·        TOEFL Board Grants

·        TOEFL International Speaker Grants

·        Library and Resource Center Award

·        TOEFL Outstanding Young Scholar Award

The following is a guest post by Philip Walton (@philwalton). Philip recently went through a slew of interviews for front-end jobs at tech companies in the Bay Area and found them to be not what he expected.

A few months ago I started casually looking for front-end gigs in the San Francisco Bay Area. I liked my current job, but I felt I was outgrowing the tech scene in my town. I wanted to leave my small pond and see how I'd fare in a big one, with some of the best developers in the world.

When I started looking I knew I wanted to work at a place where I wouldn't be the expert, so I only applied to big name companies. The whole experience ended up being quite valuable, and through it I got a chance to meet some of my heroes and visit the offices of some of my favorite companies.

But it wasn't all good. In fact, after looking back on the process I can't help but feel like there is something fundamentally wrong with the way tech companies interview their front-end candidates.

Before continuing, I want to offer this disclaimer. Parts of this article are going to be critical, so I think it would be best to keep the names of these companies anonymous. After all, who they are is not relevant to my overriding point.

The only details I will share is that I applied to and had phone interviews with six companies, four of which invited me to interview on-site. In total I had 23 different interviews, all of them technical.

The other thing worth mentioning is that these were all well-known companies. Companies I'm 100% sure you've all heard of, and I mention that not to brag, but to suggest that since they're the ones who set the bar where it is, the experiences I had were probably pretty close to the norm.

My Experience

Overall, my experience was quite good. Some of these companies have a reputation for their excruciating interviews, but what I went through was not nearly as bad as the stories I'd heard. Everyone was nice, everyone was professional, and if I didn't know the answer to something, I never felt belittled. Most of the time it just seemed like a simple conversation about technology between two people discussing the best way to solve a problem.

But there was something obvious missing: front-end specific questions!

Now, I'm no interviewing expert. And I'm sure most hiring managers would disagree over how to best measure the effectiveness of any particular set of interview questions. But one thing I'm sure everyone can agree upon is that the questions you ask should be questions that will be best answered by the most qualified people for the job.

To put that another way, if a talented computer science grad, fresh out of college, with almost no front-end experience can outshine a great front-end engineer in your interview, you're probably asking the wrong questions.

This basically sums up my criticism. The overwhelming majority of my interview questions were logical puzzles, generic coding challenges, and algorithm design problems — things that are necessary but nowhere near sufficient.

What Was Missing

I know several people who do a lot of interviewing, and I hear the same line from them over and over: I'd rather hire a smart person and teach them X then hire someone who knows everything about X but lacks creativity, logic, and reasoning.

I get that. The problem is that front-end development is a domain specific skill set. It's not just about mental ability, it's also about knowledge and experience.

Front-end engineers, at their most basic level, are developers who write code that runs on the user's browser. Today that means someone who writes HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and knows the various APIs that browsers expose. The difference between the general term "programmer" and specific term "front-end engineer" is simply the domain where one's knowledge exists. A superstar front-end engineer is probably also a superstar programmer, but the reverse is not necessarily the case (often not).

If you agree with what I've just said, then you can understand my surprise at the absence of some of the following topics from all 23 of my interviews:

• I wasn't asked a single question about new or upcoming HTML APIs.
• I wasn't asked a single question about the differences between various browsers and browser versions or how to target/deal with those differences.
• I wasn't asked a single question about the differences between desktop and mobile browsers or about techniques for building webapps to run on both.
• I was asked just one CSS question (just one!), and it was "tell me the difference between inline and block", a question that even most non-front-end people know.
• I was only asked one question that had anything to do with the DOM, DOM events, or event binding.

What I was asked is a lot of questions like these:

• Write a function that takes two sorted lists of numbers and merges them into a single sorted list.
• Given an array of integers (positive or negative) find the sub-array with the largest sum.
• Determine if a given string is a palindrome.
• Given a large hash table whose keys are movie names and whose values are a list of actors in those movies, write a function to determine the Bacon number of a particular actor.

Again, I don't want to imply that there isn't value in asking these questions. The problem is they have nothing to do with front-end development. As I said before, most smart developers with a strong computer science background could answer all of these, even if they'd never built a website.

So What's Going On?

