Another mock React interview (featuring Cassidy Williams)

hey alex from scrimba here welcome to another mock react interview with cassadoo in this video cassidy is joined by alejandro alejandro is such a nice guy i just have to say right off the bat that he was a fantastic sport cassidy and alejandro hadn't met before this interview and we didn't give alejandro a very good idea about what to expect all of that to say that whilst this isn't a real interview there was still a healthy dollop of pressure you know three things real quick before we jump in please rate the video but only like it if you actually like it comments if you have something constructive to say or maybe a question and finally please check out scrimba specifically make sure you check out cassidy's new react interview questions module on scrimba in that course cassidy gives you a broad range of react interview questions and answers to prepare and as you'll see in this video cassidy has a fun and engaging way of presenting information it's really great to watch and it will help you succeed in a react job interview of that i am sure anyway without any further ado here's cassidy and alejandro with the mock react interview i hope you enjoy alejandro good luck man i'll catch you guys in a little bit all right talk to you soon we could just keep talking about chipotle but i guess but i'll introduce myself really quick then i'll ask you about yourself and then we can get into it but um long story short hello my name is cassidy i'm a principal developer experience engineer at nutlify and so what that means is i help improve the experience for developers who are building things for nullifying and i focus on react and next js and uh so i'll write tutorials i'll build demos and i'll work with the product teams to get features built out so that way it is an easier time for uh for developers on nullify um and i've been interviewing people and doing interviews and stuff for too many years now and uh and so that's uh that's kind of just my high level background and i'm happy to answer any questions about that but i would love to know more about you thank you um my name is alejandro i am originally from mexico i live in montreal canada now i i thought you were going to wear something cool and i prepared so this is my my only christmas sweater not a few of yours i um i my background is in music and and sound recording cool i love microphones so i see you have a pretty cool microphone it's honestly just a blue yeti it's not particularly fancy when when i was studying for me like blue was like one of those brands that i was that i thought it was unattainable and once like i started playing with them and they're pretty good they're really yeah it's it's impressive i like i keep thinking maybe i should get one of those fancy ones but this gets the job done no no no it sounds really good that's all you need i mean it's it's for you know your voice that's it it works perfectly so that that's my background i'm a i'm a nerd in that way and i worked for about 10 years in that i recorded music in general for video for uh video games uh i still have i still have a little company that to that i do sound we make sound and and music and in general integrated into video games for indie yeah that's awesome it's it is really cool um but then the the mark the job market kind of dried out and audio is not a priority especially in the new world of like mobile technologies and stuff like everything is you're watching it while listening to podcasts i don't know there's there's no room for that so i started um i started learning coding little by little five years ago and i asked i felt that something catastrophic was going to happen i kind of foresaw it about a year and a half ago and i thought i should take a boot camp i took it took a boot camp a year and a half ago um and now i'm i'm out of a job and i'm i'm doing like i'm powering through and i really want to transition into this this is my career now there's no going back so there's no safety net either way so i just i'm gonna lean to it leaning into it and hope for the best and i'm trying uh my hardest that's awesome well i want to talk to you about the music stuff because i was actually in the seattle video game orchestra before moving over to chicago i've got my trumpet over here we might have friends in common we might actually push you you got you got this interview it's it's all you we can we can talk about this a little bit later but i see that guitar behind you so we can talk more um but anyway so did you start coding game dev when you were first starting or did you uh just go straight into like the website of things so my my my learning has been all over the place because um when i started coding i i finished my masters in sound recording in 2015. so i was really happy with that a bit but i i knew many applications of sound recording and video games especially needed some kind of coding thing and and i started learning python from udemy and uh it was okay but i never found a way to translate those that knowledge then free code camp started around 2015 and it was very lacking back back then now it's really good it is huge and it has everything especially the blogs and the videos i'm genuinely jealous of developers who are just learning now because i'm just like man you have everything now so i got i'll get a little frustrated with that um i didn't know where to go and what to do with with these with the knowledge and then when i started doing video games i had to learn so i i learned on real engine and i learned the other one unity so did you do c plus plus with unreal a little bit of c plus plus i didn't love it um i i used mostly the blueprints and you have to it's like objects you know you can connect to objects but i was doing c sharp with with unity and that that i had to learn and this was all like encompassed in me doing a phd that didn't really lead anywhere they promised me oh you're gonna develop video games you're gonna develop stuff like audio 3d audio for video games and then it ended up being like oh no that's not what we want you to do we want you to