[Jgrubb]

More ridiculous than asking CS questions of a front end dev. I'm a self-taught front-end dev who has flunked numerous interviews because of a lack of CS degree and being able to get through the sorting algorithm questions. I then went home and have spent lots and lots of time teaching myself those fundamentals, if only to interview better. Those fundamentals have made me a vastly better front end dev, able to efficiently solve problems I wouldn't have been able to solve a year ago.

I have had the exact same experience with the author of the article regarding a total absence of actual front-end related questions, though. Not sure how to feel about not getting those gigs.

[krsunny]

Can you give some examples of which algorithm have been the most relevant/helpful?

[drgath]

I was recently asked a "making change" question [1] in a front-end interview, and once I finally understood it, it really really helped my comprehension of how to properly dissect tree-recursion-branching problems. Here's the code, https://gist.github.com/derek/8073844.

Another one that popped up in an interview was sub-string matching, which I bombed, but after learning Boyer-Moore-Horspool I have a much greater understanding of efficiently designing algorithms. It is the algorithm some browsers use under the hood for String.prototype.indexOf [3]. Here's that code, https://gist.github.com/derek/8035740.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change-making_problem

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyer%E2%80%93Moore%E2%80%93Hor...

[3] http://javascriptrules.com/2009/08/12/string-searching-algor...

[sergiotapia]

His silence is highly amusing to me. :)

[Jgrubb]

Your condescension is highly distasteful to me.

[krsunny]

Who was he talking about? Me? If so, I upvoted the reply, what more do I need to do?