When working on a web development project, what do you do to improve your code's maintainability?
When interviewing for a front-end developer position, you can anticipate that the interviewer will ask this common question. There is a high turnover rate for developer roles because they are recruited to other organizations or promoted within the same organization. Therefore, other developers must read, patch, and improve the code if the original developer is unavailable. Hiring managers will seek to confirm that you incorporate maintainability into your development process and that the techniques you use are similar to the ones their organization employs.
"Since I've been working in this role for several years, I've encountered situations in which I've been asked to work with code which has been developed by someone else. This has taught me to incorporate maintainability into my development process. Techniques I use include iterative development, such as Agile or Waterfall, making my code readable, and documenting everything. Other techniques include single responsibility, the law of Demeter, and the open/closed principle. I have never been contacted by a developer who assumed responsibility for my code to ask me to help them understand it."
Community answers are written by other candidates practicing this set. Reading how others frame the same question is one of the fastest ways to sharpen your own.
Anonymous Answer
I would break it down into 3 categories:
Maintainability:
- Small components, don't make the code take up more than 100 lines
- Folder structure that makes sense.
- Avoid duplicate code, make generic functions to be reused
- Avoid generic variable names but also shouldn't be overly long
- Documentation: comment on things that aren't self-explained by the code and let semantic code take care of the rest
- Style guide: have a general UI/UX style guide and theming within styled components
Scalability:
- Modular components are components that have a single purpose and do that purpose very well and are agnostic to how it's used in the application. But also don't over modularize so that you have too many files interacting with each other
- Choose less opinionated software so you're flexible in how you use it. Like angular is more opinionated, you have to use its built-in router and API fetcher whereas in react you can choose your own and swap them out based on your needs or updates in the web world
Performance:
- Avoid re-renders
- Small bundle size
- Small npm libraries
- Prefetching like for pagination
- Lazy loading like for images.
Amanda's Feedback
You've done a good job explaining how you ensure code maintainability. You can strengthen this answer further by sharing an example of a time when you implemented these steps or strategies to optimize a specific web development project. This helps the interviewer better understand how you put these strategies to work and how they've benefited real-world projects.
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