Tools, Frameworks & Implementation Proficiency Topics
Practical proficiency with industry-standard tools and frameworks including project management (Jira, Azure DevOps), productivity tools (Excel, spreadsheet analysis), development tools and environments, and framework setup. Focuses on hands-on tool expertise, configuration, best practices, and optimization rather than conceptual knowledge. Complements technical categories by addressing implementation tooling.
Frontend Expertise and Framework Mastery
Be ready to discuss your deep expertise in frontend technologies mentioned in the job description: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React/Angular/Vue. Talk about performance optimization, scalability challenges you've solved, and your understanding of modern frontend architecture. Share examples of how you've made technical choices that improved code quality, performance, or team productivity.
Technology Stack and Interests
Covers both the team and product technology choices you will encounter and the candidate's own technical experience and learning interests. Topics include common frameworks and languages used in modern stacks such as React, Vue, Angular, TypeScript and backend platforms, as well as build tools, testing frameworks, deployment tooling, and styling approaches. Candidates should be prepared to explain why certain technologies were chosen, trade offs and migration paths, which parts of the stack they expect to learn on the job, and how their existing skills translate to the company stack. Interviewers also assess genuine interest in the company technologies, learning agility, adaptability to new tools, and practical experience with relevant frameworks, libraries, or patterns. Good answers combine a clear understanding of the team stack, examples of past experience, and a plan for rapid skill acquisition where needed.
Technical Skills and Tools
A concise but comprehensive presentation of a candidate's core technical competencies, tool familiarity, and practical proficiency. Topics to cover include programming languages and skill levels, frameworks and libraries, development tools and debuggers, relational and non relational databases, cloud platforms, containerization and orchestration, continuous integration and continuous deployment practices, business intelligence and analytics tools, data analysis libraries and machine learning toolkits, embedded systems and microcontroller experience, and any domain specific tooling. Candidates should communicate both breadth and depth: identify primary strengths, describe representative tasks they can perform independently, and call out areas of emerging competence. Provide brief concrete examples of projects or analyses where specific tools and technologies were applied and quantify outcomes or impact when possible, while avoiding long project storytelling. Prepare a two to three minute verbal summary that links skills and tools to concrete outcomes, and be ready for follow up probes about technical decisions, trade offs, and how tools were used to deliver results.
React Functional Components and Hooks
Focuses on the functional component model and React hooks API. Topics include using state with useState, managing side effects and lifecycle with useEffect including dependency arrays and cleanup, avoiding common pitfalls such as stale closures and infinite loops, memoization and performance patterns with useMemo and useCallback, state management with useReducer, context consumption with useContext, building and testing custom hooks, rules of hooks, and common patterns for data fetching, event handling, and component local state. Emphasis spans from junior correct usage to advanced patterns and debugging of hooks.
React Component Composition and Props
Covers designing and building reusable, composable React components using props to pass data and callbacks. Includes understanding prop drilling and strategies to avoid it, controlled versus uncontrolled components, prop validation and type checking, the children prop, render prop and higher order component patterns, and when to split or combine components for clarity and reuse. Emphasizes component hierarchy design, interface stability, handling default and optional props, passing event handlers, and when to use context or other patterns instead of deep prop passing.
React Patterns and Code Organization
Covers common React development patterns best practices and project organization principles to build maintainable and performant user interfaces. Topics include component design and composition, conditional rendering and list rendering with keys, hooks and custom hooks patterns, state management strategies and avoiding prop drilling, context usage, memoization and performance optimizations, file and folder organization conventions, naming and code style, testing components and integration points, accessibility considerations, and trade offs for applying patterns in different application sizes.
Technology Stack Knowledge
Assess a candidate's practical and conceptual understanding of technology stacks, including major programming languages, application frameworks, databases, infrastructure, and supporting tools. Candidates should be able to explain common use cases and trade offs for languages such as Python, Java, Go, Rust, C plus plus, and JavaScript, including differences between compiled and interpreted languages, static and dynamic type systems, and performance characteristics. They should discuss application frameworks and libraries for frontend and backend development, common web stacks, service architectures such as monoliths and microservices, and application programming interfaces. Evaluate understanding of data storage options and trade offs between relational and non relational databases and the role of structured query language. Candidates should be familiar with cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure, infrastructure components including containerization and orchestration tools such as Docker and Kubernetes, and development workflows including version control, continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines, testing frameworks, automation, and infrastructure as code. Assess operational concerns such as logging, monitoring and observability, deployment strategies, scalability, reliability, fault tolerance, security considerations, and common failure modes and mitigations. Interviewers may probe both awareness of specific tools and the candidate's depth of hands on experience, ability to justify technology choices by evaluating trade offs, constraints, and risk, and willingness and ability to learn and evaluate new technologies rather than claiming mastery of everything.
Cross Browser Compatibility and Developer Tools
Focuses on identifying and resolving cross browser rendering and behavior differences and using browser developer tools effectively. Topics include common cross browser issues for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, vendor prefixes and experimental features, progressive enhancement and graceful degradation strategies, feature detection and polyfills, responsive and device specific testing, automated cross browser testing and continuous integration practices, and practical debugging techniques using browser developer tools such as DOM and CSS inspection, layout and repaint profiling, network throttling, device emulation, and console and performance tooling.
TypeScript in React
Applying TypeScript to React applications to improve correctness and maintainability. Topics include typing component props and state, designing generic and reusable components, typing callbacks and custom hooks, using utility types and discriminated unions for robust domain models, handling nullable and asynchronous data, and strategies for incremental migration. Candidates should discuss trade offs of strict typing, how types surface regressions, and patterns for integrating third party libraries into a typed code base.