teach our classes and okay that's fine but can i still do it no no no if you do it you won't pass oh come on it was very traditional so wow that that was my first approach and i knew a little bit of c plus plus a little bit of c sharp a little bit of python and a little bit of javascript but i didn't know how to do anything with that and then after that i i took the boot camp and if everything kind of made sense and now from like knowing the basics or like the fundamentals of javascript i think i i can approach i can approach other programming tasks in a in a better way because i kind of know what it what i'm trying to do so i i think i've been self-taught self-taught for a while and i kind of see a problem and then i like break it apart and find the solution and work my way into it i don't know if i answer your questions sorry oh no you did you yeah no this is really interesting gives me a good background and so our with the boot camp was it mostly a web focused boot camp did you are you all javascript now yes yes that's my main tool now um i still do i have a friend that i'm that i'm working with and we do uh data analysis so he's he started hit the path of he wants to become a data scientist and that's all python and r but like i i won't touch r but it's python so whenever i review this code i have to like oh this is how it's done oh okay i forget it'll shift a little bit especially when when you know when javascript is like a variable when you go inside an object you you do dot and you you know you go deeper and i forget that in python you can't do that but it doesn't really yell at you when you do it yeah just doesn't work so when i'm trying to do those things and i have to have my cheat sheet on the side and i yeah but yeah whatever mostly yeah whenever i switch to python i always accidentally include brackets and like the curly braces and stuff and ah gotta cut that out uh likely python yeah python 3 has more parentheses though so i can i can tolerate that um but anyway uh so uh alex over at scrimba he was telling me that you have done a bunch of side projects and stuff do what what has been kind of your favorite side project that you've worked on um my like i've been freelancing a little bit okay and i also have been doing like my own stuff the latest thing that i really enjoyed is i was taking here i go again being all over the place i had a i got a scholarship for like a micro mba i don't know if you if you know this um this guy his name is scott galloway he talks about business and does it really i know every like every young person kind of knows him like i i've i've seen his name before i like i couldn't picture him off the top of my head but i know of this person yeah well he's a professor at uh the business school at stern business school in in nyu and he teaches uh the business like the mba courses and he made like a massive online platform to teach like he broke apart the the the mba into little modules and i got a scholarship to do one of to take one of those it was the brand modules and i had to learn a lot about business that i wouldn't know um but then i i got excited with that and i built a project so that the people in business could understand because it was so massive of course it was a thousand people taking the course and i wanted to read every everybody's uh like introductory line but it was too much i mean two a thousand lines of that so i made a database of visual visualization of the most common words and i ran a positivity score on that and i i did a bunch of um natural language processing on on there on the slack messages and i i put it all in a blog post explaining how positive people were and i was trying to take these sciency concepts and make them as simple as possible so business people could understand them it was it was really fun it was really cool to work with that that's really interesting and so do you prefer kind of that data side of things or are you do you have a preference towards a stack or anything um i mean i would i just like doing things i like challenges and i like learning um yeah but i don't i don't really have a preference if i see something interesting i pursue it but i also have to i'm trying to force myself to stay in a lane and try to get a full-time job because you can't go into a job and say like i do a little bit of everything but not right a lot of something but my stack is uh reacts um i either do next ges or gatsby and for the back end i try to keep it as simple as possible and uh sometimes i do firebase sometimes i do i've been getting into phone id fonadb a little bit of graphql um and node.js that's that's kind of nice cool yeah once you do get the job you can go all in on the fun projects and then use that to get different jobs but yeah getting in the door you kind of have to specialize a little bit i've known many people who fall victim to their own interests and stuff like that um cool so let's let's start talking about react stuff that's cool that you know next in gatsby because maybe we can dive a little bit into those two um and so i'm going to because i know you know things i'm going to i'm going to talk about an application so have you used imager before the meme site no oh it's fun if you if you want to look it up it's imgur.com it's it's okay yeah i didn't know that you pronounced it that way i've always i know a lot of people do emger you know i've never pronounced it before well now you know i truly found out it was imager after like years of of messing with it but anyway let's talk about memes yes let's let's say that you are are building imager and stuff and and we could say that it's a react and xjs website um how would you kind of just add a high level structure out the different pages how would you structure out a user table and a post table and that kind of stuff well from looking at it aside from from it being really distracting yeah i'm just like oh i might click on that and give it an up focus yeah yeah i'm trying to think of too many things happening um if i were to do i have to pick like a technology or pick it however you want we can we can dive into any ones but uh