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Comment by jzig | Hacker News Reader

The following is intentionally a little snarky.

I know what IP and DNS are but I couldn't tell you how they work.

I almost never use `this` and therefore don't remember all of its nuances. My team specifically avoids using it because it is harder for junior devs to grasp and makes things harder to read. I tend to agree.

Writing a reduce function? That's what I use lodash for.

What is REST? I use it every day but would have to look up a proper definition for you.

The event loop? I know what it is but I have never needed to know what it is.

I should learn these things because they are practical? Most of them aren't at my current job, but that's just my experience. And I probably get paid enough and have enough day to day freedom that I wouldn't want to work for you. However I would gladly answer all of these questions as a part of take home "homework".

Sorry if I'm being a curmudgeon. Shrug.

P.s. your website is down!

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> I almost never use `this` and therefore don't remember all of its nuances. My team specifically avoids using it because it is harder for junior devs to grasp and makes things harder to read. I tend to agree.

Honestly I think `this` (and any OOP technique) should be avoided except under very specific circumstances, regardless of whether junior devs are involved. Exceptions include (but are not limited to):

- Interaction with native APIs or legacy libraries which mandate its use - React lifecycle or other modern lib equivalent, if absolutely necessary - When using a `class`, and only if it would be substantially more clear than a functional alternative

> Writing a reduce function? That's what I use lodash for.

Unless you need it for non-`Array` collections, just use `Array#reduce`.

> The event loop? I know what it is but I have never needed to know what it is.

Every time you do anything asynchronously in JS, you are interacting with the event loop. It would be a good idea to familiarize yourself with it, to understand the constraints and performance impacts of single-threaded asynchrony.

> What is REST? I use it every day but would have to look up a proper definition for you.

REpresentation State Transfer

...

That's about all I can do to define REST. I can't really tell you what it really means beyond describing CRUD, but I can identify a REST interface when I see one.

REST isn't exactly aligned with CRUD, though it's often used for CRUD APIs.

REST generally describes (roughly in order of most common in implementation to least):

- HTTP requests operate on resources - HTTP verbs describe the specific operations to perform (most typically HEAD, GET, POST, PUT, DELETE; some systems also implement OPTIONS, PATCH, custom verbs; some less-RESTful systems use POST for everything besides GET) - Resources have a single identifier (URL); some systems get this wrong - Query string parameters provide filtering and conditional behavior on requests for resources - HTTP status codes indicate the condition of the response - HTTP headers provide mechanisms for authorization/authentication, content type negotiation, pagination, error condition mitigation (redirects, rate limiting, etc) - Responses provide URLs to related resources where appropriate

I'm probably forgetting a ton. The fundamental idea behind REST is to use the semantics of HTTP, as they were designed, to implement and interact with an API.

Well damn I just got told what's up.

I wish I'd noticed how bad the formatting was on that. I don't see a way I can edit it to fix it now.

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