6 month to crack the frontend interview

I followed this 6 months plan to switch to Razorpay, my first product-based organization

My tech journey has been a little different, as I don’t hold a proper 4-year BTech degree, I had to struggle constantly for the first 5 years of my career to grab a decent-paying job.

I started with a service-based startup working with PHP and its frameworks like WordPress and Magento, and then switched to ReactJS for web development.

There were no mentors, process, or structure; everything was on the fly, and there was no documentation or best practices to follow. Just get the job done; that was the focus.

I always wanted to work in a product-based field like all of you, but it was not easy to switch from a service-based based that especially with a not highly relevant educational background.

Thus, I waited for my time when my experience would overshadow my degree, and that happened when I had more than 5 years of experience.

I was working at Fractal Analytics and was making around 12lpa I had spent two years here and was looking to jump into a product-based role this time.

With the intensive research, I updated my resume, and then through a consultancy for the job (Careernet) I got shortlisted for the interview at Razorpay.

It was a once-in-a-while opportunity, and I somehow wanted to get this job. I had been following a 6-month plan to prepare myself to crack the interviews.

Here is what I followed, and you can follow to crack the dream job in the next 6 months

1. Get good at the JavaScript language itself.
Knowing the fundamentals is extremely important, why because the frameworks will keep on changing, but the underlying language remains constant and JavaScript is the language ruling the browser since its inception.

Two books to master it
- Eloquent JavaScript, latest edition (To get started)
- Professional JavaScript for web developers, latest edition (for advanced)

But by reading only remember a fraction of the concepts, you should follow the technique of reading & doing -> reading & doing -> reading & doing (Thrice).

First month: Read the books
Solve the problems, do DOM manipulation, implement polyfills, data structures, and algorithms in vanilla JavaScript (Cover in 1 month)

Second month: Read the books again
Solve the problems, build as much as UI components as possible, small to large, that covers all the area, this time you will understand the JavaScript concepts better. (Cover in second month)

Third month: Learn a framework like React
Build all the UI components you had built in Vanillajs in React and do the comparison, how the framework was helpful. This will help you to understand why we need the frameworks in the first place.

Fourth month: Solve a problem in JavaScript, build UI components in React, and aim to do these under 60 minutes. This will help you to prepare for interviews.

Fifth month: Understand the browser ecosystem, understand how things work in the browser, different rendering strategies, optimization techniques, SEO optimization, etc

Update your resume, create 3 versions of it, experiment with the wordings, remember always mention your accomplishments in your resume.

Sixth month: Read the books again, by this time, you will be thorough with all the concepts and your mind will itself start creating the solution once you read the problems. Revise the framework and the problem solving and web fundamental concepts.

I have all the resources that you need to crack the frontend interviews segregated in one place on alpha.learnersbucket.com, you can use it for structured and distraction-free learning.

There are also company-wise problems that you can practice before interviews to get an idea of the difficulty level of the questions.

You get lifetime access to the course once you are enrolled. Use your learning budget to up skill yourself.

You should be preparing in such a way that even if you get once chance to interview, you should be able to crack the interview.

This is the era of skilled professionals, thus get skilled.

By that time, keep learning, keep hustling!.