you can go as high level as you want okay um so this seems like a social thing so people have to submit some something uh i guess their images so there there has to be an um like a data intake page so a user will upload their video um or their gif gif uh maybe they have a video there has to be some kind of engine that adapts uh to to our platform and our limitations because you can't really just upload whatever you want and reproduce it so i guess some some kind of uh serverless function that converts the to the target format uh some kind of like an like a bucket like an s3 bucket that um stores all the all the user content um yeah so once once the data is processed it goes in there and then a database that stores the usernames and whatever the data lives inside their like um you know it all the data that is related to to that user so all the user content kind of related to that um and from there there's i see there's the home page where the trending um the most viral the newest so all that metadata has to go whenever a user adds something to the platform we have to tag it and make it easily retrievable and then all the user interactions have to be also stored in the database so whenever a user opens a shares something or interacts with with the content some kind of logic has to happen behind in the in the server that it informs us that there's has been some interaction with the content and then we read those um read those values and put them in the front page to to to show that these are the most variable these are the newest um what else so when you click on a new uh when you click on on any of these videos or any of these images yes um we would have to have dynamic routes because we don't know what's going to happen we don't know what we have to generate everything dynamically so we'll have a have some kind of router that um takes takes care of where where the user goes if they click on a post that didn't didn't exist five minutes ago so it can't be um statically generated it has to be dynamic but we can like we can use some server-side rendering for for some parts of the um the page um what else i get i guess there's there's comments i'm not sure but all that can be stored in the yeah in the data object so each post has comments and a lot of setup with users and comments and yeah votes and all that um what else i see tags um so let's let's assume that we're looking at this at this post page from a react perspective how would you set up like the components on the page and the interactions and stuff um i see there's a layout so all the all the menus and everything that doesn't change stays there uh those are the in xjs or uh gatsby there's the layout components so those are the ones that don't change or they change fairly and then all the dynamic content is what it's inside the layout um i see a lot of reusable components like arrows that um you know like the the design system like this the simple arrows and buttons uh displays um in in a like how how the page would kind of load i think it's when the component mounts uh it fetches the data from from the api so it gets the title the user that posted it some data about how many upvotes it has how many comments and then as you scroll well you of course see the the image and as you scroll you see the content of the like a caption i guess and the links the tags all that is i guess it gets retrieved from the from the api on mount and the comment section is pretty much the same yeah yeah that that answer is that answers high level what what i wanted to hear like pull making sure pulling things on mountain stuff and so uh from a user perspective how would you persist a user authentication across the different pages and across the different sites and posts and stuff um i would go i would try to go with a some some kind of token uh with uh like cookie cookie based token like a jwt json web token um so that's i love those jwts [Laughter] they're so nice and they have recipes um so all the communication between the the client and the server is passing that um that cookie so about that key um and then i would store that i would store some kind of some states like in a global state i would i would i would have like user is logged in so that all the all the routes can be accessed easily and you don't have to you know pass components right so with with the with that kind of shared state do you have a preferred way of doing state management across all of these different things um i am very partial to redux you're rare i know i i learned i learned redux and i hated it honestly the first the first few most people do but the one saving grace for me is the the extension the the the chrome extension and i'm pretty i i i'm almost sure that reacts the the context api maybe someone made one for for them and it's like an exact copy but i like it so much so the the idea that you can go back in time and you can you can trace your um because it represents the states as crafts and it's so nice and beautiful and the and the regular react uh experiment extension is so ugly i don't i don't i don't like it i do think they're improving it but i agree with you i i've basically replaced all of my redux with the context api plus use reducer and and that has been amazing because it's basically the benefits of redux without having to deal with redux yes and it's a smaller package yeah yeah exactly um cool you've you've answered a lot of the like things that i've wanted to see uh how you manage state and how you manage passing data with components and stuff and so i'm curious in terms of where you actually query these serverless functions and stuff how would you structure that just in folders and stuff in an application and also what functionality would you implement how how would you set that kind of stuff up both gatsby and nextgs have serverless functions sort of built in and they are like they are able they do aws lambda functions so they it's like if you were having if if you had an api like a server that only exists in the ether for for a few seconds and then it goes away so i would i would have in the folder structure i would have my my