John Polacek

Chicago Web Developer

Engineering manager and frontend lead at Howl

My product recommendations at shop.howl.me

Shipping open source on Github

Follow me at @johnpolacek

Front End Interview Questions

Originally published on 8/11/2012

A few months ago, Darcy Clarke posted a collection of Front End Developer Interview Questions to Github. Another dev at work shared them with me a couple weeks ago. I took a look at them and decided they would be a great knowledge check. For some questions, I knew the answer straight away. For others I knew what the question was getting at, but had a hard time translating the answer from being understood logic in my brain to words. Other questions referred to a concept I was familiar with, but didnt know or remember the terminology for. Going through these was a great review for me. I looked up and read about all of the topics, even the ones I knew pretty well.

Personally, I think it works better as a Front End Developer Trivia Quiz, as I dont think some of the questions are particularly vital for a Front End Dev job candidate to know off the top of their head. When I interview people, Im not looking to ask a lot of gotcha-type questions. Instead, I ask more about what the person is into, their comfort level doing certain kinds of projects and take a look their code (then ask questions based off of that). Perhaps this questionnaire was intended to be for a written response interview, in which case I think it would work pretty great.

Take a go at it, and when you finish, you can read my responses to all the questions on my Front End Dev Questions Github fork.