I'm sure part of the problem is the newness of the need for front-end only positions as well as the term "front-end engineer" itself. It's not a well-defined term and could mean very different things depending on who was using it. I'm willing to admit the possibility that my idea of a front-end role is different from those who were posting the job, but I suspect there's more to it than that.

Another likely causes is that the majority of my interviewers were not themselves front-end engineers. They were senior team members, hiring managers, VPs, founders, etc, but they were usually not front-end engineers. As a result, they stuck to what they knew, and they asked the same questions they always ask.

My Suggestions

Given my recent experience, I want to offer the following advice to anyone reading who might be interviewing a front-end engineer in the near future.

• Front-end candidates should be interviewed by at least one front-end team member (preferably more). If you don't have a front-end team member, find someone you know and trust and ask them to do it.
• Obviously topics like logic and algorithms are important, especially for certain companies, but if you're interviewing for a front-end position, a substantial portion of the questions should focus on the front-end.
• If you really want to ask questions about logic and algorithms, figure out a way to do so that combines your questions with front-end specific knowledge.

To illustrate that last point, instead of asking about the complexity of merge sort, ask about the complexity of this jQuery expression:

$("#nav a")
      .addClass("link")
      .attr("data-initialized", true)
      .on("click", doSomething)

A correct answer to this will demonstrate both an understanding of basic computer science principles as well as a deeper knowledge of what jQuery is doing behind the scenes.

Instead of asking someone to write a function that adds two dates, have them build a simple calendar widget to go along with it.

Instead of quizzing them on CSS trivia, give them two paragraphs of text and see how many ways they can think of to arrange them side-by-side as columns. Then ask them to describe the pros and cons of each method.

Finally, good front-end engineers tend to be very self-motivated. Since browser technologies aren't usually taught in schools, most front-end engineers learned this stuff on their own. So instead of asking them what they know (which is of limited value), ask them how they stay current, and how they keep from falling behind. What are they doing to make sure they'll be better in a year than they are today?

Conclusion

Interviewing is a tricky thing, and even some of the most innovative companies get it wrong sometimes. And interviewing for a front-end position can be even harder because of the ambiguity of the term and the range of expectations that come with it.

The impression I got from many of my interviewers was that most of these companies have only recently begun to realize the importance of dedicated front-end people. Their front-end code bases are starting to get massive and really hard to manage. And part of the problem is the people who manage them aren't well versed in front-end best-practices.

If you're looking to hire a front-end candidate, consider reexamining your interview process. If you're doing some of the things mentioned in this article, you may very well be missing out on some great people.

If you're looking for a job as a front-end engineer, you couldn't be looking at a better time, but if my experience is any indication, I would suggest brushing up on some of your computer science fundamentals. One resource I highly recommend is the MIT Open Courseware lecture series, specifically Introduction to Algorithms.

Lastly, I hope this article isn't just seen as a rant by someone who didn't like his interview questions. That is certainly not my intent. My hope is that I can do my part in raising the bar for front-end work in our industry. And I believe one of the best ways to make that happen is to help companies hire the right people for these jobs.

Interviewing as a Front-End Engineer in San Francisco is a post from CSS-Tricks

With the holiday season in full swing, you would almost expect a plethora of holiday themes to saturate the market. But that’s not the case at all.

Designers released quite a few excellent free WordPress themes in this holiday month, most that will work every day of the year.

Every month, we’ll be bringing you our pick of the best free WordPress themes released in the previous four weeks. Here are our favorites for December 2013:

Twenty Fourteen

The default WordPress theme for the new year is the appropriately named Twenty Fourteen. Their responsive magazine-style layout has a sleek, modern design and content can be featured as either a grid or slider. Use the three widget areas to customize your website, and change your content’s layout with a full-width page template and a contributor page to show off authors.

Asteria Lite

Asteria Lite is a clean responsive theme with a beautiful slider, multiple layout options, social icons and three page templates. The theme also includes a neat logo designer with more than 600 typeface options. This theme includes an ajax pagination feature which means you can navigate through posts without page refresh. Plus, Asteria Lite is WooCommerce compatible, making it an option for sites with retail sales. It is also translation-ready and fully translated into French, Italian, German, Spanish and Chinese.

