Another Front End Engineer Interviewing Question: Loop Alternatives

Posted on by Rob Larsen

We’ve actually hired a couple of people recently, so I’m not sure if I’ll be able to bust this one out any time soon. Instead, I’ll share it with you.

This is another one that I feel works for a lot of different experience and knowledge levels. A good, junior developer should be able to give me a satisfactory answer and a senior developer could take the same problem, decide to be clever, and give me a great answer.

Let’s take a look at it.

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My Intro to HTML5 Boilerplate @ IBM developerWorks + Another Wrinkle on Customizing

Posted on by Rob Larsen

I wrote an article about getting started with HTML5 Boilerplate. It’s live at IBM. Check it out:

Kick-start your web development with HTML5 Boilerplate.

I’ve got some more content coming up on IBM over the next few months on some pretty exciting topics. I’m in the middle of a deadline for one right now, actually…

That begs the question- when will I sleep?

Answer: never.

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Interviewing Front End Engineers: The Technology Breakdown

Posted on by Rob Larsen

Two caveats before I dive into this one.

For starters, the following is what I’m generally interested in when doing an interview. It doesn’t represent in any official way what my current employer and my boss might be looking for in a candidate. It’s not my group, so this is only part of the picture.

Secondly, this is based on the “Front End Developer” role I outlined in my previous post. That’s what I do and what I’ve interviewed people for over the past few years, so if you’re looking for insights into interviewing for another role, adjust accordingly.

Also, and this should go without saying, the following is simply what I look for in a candidate. This is entirely personal and biased. If you look for other things or don’t care about some of the things that I value that’s cool. There are infinite ways to get to the same result here. We all want to hire good people.
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The Front End Engineering Spectrum: The Roles

Posted on by Rob Larsen

Following up on my previous post about the generic types of front end engineers, this post will deal with the common roles that I see people trying to fill. Unlike the previous list which was written solely from the perspective of a front end engineer, looking at the actual skill sets of the people whose resumes I’ve reviewed, people I’ve interviewed and folks I’ve worked with; this list is based on job descriptions and roles designed by people may not really understand what being a front end engineer means in 2011. Hopefully a few of those people (and maybe a recruiter or two) will visit this site and come away with a better sense of how to staff these roles.

I’ve seen examples of all of these over the past few years.
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Targeting Multiple HTML Files in the HTML5 Boilerplate Build Script

Posted on by Rob Larsen

This came up in a comment here, so I thought I’d bubble this little tip to the top.

To target multiple files for URL rewriting in the HTML5 Boilerplate build script (as of version 0.95) use the fileset element instead of the file argument in the “html” target:

  
<target name="html" depends="">

    <echo message="Clean up the html..."/>

    <!-- style.css replacement handled as a replacetoken above -->

    <replaceregexp match="&lt;!-- scripts concatenated [\d\w\s\W]*?!-- end concatenated and minified scripts--&gt;" 
    	replace="&lt;script src='${dir.js}/scripts-${build.number}.min.js\'&gt;&lt;/script&gt;" flags="m">
	  
        <!-- grab everything html -->

       <fileset dir="./${dir.publish}/" includes="**/*.html"/>

    </replaceregexp>

    <replaceregexp match="&lt;!-- yui profiler[\d\w\s\W]*?end profiling code --&gt;" replace=" " flags="m">

        <!-- grab everything html -->

        <fileset dir="./${dir.publish}/" includes="**/*.html"/>

    </replaceregexp>

    <!--[! use comments like this one to avoid having them get minified -->

</target>

You then need to expand the fileset element in the next three targets (htmlbuildkit, htmlclean, htmlcompress) to include subfolders.

Replace

<fileset dir="./${dir.publish}/" includes="*.html"/>

with

<fileset dir="./${dir.publish}/" includes="**/*.html"/>

And that should do it.