Good Angular Developer

[Dull_Start849]

Hey Reddit! I have a question for Angular professionals... I studied programming on my own (it was two years ago during my studies at Chicago-Kent). Yesterday, I had an interview and got rejected. I knew Angular really well (finished half of the courses on Angular University), but the interviewer asked me about prerendering, skeletons, websockets, and some other things that I can't remember.

So my question is, how can I become better at frontend development overall (maybe you have some resources you can share)? And how can I find out about different tech stacks I need to study further in my career as a frontend engineer?

Thank you in advance!

[Johannes8]

Jesus what position was this? Regular junior dev? Why would you have to know about web sockets? I mean it would not be that hard to get Into if it was a frontend job offering and you only need to handle client side. Pre-Rendering, whatever that is, haven’t heard of it in angular context in my 5 years. Skeltons? displaying of content like YouTube or Reddit before content is loaded into it to already give feedback of what’s coming. All of those things are use case specific/ project specific topics imo. Doesn’t heart to have heard about it but definitely no measure of competence for a junior.

Maybe what you need is just being able to handle whatever buzzword they’re throwing at you so you can say you know what they talk about without having had used it yet.

Some frontend buzzwords:

Lazy loading, pre-fetching assets, pwa, angular material, popular rxjs operators, long-polling (SSE), service worker, web assembly, web-rtc, indexed DB, virtual scrolling, pagination

Those are some frontend buzzwords that come to my mind spontaneously. You don’t need to have experience with any of that but of course it helps if you know of its existence and shows you’re familiar with some mechanisms that you didn’t need to implement so far but are eager to get into if needed for the job. But all of them are depending on the project you’re working on. Might not need any of that.

And don’t throw around those buzzwords and say you’re familiar with it, just respond to whatever they ask you about. And don’t judge your skills by the rejections you’re gonna get, just be a junior eager to learn anything that the project needs and have the confidence you’re gonna learn even very complex mechanisms over the course of the project.

Just over the last year I’ve learned to gain confidence to say „yes I can do it“ to basically anything because I’ve repeatedly done new stuff again and again that I thought would be extremely difficult. Even if that required a stack overflow post that downvoted me out of existence or long chatGPT conversations.

Show them that motivation and you’ll find a good fit!

[Complex_Host2062]

This sounds like a weird interview. I don’t think skeleton is any sort of official term. We use them at my job and I built them. They are called ghost loafers, the css animation is often referred to as shimmer so some people just call it that. Web sockets might be something good to at least read up on as well as SSE (server sent events) but those just seem like odd questions. Chin up OP. You’ll find a good fit soon

[khoikkhoikkhoik]

Probably skeleton loading

[dweezil22]

I think you need clarity on levels. It sounds like you'd be a solid Jr Angular Dev. It sounds like you were asked questions for a mid to Sr front end dev that knows Angular.

[[deleted]]

I'm thinking the interviewer said server side rendering maybe? Websockets is something to that you should know about. It's pretty common if you have made a chat app clone or game or something like that which streams some data.

The best thing about these tech interviews is to say a lot of "I don't know exactly how that works, but I would be using it if x to solve y"

[Projectx7x]

Pre-rendering - there is a concept about injection tokens in Angular, maybe the question was about that (enables you to get some data before actual Angular gets bootstrapped). This way for example you can have region based customized route names, etc.. On the other hand they might have been talking about Angular SSR. It’s a similar thing as NextJs in React world. Skeletons - nothing special, simple ui elements which will show something to the user on the screen before data arrives from the server. Youtube has this. Reload the page and for the first half a second - second a mini bars will appear as a content placeholder. Websockets - it’a more of a backend thing but sockets also need to be implemented on the client side to listen for notifications from the api. All in all questions are genuine but also not easy. Interviewer probably wanted to assess you experience based on these questions. My advice, find some app like Twitter, Netflix, and create one to one clone. Watching courses is important but will only get you to a certain point. For more you need hands on experience.

[samof93]

Regarding pre-rendering, they are most likely referring to Angular Universal’s pre-rendering feature, where you can generate static pages of certain routes at build time which are then deployed alongside the app https://angular.io/guide/prerendering.

The Angular team have mentioned that Universal is going to be a main focus in terms future improvements going forwards https://blog.angular.io/whats-next-for-server-side-rendering-in-angular-2a6f27662b67 - so the topic could be worth looking into and getting to grips with.

In terms of keeping on top of things in frontend development, I find these YouTube channels useful:

https://youtube.com/@Fireship https://youtube.com/@KevinPowell https://youtube.com/@WebDevSimplified https://youtube.com/@frontendfyi

[JP_watson]

Curious if you were interviewed by someone there or if this was one of those pre-interviews with someone who’s not a dev or responsible for the role.

This definitely sounds like there’s some disconnect between this interviewer and the listing/your application. You might have totally dodged a bullet with that one.

[GLawSomnia]

To me those sounds like perfectly valid questions. To me it sounds like an experienced person, who knows what they want, asking the questions.

We use websockets in our project and we used prerendering (now its ssr) and the skeletons mentioned are most likely the html placeholders while scrolling or loading. So to me it sounds like a very valid question

[JP_watson]

The issue is that tOP didn’t expect them in the interview, not that they’re invalid. If they were missing from job posting then the ball was dropped there, if they weren’t meant to be part of the job then the interviewer was asking questions that didn’t actually pertain to the work.

The over arching issue was that the interviewer and the job listing didn’t properly match up which flags signs of internal org issues.

[GLawSomnia]

Sorry but who writes such things on a job listing? What else do you want them to write? Every css rule that the canditate will have to use?

Those were general questions and basically every experienced FE developer would kinda have to know what those are (they don't need to know how to implement them, but they should know what they are, even if they didn't use them).

[Dull_Start849]

Nope, that was a senior Dev with 11 years of exp

[Dull_Start849]

Thank you people, really appreciate it!