source and my components and i like the way that next next.js right off the bat has an api folder where everything lives because it makes sense like this is like my little server and everything kind of goes there and all the all the logic i would put all the all the functions try to spread them out as much as possible because if you put all the api in one function then it loads every time um so have little uh folders with each function and if a function is going to resize an element it will only do that fetch [Music] well use the libraries that it has to use does whatever it has to use and it has to do and drops it off in the in the bucket and if there's another function that um well i guess that's most of the things that i would do serverless for maybe authentication like if i'm just going full serverless all everything that a server does as far as i know can be done well as long as it doesn't take more than what 15 seconds or 30 30 seconds i forgot what the timeout is there's yeah some something like that but i usually sometimes i cheat and just like call another function well it's not cheating but yeah you know yeah yeah no that's great um and then let's see i had one last question i'm trying to remember what it was um oh my gosh what was it you've answered you've answered pretty much all i want you to answer um and ah i had one more you know what it'll probably come to me but yeah you built imager ah yay if i come up with it i'll let you know but i think you actually kind of answered it as we were talking so thank you that works out but um do you have any questions for me about anything before we start going over what we've talked about uh yeah i have a bunch of questions well not a bunch i have i have a few questions for you uh in general not regarding this sure application but uh we can do them in the end or we can do them now yeah let's do it now might as well okay so my context for these questions is that i'm i'm i'm going to go deep into the job search soon my plan is is to start in in january um i've had a few unsuccessful applications but i i i don't know those have right most of them are and i wanted i wanted to get your your perspective on a few things one of them is how can i tell from from an interview if it's a company that i want to work for like culture wise yes so i have a i have a few different tricks for that so first of all when i'm interviewing with people whether it's an on-site video call or whatever when i'm interviewing with people i always ask them what is most important to the company is it the customer is it the employee or is it the product okay and and none of those are a wrong answer but what's important to me is hearing does everybody answer that consistently um and that tells me multiple things that tells me for example just how consistent is communication across the company are people all on the same page stuff because i've talked to some teams where everyone answers something differently and that tells me okay i need to probe a little further on how messaging is across but then uh i've talked with some companies where they immediately are just like oh the employees and and it's immediate and and you're just like okay if if that is the case great and you kind of get the answers in your head about the company culture a little bit and you know that communication is good because i think there's there's all kinds of good and bad signs in a company but knowing that they communicate well is huge um and and so that that's one that i that i ask um and then also uh figuring out the work-life balance side of things now you are into music i am into music i want to find out will i have time to do music if i work at this company well i have time to play video games live time to hang out with friends and stuff and so asking about work-life balance you can just say how's your work-life balance but getting more specific like how many times would you say you work more than 40 hours a week and and hearing about that because a lot of times people might say well it's a startup and that's an immediate sign like okay that means that you don't have any and then uh there are sometimes where it's just like i sign off at 5 pm every single day and and sometimes there's something in between and sometimes people are like well when it's crunch time i admit we have to work harder but otherwise it's it's pretty laid back and so asking those kinds of questions to really gauge on culture i think really really helps and then also for myself and this this might vary for different people i always ask if i haven't seen a lot of women i ask if i can talk to one um and then uh sometimes if i've if i've seen men and women but i haven't seen like a person of color i'll ask hey do you have any anybody from a more diverse background that i can uh that i can talk to because they it's good to get that perspective because you though you never know uh where it might be all sunshine and flowers but then when you talk to someone they might be like you know it's kind of tough and and we have each other's backs but it can be tough and then sometimes they're just like these people are great they're they're they have all of these initiatives blah blah i've i've seen both sides of that and it's really useful to find that person who can be honest about it um because that can be necessary sometimes um does that answer your question yes yeah 100 thank you so much great it does make sense um yeah it's a good way to probe for like yeah target the question and try to get the answer my next question is [Music] how how can i stand out as a as a junior candidate i know that having a strong portfolio is for sure one thing because you you have to go if the 10 seconds that the recruiter is going to look at your your stuff it you know that's that's the first filter but after that i want to go into the interview with uh i guess with an advantage because i can work on some things on in advance like i can i can work on on my portfolio i can work on my on my cv um but at the same time i feel like there's so much so much competition that there has to be one thing that i that i want to show right