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Seems a pretty solid list to me ;) It's a decent representation of your journey on the path to mastery. With a few years experience building several large (10K

by indescions_2018 9y ago

Seems a pretty solid list to me ;) It's a decent representation of your journey on the path to mastery. With a few years experience building several large (10K+ users) sites. One should at least have an opinion on 80-90% of this material. It demonstrates a proclivity to dive deep into web technologies. And a willingness to understand rather than simply mimic. The number of folks who claim proficiency, but who merely copy and paste code becomes pretty self-evident after collecting your first dozen or so resumes. For example consider javascript's "this" keyword. Not really concerned with a textbook definition from the ECMA spec. Or how its implemented in V8 runtimes. But you should be able to demonstrate how to bind a function call to any context you want, when to use global scope, why eval is not necessarily evil, etc. This knowledge base represents the shared technical language your team mates will use to communicate. That requires some fluency in it.

gambler 9y ago
>It's a decent representation of your journey on the path to mastery. Mastery of what? Most of them are trivia questions. They don't concern any fundamental knowledge or capability, just familiarity with some arbitrary aspect of browser's working or even a particular JS library. Asking trivia questions during interviews is a giant disservice to the hiring company. But people do it anyway, either to show off and assert their own "competence" or to filter out "profane" candidates. Personally, I mostly ask scenario-based questions. "If you need to do X, what would be your options?" "What steps would you take to figure out Y?" Works great and quickly filters out buzzword-spewing idiots who know things, but can't actually do anything. >This knowledge base represents the sha6red technical language your team mates will use to communicate. Social signalling. That's all it is. I remember how my company's interview guidelines use to state that we must ask all C#/.NET candidates about GAC. Meanwhile, 90% of all current developers never had any non-trivial interactions with GAC. Plus, the answer expected from the candidates was kind of bullshit. Plus, it was something you could find online in 5 seconds. sigh I never asked that myself, but I wonder how many qualified people were rejected just because they didn't know some arbitrary set of .NET quirks.
- mercer 9y ago
  > Mastery of what? Most of them are trivia questions. They don't concern any fundamental knowledge or capability, just familiarity with some arbitrary aspect of browser's working or even a particular JS library. I can think of a lot of cases in front-end programming where knowing the volumes of trivia is very important/useful and can very well be considered a job in itself (and often is). It's precisely the reason why I'm moving away from most of it for the time being, because I feel it's just too much trivia and too little 'fundamental knowledge or capability'. The latter ages well, the former doesn't. However, I don't think they're just trivia questions. If you want to create a web app that supports a good range of devices, multiple browsers on these devices, and all the various quirks that exist until this moment, do you really want your 'master' developers to memorize this trivia? The same goes for CSS and its quirks, and quite a lot of js/dom stuff. It's getting better, but there's still a staggering amount of trivia to learn, and there's immense value in the kind of person who would willingly learn all this.

gambler 9y ago

>It's a decent representation of your journey on the path to mastery. Mastery of what? Most of them are trivia questions. They don't concern any fundamental knowledge or capability, just familiarity with some arbitrary aspect of browser's working or even a particular JS library. Asking trivia questions during interviews is a giant disservice to the hiring company. But people do it anyway, either to show off and assert their own "competence" or to filter out "profane" candidates. Personally, I mostly ask scenario-based questions. "If you need to do X, what would be your options?" "What steps would you take to figure out Y?" Works great and quickly filters out buzzword-spewing idiots who know things, but can't actually do anything. >This knowledge base represents the sha6red technical language your team mates will use to communicate. Social signalling. That's all it is. I remember how my company's interview guidelines use to state that we must ask all C#/.NET candidates about GAC. Meanwhile, 90% of all current developers never had any non-trivial interactions with GAC. Plus, the answer expected from the candidates was kind of bullshit. Plus, it was something you could find online in 5 seconds. sigh I never asked that myself, but I wonder how many qualified people were rejected just because they didn't know some arbitrary set of .NET quirks.

mercer 9y ago
> Mastery of what? Most of them are trivia questions. They don't concern any fundamental knowledge or capability, just familiarity with some arbitrary aspect of browser's working or even a particular JS library. I can think of a lot of cases in front-end programming where knowing the volumes of trivia is very important/useful and can very well be considered a job in itself (and often is). It's precisely the reason why I'm moving away from most of it for the time being, because I feel it's just too much trivia and too little 'fundamental knowledge or capability'. The latter ages well, the former doesn't. However, I don't think they're just trivia questions. If you want to create a web app that supports a good range of devices, multiple browsers on these devices, and all the various quirks that exist until this moment, do you really want your 'master' developers to memorize this trivia? The same goes for CSS and its quirks, and quite a lot of js/dom stuff. It's getting better, but there's still a staggering amount of trivia to learn, and there's immense value in the kind of person who would willingly learn all this.