Applied and forgot about it because a recruiter reached out to me one month later.

So had a 30-minute Zoom call with the recruiter. Asked me typical questions about my background and why I was in the market for a new position.

After this, I went on to the technical portion, which was a Merge Request review that I did on my own time. I was given access to this on Gitlab, where you need to review it and request changes for improving the Merge Request, with the expectation of implementing these changes in a live coding session. It was pretty easy and was done in Vue.js along with unit tests in Jest.

The 90-minute live coding session went very smoothly because I was well-prepared and understood what the Merge Request was solving in the issue tracker. But I focused too much on solving the issue tracker and ensuring it passed the unit tests.

So I failed the live coding session even though I thought I did amazing, which took me off guard. The feedback I was given was that I need deeper experience in JavaScript and CSS. Also, that I should look into working on a performance test on a Vue.js app.

What I potentially missed:

• I was completely taken off guard, so I went back to look at the code and found two potential solutions in terms of performance. One was in the while loop; it could possibly turn into an infinite loop, and maybe I should have limited retries to something small like 10 tries, but with how the conditional was set up, it would at most only retry once or twice. Now, if the conditional were to flip, it could turn into an infinite loop.
• Now, what I did not think of was there was a method that ran upon button click which made an API call to an endpoint. I didn't think of this till after the interview, but in reality, we did not need to make the API call over and over. We really either need to just call it once on mount and store it in the component's data, or have a solution where the call happens once on button click and stored in the component's data.

Pretty mad at myself. Hopefully, future interviews might find this helpful, but I really don't know if the two were the performance issues they were looking for. I strongly stand on the API call because you don't want x amount of the same request going out over and over. Now, for the CSS portion, I had no idea what they meant because part of the solution was to fix the view for mobile to match the mock, and I was able to do this with media queries.

Overall, pretty easy interview process, but obviously not happy. As I have been interviewing in 2023 and 2024, I'm not liking these gotchas. I feel like it's not representative in a one-hour session. It's like they have a behind-the-scenes formula, and hopefully, you crack it.

Were you able to pull down the repo and build locally?

Do you have experience with VueJS?