Tips & Advice

Now we’ve completed our technical test, we can reflect on the process and think about things we can do for a little bit of extra credit.

First of all, if this were a real technical test we would not send it to an employer in its current state. Now we have a solid draft that works perfectly, we would rewrite it in the following way and make commits at these points:

• Create a brand new repo.
• Clean up the project and make an initial commit
• Create our Search component and Search.test file and make a commit
• OPTIONAL STEP - write a test for getImages with mock data
• Create our getImages function and make a commit
• Create our SearchResults component and SearchResults.test file and make a commit

We would also add style as we went instead of leaving it until the end.

The reason we do this is because the employer will check our commit history to see if we waited until we finished to commit everything in one go (bad practice) or committed code we had to go back and change later (poor planning). Commit histories say more about developers than finished code does.

Always do a thorough check of your completed tech test for things like console.log's, comments, and unused variables are not present. Always ensure that your code is readable and clean before submitting. These can be seen easily by the first person reviewing your submission and will give a bad impression.

Remember that recruitment is a discriminatory process, it may come down to two people for one role and if one person has a clean commit history and a few minor mistakes, and the other doesn’t, who will get the job?

Something else we can do is deploy our app using Vercel or Github Pages. This will show we know how to host our application on the web and allow a recruiter, who may have no idea how to clone a repo, the opportunity to test our app. Do some further reading on this as it will come in handy and takes very little time to set up.