The initial technical screen was a take-home coding problem that I spent about 6-7 hours on over the weekend. There were two options for the coding question, and I chose to implement a small, familiar game in JavaScript using React. They asked me to focus on architecture and unit testing. I successfully completed the game and outlined some of the testing I would have done, but ran out of time and couldn’t implement the unit tests. They were understanding about that, and asked me to talk about some of the architectural decisions I had made. For example, I had decided not to use Redux, because of the simplicity of the game. However, I did choose to place all of the state in one component near the top of the tree, where it could be easily extracted and moved to Redux in the future. I also admitted honestly that since I had more experience with Angular than React, I didn’t have enough experience with Redux yet to make that task something I could finish for this game along with everything else over the weekend. They impressed me by how they prepared for my interview ahead of time. They examined and modified my code in a way that would stress it out, and made one of my recursive algorithms produce a stack overflow. They asked me how I would fix that, which gave me a chance to talk about how I would re-implement it using an iterative algorithm, and a few other optimizations.
