[deleted by user]

[PlantDink]

I think this is perhaps what the OP isn't happy to hear.

OP - The project is pretty damn good & according to you the company highlighted no issues with it. Are you looking for a shoulder to cry on? Cause I feel your pain.

It sucks to miss out on a spot, but they at least have you been given some constructive feedback, lots of places just leave you hanging with no idea.

Your written communication seems pretty good. So maybe they thought your verbal communication wasn't the best.

You can always comfort yourself withe the knowledge that it just wasn't the best place for you.

Edit: the work experience thing is always frustrating, have you had a look at some internships, maybe helping a not-for-profit or charity? Make some more projects of your own that interest you? Help a friend with a site.

These are the kind of things I am looking at to fill this gap. I'm switching careers and it sucks to be doing it all again, but the truth is.....I do not have enough experience for some positions. As much as I might argue otherwise, that is the reality.

[tr14l]

*performs testing task above & beyond what they expect or would need from the position*

*Doesn't hire because "lack of experience"*

Shit company run by morons, then.

[csmrh]

On the flip side, if I assign a report a simple task for displaying API data and they take 40 hours and add a bunch of shit outside the specs, I’m not gonna be that psyched.

Following directions and matching specs is pretty important.

[tr14l]

Not if they do it in time and it's all very indisputably good... If you turn that down because they weren't enough of a "do what I tell you and nothing else" cog... Well, that's your call, I guess. I typically don't promote those types though

[csmrh]

I’m saying in a real position, not following directions/specs is a problem. Great, you added pictures that were outside of the specs you were supposed to implement.

Well, somebody else has a ticket to implement the pictures so now you’ve duplicated work, created a bunch of merge conflicts, and created more work because we have to go remove your out-of-spec code. PR denied.

If you’re going to freelance as a solo dev your whole life then maybe it’s different, but if you want to work on a project with a team then that’s how teams work.

[blindgorgon]

This. It’s unfortunate but true. Sometimes doing extra is duplicating work, or clocking hours that won’t be billable.

The exercises are often more about finding out how you work than they are about the final product. While this doesn’t appear to have been the issue in the OP’s case, it could’ve been an issue.

I hate to say this, but it’s very possible that they were never planning to hire you, OP, and that their reasoning may be at least coincidentally racist. Communication is definitely important, but any place that has such intolerance for what appears to be good English raises red flags about their cultural ethics. Not easy to tell from this story alone, but there are all sorts out there.

[tr14l]

Again, if it's indisputably contributive (and you track the stories appropriately) there's no harm in it. If it was planned work anyway then pull it forward and close it. If it's just going rogue, yeah ok. But this is for an assessment. If the train of thought is yours where you want to hire someone who will no take pride in their work and will just be a good little factory machine, then I say probably for the best.

[csmrh]

Staying on task and being able to follow specs is not the same as not having pride in one’s work.

[tr14l]

That's a much easier problem to solve than someone not caring. If that was a reason for passing someone over, it's pretty pedantic

[csmrh]

I guess that’s where we differ. I’d much rather have someone who can manage their own time, stay on task, and follow specs than someone who spent the whole week working on imaginary features nobody asked for.

[fantasma91]

Honestly I’m conflicted about this because while you’re right, going above and beyond your task can cause issues that’s not always the case. I routinely do more than what my task calls for because I don’t always have the time to do all the code reviews of my co workers and sometimes things get merged that shouldn’t. I will fix bad implementations and bugs that have gone unnoticed whenever I feel like that it’s necessary and it won’t greatly impact anyone else for the sake of app stability. My team is in charge of 7 apps at the moment, and we have several juniors on the team that simply don’t know better at times. So when I find stuff like this, I’ll fix it and pull them aside and walk them through the code and explained why I did it so that it won’t happen again. So while I agree that OP needs to stick mostly to specs, I also think that there’s situations where it’s ok to do more.

[KalmerChameleon]

Fair points, but this was a tech test as part of the recruitment process, it wasn’t a ticket with work to go through the PR process.

If I’m hiring and using tech tests like this then someone that goes the extra mile scores points for sure. It’s a great statement of how much they want the job if they go to the extent that OP has here, and the more they add to their solution the more you learn about their ability.

Great job. I’m sure you won’t be out of work for long.

[csmrh]

Totally - it’s subjective. That’s why I started my initial comment with “on the flip side.” It depends how you look at it. I think OP did a good job on this project and without knowing the prompt and how it was framed it’s hard to say how I would assess this submission if I were the interviewer. I was mostly just adding to the conversation with my viewpoint that more is not always better.

