[krapp]

It may have been a red flag if they asked you for a simple memory game with a tiny back end and you gave them a Laravel install with a Node.js dependency that you admittedly "cut corners" on and left "a couple of minor bugs" in.

I don't know exactly what they were expecting from you if anything in terms of efficiency or scale but there is a chance this looks like a massive, bloated chunk of unnecessary dependencies and code, which suggests you might not know how to manage a project efficiently. Just requiring Node.js to do javascript development in a PHP environment, itself, is kind of smelly to me.

I'm not saying it's fair, just that it's the impression i'm left with.

[antjanus]

I think this is the root of it. Looking at the repo, you shouldn't have to go through 20 steps to just install the app. I believe Node is just for compiling and gulp stuff, so that's fine for front-end.

I can't say I'd pass the interview but my idea of how this would work would be:

- simple instal.php script that would use PHP's PDO to create a DB and a table with necessary info - simple api.php script that would take API calls in order to save scores and that's it. You could easily do this in Node as well thus keeping everything javascript - javascript front-end with no PHP involved there. An actual index.html file with everything in it, referencing one (non-minimized) JS file and whatever images and CSS.

This is hindsight 20/20 obviously especially since we all want to show EVERYTHING we know during an interview and I'm guilty of doing things like this as well. I'm guilty of doing the opposite too, keeping things too "prototype-y" and messy.