How to Hire an Angular Developer
Angular allows for the creation of rich web applications in a consistent way that can easily scale as your business grows. It provides a great deal of functionality out of the box, allowing any developers you hire to be productive from day one. As a free and open-source Google project, it has amassed a great deal of long-term support and updates, allowing for a large number of developers to make use of its rich community.
In this article, we’ll explain how you can spot the best Angular developers, the technical skills and knowledge you should look for, and the soft skills that will make them the best hires for your team.
Table Of Contents
Why Hire Angular Developers?
Angular allows for a great deal of consistency between your different products, leading to increased productivity, code quality, and reusability. Furthermore, choosing Angular will also improve the maintainability of your products, allowing your team to spend more of their time developing new features instead of fighting old code.
We’ll cover some non-technical skills you should assess in Angular developers, how to spot a developer that would be a great addition to your team, and the skills and attributes to look for.
What to Look for in an Angular Developer
When hiring angular developers, it’s important to assess non-technical aspects of their personalities that would help with their effectiveness within your team. A passion for high-performing applications and well-written code is crucial to maintaining quality standards within your business. They should also be true team players and enjoy sharing their knowledge and mentoring newcomers.
Are They Passionate About Learning?
Look for developers that demonstrate a passion for continuous improvement. Keep an eye on their portfolio and if they are currently experimenting with any technologies. You can also look at their certifications; do they have any related to project management, for example, AWS certified? These would provide valuable insight into what drives the candidate and how they can benefit your team.
Are They an Open Source Contributor?
Another aspect to pay close attention to is any open source contributions the candidate may have made. This is a big plus as it demonstrates that the candidate is using various tools and libraries and actively improving them. Open-source contributions show proficiency and passion for writing good code as the candidate is willing to make improvements and share them with the world. This, combined with knowledge of common design patterns such as SOLID, DRY and KISS will let you know that you have a great candidate in your hands.
Do They Write or Share With the Angular Community?
In a similar fashion, look for developers that have been creating and sharing content about these technologies. Similarly, look for developers that have been creating and sharing content about these technologies. Whether as technical writers of documentation, blog posts, articles, or any educational content, it shows they are passionate about the Angular ecosystem and vouches for them as great additions to any team, as they’ll help upskill their fellow developers.
Do They Have a Big-Picture Understanding?
You should also check if they understand how business objectives align with development objectives. Is it worth You should also check if they understand how business objectives align with development objectives. Is it worth upgrading to the latest version of Angular? What benefits does it provide, and what problems would it solve for your customers? These questions will help you identify if they can balance the Angular ecosystem’s advantages and disadvantages to maximize productivity while allowing your project to use the latest software versions that provide security updates and new features.
Technical Skills to Look For in an Angular Developer
One of the most important aspects of hiring Angular developers is to test their knowledge of Javascript and Typescript. Typescript, the language all Angular applications are written with, can be incredibly powerful when used properly, so you should test this knowledge as early as possible. You should verify that the Angular developer understands what advantages Typescript provides, what problems it solves, and how it can be combined with Angular to help improve development.
Newest Features
Angular regularly has a major release every six months, so your developers must keep updated with the features added in every version. It’s also imperative that any Angular developer you hire knows how to deal with the migration process and the changes required between different versions. It’ll save you headaches further down the line as you won’t be stuck with older versions and taking on technical debt that one day you’ll need to repay.
Knowledge of the Component Lifecycle
Angular developers will need to know the component lifecycle within Angular and how this will apply to both new feature development and resolving issues within the codebase. By understanding the component lifecycle, they can utilize hooks to attach to different events occurring within the application to provide functionality when properties have changed, which is key to any application. It also makes life easier when debugging different components so knowledge of this forms a strong foundation for any angular developer.
Knowledge of Angular Material
Furthermore, you want to verify that the candidate is aware of how to use the Material UI and its integration with Angular. Material UI can save your team an immense amount of time as they do not need to recreate common components such as tables, menus, etc. You can also theme Material UI to suit your business requirements, and thereby it provides a great toolkit for your team to quickly ship features. Assessing knowledge of Material UI would be an immense advantage as it saves the entire team the hassle of creating these components for each project.
Data Flow and Immutability
One of the key benefits of Angular is how it manages data flow within an application and guarantees immutability where needed. This means that the different parts of the application can have access to the data they need safely and reliably.
The Angular developer you bring onto your team should be acutely aware of how unidirectional data flow works, and how to utilize data binding to build fast, dynamic applications. Using these features is essential for every developer, and it’s a good idea to confirm strong knowledge of this as early as possible.
Application Structure, Services, Modules and Routing
The Angular developer should know how the MVVM application architecture pattern works, as this is the core of Angular’s design. This, combined with verification that the developer knows how to use standard Angular services, modules, directives and routing, will help you verify that not only is the candidate a proficient Angular developer but that they’ll start making an impact on your organization from day one
Tooling and Workflow
There are several industry tools that your team may already be using, including Jira, Git and any number of CI/CD pipelines. Make sure that the Angular developer you’re hiring is aware of how to use and set up these tools so that they’ll maximize their productivity from day one and can hit the ground running.
Command Line Interface (CLI)
Finally, you want to ensure that the developer is familiar with and knows how to use the Angular Command Line Interface (CLI). It’s essential that any Angular developer knows how to harness this toolkit to their advantage to help speed up their development, aid in creating various Angular components, and debug their applications effectively.
These, combined with a thorough knowledge of the various testing tools available within Angular for Unit testing and End-to-End testing will allow you to hire someone that can maintain the quality your organization requires in the long term. Knowing how to test Angular applications is incredibly important, so they should be Test Driven Development minded, allowing your team to write tests as needed. These will aid you in the future when migrating to newer versions of Angular and know exactly which sections of your application are not working.
Technical Interview Questions for Angular Developers
How can you create directives using the CLI?
Use the “ng generate directive” command
Which is an example of a router event?
NavigationStart
What is interpolation in Angular?
It allows for component properties to be embedded within the view and angular replaces the {{placeholder}} with the actual value.
What is the nglf directive used for?
It allows you to displace specific view sections when certain conditions are met. It hides/shows depending on the evaluation of the condition.
What is a service?
A service allows for common functionality to be shared across modules. It allows for the separation of concerns.
Conclusion
As we’ve seen, Angular is a powerful framework that can help increase productivity within your team and allow you to create reliable and maintainable products. As with any framework, though, it’s important to use the framework correctly, as failing to do so can have disastrous consequences in the long term.
We’ve seen how previous versions of Angular can introduce significant changes when upgrading, why developers need to understand the problems Angular solves, and how these features need to be used correctly so your business can enjoy its benefits. Angular can save you time, and combining it with excellent developers who know how to maximize the framework’s potential will allow you to create products your customers can rely on.