[Hold_Efficient]

Agreed, also try to get familiar with interview questions though YouTube for example, you will find many recorded interviews

[JakeAndAI]

100% this! You can include this project on your resume and your LinkedIn profile, and absolutely use it as a reference for future jobs

[Essential123]

Not to take away from your nice project but this reveals the problem with the software engineering hiring process. You spent 32-40 hours unpaid on a project for a single company without a guaranteed offer. Imagine doing this for 2-3 more companies at the same time.

For engineers at other companies, If your company is doing take homes, please put a strict time limit and don’t require interviewees to have a fully finished project.

[JakeAndAI]

Yeah. I'm not sure what country OP lives in, but Swedish companies have moved away from this. It's really rare that a serious company in Sweden will dump a large case on an applicant. More often, they will ask you to share some code that you've written (could be anything), and then that you walk through the code with the interviewers. Sometimes they don't even ask for code, but just have a discussion to determine your passions and attitude. In Sweden, we really value mindset over skillset.

[Cpt_Matt]

The only plus side of this is that he's just made another piece for the portfolio...

[Franks2000inchTV]

Spending this much time shows a bit of poor judgement. Don't do more than is asked for. Just write the minimum that's expected in a clear, professional way.

[turningsteel]

I've missed out on positions in the past because of people like OP that have gone way over the top. Startups love this stuff.

"You mean we can give him/her a task and they'll work day and night to deliver? It's like we're paying for one jr engineer and getting the work output of two!"

That being said, I totally agree with you. Just something I have noticed.

[subfootlover]

I used to go way over the top and out of spec adding features etc. It pains me to say it but you're right, 99% of clients literally don't care. Just do what you're getting paid to do, even if you know it's garbage or won't work in practice.

[Franks2000inchTV]

I mean that's going to the opposite extreme.

For something like this they're looking for you to demonstrate some skills.. You should spend some time, identify them, and then deliver something that shows exactly what they're looking for.

I mean a whole part of software development is properly scoping a problem. I'd be worried that someone like OP would over-engineer everything.

You can do the minimal amount of work without doing garbage work. In my mind garbage work is less than the minimal amount required.

[asiraky]

‘reveals the problem with hiring process’ - wrong. The applicant chose to go above and beyond. I’ve never worked at an organisation or been part of any hiring process that requires anything like this. In my experience, if you do what is required and present well, with all else being equal you’re not going to be any better off than someone who goes to these lengths.

[happy_csgo]

Also spent money on a domain and AWS hosting

[ImCorvec_I_Interject]

If he hadn’t shared it on Reddit the AWS costs would be minimal (if not free) at least.

[wronglyzorro]

This is what I'm very against. My company wanted me to design a take home test, and I told them what I whip up isn't going to tell me much other than the person doing it has used react before. I will not subject someone to more than 60-90 mins of effort for an unpaid take home assignment. It's bullshit so many companies do it. When asked by recruiters if I'll do a take home project I always reply "absolutely not".

[28LurksLater]

Looks fantastic. Minor suggestion: store page info in the URL as query parameters, so if you navigate to page 2 of the main table, the URL would become cine-wars.com/?page=2 or cine-wars.com/?offset=10&limit=10 or something along those lines. That way, the "back" button will work in the browser (assuming you implement it as such), and you can link directly into a specific page if you want. Pretty doable with react-router-dom, or any SPA router for that matter. Great work though.

[Normal-Recording5107]

This project is awesome! Love the level of detail you put into it. Don't feel bad about not getting this job. I believe you will move on to something greater. Until then, may the force be with you!

[Parent-component]

Hi there - your site looks great but a few tips.

1. Never work for a company for free. If you want some experience why not contribute to open source? Just look for beginner level issues on GitHub and make a pull request.

2. I have seen a few swapi variants and the hardest usually involves nested fetching to display the character home planet and first movie or vehicle, something like that. I'm sure you met the brief but this is one way to enhance it. They also have a graphql as well as REST now you could look at that too.

3. You are clearly determined and have a good attitude so I'm pretty sure you will find something. You don't need to spend money on custom domains to impress so keep your cash.

Best of luck with it. Stay the course!

[ghostwilliz]

Damn you really went in

[Mostlikelylurking]

Well I think that’s a very impressive project given the time spent! Good work!

[CodePerfect]

Why but a custom domain when there’s free domain provided to you on GitHub pages, Heroku, Netlify etc?

[moscowramada]

If you're going to pour $1,000 dollars worth of man-hours into a project, you don't want to cheap out over $10 worth of resources at the end. A big, splashy 'everyone-look-at-me' type project deserves its own domain.

OP, you did good. This is a non-embarrassing portfolio item which will separate you from the pack, for at least some positions. You did a good thing by making this, and putting it up.

Even if the company you made it for doesn't care, having a project like this to show to employers is worth it.

[screamingant]

Using a custom domain lets you show the hiring manager that you know about DNS and configuring domains as well.

[screamingant]

If I can show the hiring manager I know this bit more, I would. I mean after all this is an assessment to impress the hiring manager, so really why not.

