6 Important Technical Interview Questions for Full-Stack Developers!

Some of the readers have asked me about the most frequest interview questions for full stack web developer positions, here I will introduce some of the most iportant topics you need to know before getting any interviews.

Describe a RESTful API; what are the particularities of that kind of API?

Answer: magine you are looking for some videos on Youtube about "JavaScript". Therefore, you first open up Youtube, type "javascript" into a search field, hit enter, and you see a list of videos about JavaScript. A REST API works similarly. Hence, your search for something, and you get a list of results back from the service you are requesting from.

Now what are Requests and Responses?

Answer: Each URL is called a request, while the data sent back to you is called a response.

What is an API?

An API is an application programming interface. It is a set of rules that allow programs to talk to each other. The developer creates the API on the server and enables the client to speak to it.

What is REST?

REST stands for "Representational State Transfer", and it determines how the API looks like. More precisely, REST is a set of rules that developers follow when they create their API. One of these rules states that you should get a piece of data (called a resource) when you link to a specific URL.

Why is it bad to couple the frontend and the API? And how do you ensure low coupling?

A strongly coupled frontend to backend prevents taking many advantages lie in decoupling frontend and backend layers. For instance, a decoupled architecture allows the frontend and backend developers to work independently. Since development is carried out in parallel, it reduces the overall project time. Business teams usually take a keen interest in the progress of the UI/UX part of the project resulting in faster frontend rollout. This helps the backend developers with the creation of data structures suitable for the frontend. The decoupled architecture allows the project teams to test their builds independently and in parallel, further optimizing the project duration. Moreover, it can also increase the overall human resource count. As the two parts are developed and tested independently, it introduces a few redundancies in the development and testing processes.

What do you think are the consequences of bad coding practices over time?

It has multiple disadvantages and imposes various issues to your code and final software. Examples of bad coding practices are as follows:

• - Typos in Your Code
• - Failing to Indent or Format Your Code
• - Failing to Modularize Your Code
• - Causing Security Issues (e.g., Hard-Coding Passwords)
• - Failing to Use Good Encryption to Protect Data
• - Optimizing Code Prematurely
• - Poor Documentation

These bad practices result in producing non-optimized, buggy code with poor documentation. This code cannot introduce appropriate performance to the end-users, and it will be difficult for the maintenance team and other developers to extend our code. Moreover, it may jeopardize the secret information of the end-users (e.g., admin password, databases, etc.) due to the poor security conditions (e.g., hard-coded passwords can easily be obtained by performing reverse engineering).

How would you ensure that the coding convention and best practices are followed in a project or in a company?

There are a few practices that make software development projects better; in the following, you can find some of the most prevailing coding practices:

• - Simplicity: The simpler the pieces are, the more quickly you can change things in the future. The idea is to make the individual components of your code as simple as possible and then make sure they stay that way over time. This can be tested as to how easily others understand a module. In other words, code simplicity reduces unnecessary complexity in software development and not repeat yourself.
• - Testing: Testing enables the coding process faster and boosts the quality of your code. Furthermore, Testing allows finding bugs during the development phase before releasing the software to market. Finally, it helps to provide software documentation.
• - Code review: Since making mistakes during coding is extremely common, and it is crucial to show your code to a colleague to read and evaluate your code to find any potential issue that you might miss during the programming process. You can also use many off-the-shelf tools such as FindBugs to control your source code (note: you can also install most of these tools as IDE extensions/plugins)

Unit testing and its importance?

UNIT TESTING is a type of software testing where individual units or components of the software are tested. The main goal of unit testing is to validate that each unit of the software code performs as expected. In other words, Unit Testing is used to design robust software components that help maintain code and eliminate code unit issues. It is also an integral part of the agile software development process. When a nightly build run unit test suite should run and report should be generated. If any of the unit tests have failed, then the QA team should not accept that build for verification.

What are KISS and YAGNI?

• - KISS is an acronym for SIMPLICITY in coding, which I have already explained.
• - YAGNI means not wasting time by implementing unrequired features. Your job as a programmer is to find apparent parts that should be created. YAGNI should not be applied on the development level, even though this behavior might be useful on the management level.

References

• https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/api/what-is-a-rest-api
• https://blog.bitsrc.io/kiss-solid-yagni-and-other-fun-acronyms-b5d207530335