that works across companies yeah exactly and so the first thing it sounds obvious but write a cover letter for every company you apply to because they there are so many times where people are just like oh but nobody reads those people read those it's like when i'm hiring i read every cover letter that comes my way because there are some times where i'll look at a resume and i'm just like well i don't know if they have the right background but then i read their cover letter and there was literally one that i read a few months ago where someone said my job title isn't accurate to what i actually do here's what i actually do and they explained it and and suddenly we were just like actually he should get an interview then because of uh because of what we've learned about this person and so first of all always write a cover letter and and even if there isn't a form for a cover letter attach it to your resume file just so that way it's there yeah it's a sneaky way of putting it in yeah um because yes you should have like a one-page resume but if there's a second page that's a cover letter that's not the end of the world that's it's a it's a way of getting it in if a company isn't accepting those um and then for actually standing out on your resume and stuff it can be tough so first of all including your projects um you don't have to include include every project you've ever done but the ones that show your specialty um because i i know for again for you you have a wide variety of interests and i think that is awesome but a lot of times people are just like okay but do they know react like will they be able to actually contribute to this project and so like kind you might have to tailor which projects you show depending on the job that you're applying to but uh make sure if if the job requirement said you need to know react and node make sure the projects on your resume show a reactant node um and then you don't necessarily need to include an objective especially with a cover letter a lot of people are just like to get a front-end job and you're kind of like well no duh you're applying for one um so i i would kind of fill up fill up the space with the projects that you've done um with the freelance work you've done especially and then also just very specifically list the skills that you have um so you know react you know javascript and separate them out by like front and languages back in languages technologies you don't need to include microsoft excel or something like that to try to keep it as relevant to the job as possible um and then also depending on the company you're speaking with if you're from mexico include that you speak spanish too because some companies that i've applied to they'll be a client-facing company some kind of consulting company who have clients who speak other languages and i that genuinely can help with jobs i've seen some companies where they're just like we need developers who can speak english and french if you could speak english and french that would be great because of where tech teams are located and stuff so uh um including those and also it's very dumb but it works make your name the biggest thing on the page okay like it doesn't have to be huge it doesn't have to be like 92 point font but if you make it big people remember your name more and and then it's a little trick that helps you stand out a bit more all right that's perfect thank you so much yeah i have one more question related to this and one that can perfectly fit in the end if you if you still have time and thank you so much for doing all this because i really appreciate it um what should i if you were in my position where i'm going to um where you were going to apply for a job like you were the aspiring junior that i am if you're going to apply for a job in a few months like in a month a month and a half how would you spend your time and my options that i come could come up with is learn more things like learn more technologies and showcase those uh or showcase what i already know and do more of that or write some blog posts and because i i'm also getting into writing and i really like it and i like explaining stuff i don't know that's all i can come up with i don't know what else i could do there are so many options here and the fact that you're willing to write blog posts is huge because a lot of people don't want to do that so yes write your blog posts um the twitter network works and and i think networking will be the biggest part of this and and if you're open to reading a book there's a great book called build your dream network by uh kelly hoey it is a great book where she just talks about the importance of networking and just good tips for networking in the tech industry and stuff um called build your dream network it's great um so as you're as you're applying to jobs this is what my strategy would be knowing what i know now and what i tell you to do first of all whenever you do have a idea for a blog post even if it's a paragraph just write it um write it tweet it post it on linkedin get it across the network so that way it gets eyes use hashtags that are common for junior developers like code newbie 100 days of code stuff like that um i would apply to no less than 10 jobs a day which is a lot but trust me it works like it's it's job applications are a numbers game and a lot of people are just like oh i should really apply for the jobs that fit me and i'm gonna i am i don't agree you should apply for every job that's available especially for your first one and a lot of times it might be it might not be your dream company but there are so many advantages that first of all it's a good interview practice if you get far in it and second of all if they end up being great you might end up working for a company that you would never would have considered i've i've joined companies before that i truly never would have considered but the interview process made me love them and they've been awesome um and again it's it's like entering raffles the the more you enter you might win one and it's it's it's just like that with jobs and and everybody's hiring tech people you