ButterBelly

ButterBelly is a clutter-free and fully responsive theme for business-oriented websites. The beautiful image-based theme includes plenty of customization options for logos, intro text and backgrounds. ButterBelly supports five widget areas (two in the sidebar, three in the footer) and featured images. It also includes stylesheets for print and the admin visual editor, special styles for posts and has an optional one-column page template.

Dark Orange

Dark Orange is a responsive theme built in a minimalistic style. While this theme does not include any extras, it is a great starter theme for a small blog or website.

Dellow

Dellow is a responsive theme built with a minimal style and parallax scrolling features. The free theme includes some fun extras that are often only available with premium themes such as numbered page navigation, a responsive slider, customizable header and footer options, four different page layout options, custom widgets and a time display. As an added bonus, Dellow is also retina-ready.

Flounder

Flat design is still in and Flounder is a theme that showcases the best of this trendy style. The colorful theme is fully responsive and uses a simple clean style for a variety of featured post types. While some customization options are offered with this theme, it is designed to work great right out of the box.

Inkness

Inkness is a theme that is designed with great images in mind. It is a modern theme in look and framework and is fully responsive. Inkness includes two and three-column layouts, a responsive slider, is retina ready and includes some neat CSS transition effects. Add a custom logo, widget area and more to make this theme look like anything but a free download. This is one of the more complete free themes released this month.

Medicine

While the name implies that Medicine is only for medical-related sites, this theme has a variety of business applications. This responsive theme comes with several ready-made page templates, commenting, widgets and SEO optimization tools. Plus, you can customize this theme in almost any way imaginable.

One Page

One Page is a single-page theme that displays all the essential features of your website on the home page. One Page is a professional and outstanding responsive theme with a slider and simple navigation. The single-page design is clutter-free and easy to navigate. One page also includes customization options, commenting and is translation-ready.

Osiris

Osiris includes pixel perfect typography and responsiveness in a free theme. With three built-in widgets and a pair of font options, this theme can be used for any type of website from corporate or business to a portfolio or blog. The theme also includes a responsive slider.

Premium Style

Premium Style is fully responsive and includes a ton of customization options, making it a good choice for almost any type of blog or website. This simply-designed theme is also packed with extras, including custom logo options, home slider, breadcrumbs, social icons, Google Analytics box and author info.

Prose

This simple text/personal blogging theme is easy to use and manage. The simple design of Prose is great for bloggers who want to create an emphasis with words rather than effects or images. Prose is fully responsive as well.

Romangie

This retina-ready theme is fully responsive and super easy to use. Romangie is based on the Twitter Bootstrap 3 Framework and includes a great number of customization options. The look is simple and clean but includes fun extras such as galleries, commenting, Twitter embedding, a calendar, categories and nice navigation menus.

Stargazer

Taglined as “The Best Theme in the Universe,” Stargazer has some pretty impressive options for a free theme. It is very customizable, built with nice SEO-optimization tools, sticky posts and is built on the Hybrid Core framework. Stargazer is also a parent theme with a variety of child options available for an even more custom feel, including a special holiday child themes such as Christmas Joy and Dancing in the Moonlight.

Sugar and Spice

This is a theme for the ladies, with a chic feminine feel created especially for wedding blogs. Sugar and Spice is fully responsive and includes customizations options, including three different layout styles. This theme also includes a set of social icons, slideshow gallery, 10 available color palettes and a tool for building a custom favicon.

Travel Lite

Travel Lite is designed just for jet-setters or travel-based business. This elegant theme is fully responsive and features both photos and text well. It offers a variety of simple customization options, sticky posts and ability to create a custom background.

Trvl

Trvl is a simple theme with a dark color palette that works well for blogs. With some color customization options, this theme is good for beginners or someone looking for a very simple text-posting website format.

White Xmas

White Xmas is one of the few holiday-themed themes released this month. It features a blue and white color scheme with Christmas imagery and ornate typography. While the theme is aimed at the holidays, it would also be used as a seasonal (winter months) blog theme.

WP RootStrap

We always try to include a little goody for developers and WP RootStrap is it. This flat, minimal theme, which is powered by Twitter Bootstrap, is a great starter theme for the development of a website. The theme is fully responsive and can be a great visual, theme option for managing development projects. The flat design is also suitable for blogs as well and includes a sidebar with advertising space.

Have you used any of these themes? Have we missed one of your favorites? Let us know in the comments.

Arctic: Responsive Multipurpose HTML5 Template – only $9!