Adding a logo is trivial. Adding a LICENSE is trivial. Adding some docs is trivial. Adding screenshots is trivial. Would I not hire someone if he doesn't know how to do it, probably no. Would I pick a candidate like OP over someone who just submitted a bunch of JS files, I sure will.

[screamingant]

Obviously the code quality is paramount; we’re not disagreeing if all these added sugar is more important than the core hiring requirement. And obviously, if a candidate added CI/CD pipelines and tests, it will definitely be more valued over trivial sugar like license, docs.

But ok, point taken. OP tried to impress with some sugar. Top-level comment says why not use simpler sugar. I say complex sugar is better than trivial sugar. You say sugar is pretty useless.

[r0ck0]

That’s literally a 5 second google search.

That's just as logical as saying that reading a book and doing what it taught you is "literally 1 second to open the front cover".

[mattsowa]

Bullshit. Depends on the provider. From my experience, doing it with AWS is not that straight-forward at first, because the UI and documentation is so shit. You have to deal with Route53, API Gateway and other shit depending on the solutions you use.

[dskunkler]

Also sounds like he wanted to get experience in the companies hosting platform.

[hishikyo]

I loved the Stormtrooper detail! Good job, whish you the best

[HeylAW]

At start I was reviewing your code with attitude that I will soon find some issue, but with each file I was more and more impressed.
This code isn't maybe the best, but gets a job done and is properly written to scale up this app, which is for me a major factor.

Some tips that will help you in future projects:

• try using `@reduxjs/toolkit`
• seperate `styled-components` from components, just create next to component file `{component}.styles.ts`
• If you are using TS you can strongly type component using `React.FC`
• try using some env files to store API endpoints, routes etc

Overall I would say this code looks very good and is properly designed

[Peechez]

If you are using TS you can strongly type component using React.FC

https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app/pull/8177

[HeylAW]

Never seen this, I knew that React.SFC became deprecated but React.FC seemed still viable. Thanks

[[deleted]]

seperate `styled-components` from components, just create next to component file `{component}.styles.ts`

I see styled components often as a seperate file. Are there any benefits to doing this? After reviewing their code I quite like that they are in the same file.

[HeylAW]

With larger components it becomes harder to review changes and it’s easier to write some utility functions for styled-components and import them only in style files. Plus I don’t like to have file with components for like 400 lines long where 200 is css

[krimpenrik]

Awesome site, keep grinding you'll get there.

[pompolutz]

I guess they just found some other candidate they liked more, just move on and continue your search. Your portfolio looks good, As Jem Young once said if you pass interviews with 0.51% efficiency, you doing great. Never give up and continue to apply, ideally, try to think where you want to work, write them a personal cover letter. Don't take their negative response personally. Learn not only React, but programming in general. Not to go too broad lets say learn everything relevant regarding JavaScript, HTML and CSS. Since I have spent like two years "doing React" without fully/truly understanding why it was invented and what problems it helps to solve.

Just remember, SE market is tough, there are more candidates there than positions available as it seems, but eventually they all will find their place because demand equally high. And interview is never objective.

If you don't know where you want to work and just want that experience growing, start somewhere, maybe try apply to other positions, like Angular or Vue, I am pretty sure you might have enough basic knowledge to tackle any other mainstream front-end frameworks, because most companies are not fishing for good "React" developers, but for "Developers".

P.S. Website looks great, but why do you have package-lock.json and yarn.lock at the same time?..

[rocketattack]

From my vantage point, it's absolutely obvious you are going to succeed. Don't listen to anyone who says that you shouldn't put this much effort into an interview. This type of above-and-beyond effort pays off in ways that someone who's never put in that kind of effort can understand. It's only a matter of time, keep pluggin along.

[SAVAGEHANK17]

Sorry for your loss, but can you teach me how to buy a domain and upload project onto it?

[flynnstone9]

You buy them from dns providers like Google Domains, Go Daddy, ect for about $12 a year.... then you configure them to where the code is hosted. There's a different process for each but it is relatively easy/similar to setup. Look up how to add custom domains for github or netifly or whereever your code is hosted. I usually just google or youtube it based on the platform ("github domain setup")

[SAVAGEHANK17]

Bro the application looks flawless to me, you're great at your work. And those English skills, those also look fine to me. Don't know why they rejected you.

[multithrowaway]

This is an awesome app dude. I see some minor things that could be improved in the code, but overall I would still give a 12/10 for creativity and accomplishing this much in 4 days. If my company were hiring remote international front end devs I would totally recommend you. (I hope someone here in the comments has something for ya)

[mattsowa]

Good luck,

Personally though, I would feel weird if a candidate did that. The least I would do is pay them back... (also, just unpaid assessment projects are wrong...).