just have to find the place like like sweetwater the the website for musicians and stuff they hire web developers they're they're looking for web developers but people don't consider them because they're a music site and so think of any businesses think of chipotle they're hiring web developers or at least they're hiring a company to do the web development you can you can talk to that company and chances are you can find that information on the website when i was first applying to junior developer roles i was applying to literally every company i could think of i applied at like fender guitars i applied at taco bell i applied at all of these different companies because everyone needs tech people and so you never know you never know where you'll find those and as terrible as the pandemic is it has opened up people's minds to remote work and so you can apply everywhere and chances are you can find a job that uh that is open to you um and i've known so many people who get jobs from twitter from posting on dev.t.o from posting on linkedin and stuff just because they're getting the right hashtags out there and interacting with people enough um and there's also really nice online communities like on discord and and on just all of these various mediums where you never know who might know a job opportunity and there are so many discords where it's mostly developers and then someone might say hey a friend of mine's hiring if anybody's looking let me know and that could be your in at a job thank you that's perfect yeah of course yeah those are my main questions cool and then you had one that was that you said we could save to the end if needed yeah it was mostly about like if you could recommend your favorite resources but you you you've mentioned a few and like being part of communities it's it's something that i never knew before honestly even in music because communities and music are very maybe you have a different perspective but like especially in sound engineering it's like very basementy and you do go out to drink but you can't really go out to drink now you know it's it's a it's not a big community and because there's there's so few people that actually do it but there's a lot of people that are aspiring to do it and it's a very different uh world that's a very different environment yeah but here in development i see that there is a huge community i'm surprised of how many people like i follow not very many very many people on on twitter but it is something that gives me hope for humanity it's crazy like how some communities in twit twitter are so toxic and some others are so like nice and they they're always giving and that that's what i've gone from from developer twitter is nice people trying to help yeah there are so many great people and and there there are several discords like even my own personal discord channel is my favorite corner of the internet there's a channel called party corgi where it's truly just all developers who also do side projects and make content that is a great one i recommend looking that one up party corgi um there's one where it's uh people who are speak both english and spanish and it's called front end cafe that's that's a really great one and uh also just the egghead community as well like egghead dot io the the learning site they have really gone and also the scrimba one as well uh scrimba has a really active discord which i'm sure you've seen that one um the the connections the connections in these discord channels are so great because it feels tight-knit even when it's not because you're chatting with people live all right that's that's perfect i think those were i had one last one but i don't want to take that much time it's okay we got the time thank you um i was should i do a certification should i go for the aws developer thingy okay i wouldn't i would do those when you have a company that will pay for it for you okay just that won't that rarely helps people get junior developer jobs it it might help you get to like the next level after that but for an entry-level job have a company pay for that for you perfect yeah that's all the questions that i had actually great well and then with regards to the technical stuff you clearly know your stuff i i was impressed with all of your answers and and there were a couple times where you got lost in your own thoughts but you you found your way out of it um so i guess kind of watch out for that but that happens in an interview setting all the time and so i don't hold it against anybody but you never know who you might be talking to um whenever you are talking about the database of anything chances are you won't talk about it much they'll go like very high level typically just say something like okay i'd have a table there will be an id as a primary key username post and bro and just say we'll have columns for each of those and and kind of leave it high level at that because that shows that you understand how a database is structured and then you can move into the rest of it um because as you were describing it you did a good job i knew where you were coming from but again getting lost in the thoughts of how it could be structured can and can trip people up um besides that you knew the component life cycle well you described that well um i'm glad that you talked about the design system a little bit of of how the site would work um and how api functions would work um serverless functions yeah overall i think you know your stuff and you're ready for you're ready for a real-time interview thank you thank you so much i i appreciate everything you do like this and everything else like i i watch your live streams whenever i can and like oh thanks yeah like that's why i knew i knew i would have to wear something cool and if i didn't find this sweater i actually had a a bacon costume like a halloween costume that i had somewhere that was my second option that is such a compliment i appreciate that

Channel: Scrimba

Views: 5,828

Rating: 4.9330544 out of 5

Keywords: Cassidoo, ReactJS

Id: 6b19E5BmqnI

Length: 44min 31sec (2671 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 15 2020