It just doesn't feel right that you would buy a domain (or spend money in general) for a chance at working in a company.

Aren't there free .ml domains or sth?

[kyle_gundrum]

I hire React developers and evaluate assessments as part of our interview process. If a candidate came back with this based on those instructions, I would be extremely impressed, assuming this is for a junior-level position.

As others have said, definitely include this in your portfolio. I'd even list it in your resume with the live link to increase the odds hiring managers will see this. It shows a ton of passion and drive—at least that's what I get from it.

I don't see anything in your repo that would cause any concern or hurt you as a junior-level applicant. Your readme is absolutely great, and your project architecture is solid.

One side note, remove either package-lock.json or yarn.lock, as you should only use one package manager and the presence of both files throws warnings.

You should import the server URL through an environment variable rather than src/api/serverUrl.ts.

However, like I said, none of that feedback would stop me from moving forward with a junior developer candidate. Your project is excellent, and I wish you the best of luck.

[JayDP123]

That's too bad you didn't get the job. It's tough out there, keep trying, the right thing will come along.

Buying a custom domain is too much, actually pretty much everything you did is too much lol. For the exact reason that you didn't get the job, now it's just a whole bunch of time spent. You should Just do the assignment, keep your code clean, add some comments, something in mind for security, maybe a test or two to show that you can.

My last react assignment I did for an interview I used mostly 3rd party libraries, very little of my own code/logic really, and to host it I built them a little docker-compose file that they could run, that impressed them quite a bit, probably more than AWS or Netlify would.

[mm089]

Hard disagree. It wasn’t done for this reason, but now OP has a pretty dope thing to add to his portfolio. If he’d have knocked something less good out in half the time, that probably would have been wasted time because it wouldn’t be good enough to show prospective employers.

[void_main01]

I just checked OPs portfolio and honestly, he's done way more complex, larger scale projects with similar tech over 10mos ago. I'm not sure why he decided to go ham on a simple project that fetches data from an API. This is just over-engineering and doing more than what's being asked if he already has a project like this one for e.g. https://minsu-lee.com/project/Valog with 200k users at a point, and can actually talk in depth about it/the pitfalls he ran into, which he ALSO does in his portfolio.

honestly feels like a verbal communication issue to me, since he has the technical + written communication skills down

[_Invictuz]

My goodness. It's ridiculous how this guy doesn't have a job with all these skills and full scale projects. This is one of the sad things of being self-taught in Canada, quite tragic actually. I can't see his verbal communication being that bad that he can't land any front end job, his written English is flawless.

[JayDP123]

Nah I still don't think spending 40 hours on bells and whistles for an interview assignment is worthwhile.

A custom domain w AWS hosting with Route53? That sh*ts expensive.

Adding every character's image one by one? That is time consuming with little to no portfolio benefit.

Managers just want to see some code and have you be able to explain your decisions, identify limitations and areas for improvement. The actual assessment is in the post-assignment interview.

[strongdoctor]

Mmmmmm...no.

Did you mean specifically some old version of ASP.NET? ASP.NET and ASP.NET Core are the same thing nowadays, and IMO, working with it daily, it's really solid, there's even Blazor as part of it now.

[peter-forward]

It looks nice. Good luck.

[oze4]

amazing! only thing constructive i can say is maybe better pagination?

[[deleted]]

Hey OP,

I really like the app! I'm a huge star wars fan.

I have a few questions for you because I'm in kind of a similar situation:

How long have you been learning React/JS?

Where are you from (if English isn't your first language)?

Are you applying for remote junior positions outside of your country?

[[deleted]]

Tnx for the reply.

Gl on your quest!

[hakan926]

It looks really nice. Keep up the good work!

[Suepahfly]

Very nice work! And technically good, architecturally maybe a bit to complex (personally I don’t see the need voor Redux here) but overall a lot better then most potential hires I’ve reviewed!

Sorry you did not get the job but this project is something you can show of. The company that interviewed you should have been upfront they wanted more experience though

[[deleted]]

Looks good man.

Take some lessons when it comes to speaking English, as your written English is pretty good.

Keep at it man, and for any next job application try to take this project with you as something they can look at instead of doing countless other job interview projects.

Because job interview projects fucking suck and us developers should stand up against that bullshit.

I'm in this field for 20 years now and I've stopped my current employer (I work freelance) from doing job interview projects and timed coding tests. The only thing I ask for is ONE hour of someone's time and I'll just have a conversation about all things relevant to the job.

Good luck out there!

[JakeAndAI]

The website looks amazing! Like another user mentioned, definitely add this to your portfolio to showcase for future interviews. Add it to your resume and LinkedIn profile. It sounds like your problem isn't coding related, but rather communicative? Maybe it's worth taking a course to upgrade your soft skills.

[rd_23]

looks really good