1 min lesson
Get your environment out of your way
Choose the best answer to "Which failure mode is specifically fatal for a Design Engineer candidate, more so than for a general software engineer?" Then say what led you there.
Step 1 of 2
Get your environment out of your way
On a two-day clock, an hour lost to toolchain setup is an hour of polish you'll never get back. Show up with your fastest path from idea to clickable artifact already wired.
- A prototyping stack you can scaffold in minutes - your go-to React/SolidJS starter, styling and a dev server that just runs.
- A small kit of patterns you trust: an animation approach, a focus-management helper, a couple of headless primitives.
- Editor configured the way you'll actually work, with autocomplete on and nothing else you'd have to fight mid-task.
When presenting the trial build: “I deliberately scoped this down so the core interaction could feel finished rather than spreading thin. Here's the decision I made on the transition timing and why and here's the empty state I added because the first run felt dead without it.” That sentence signals scope discipline and the polish instinct in one breath.
Coded unassisted for at least several sessions this week. Portfolio walkthrough rehearsed with the why behind two interactions. A non-swappable “why Cursor” tied to a real surface. Prototyping stack scaffolds in minutes. Logistics confirmed: location and the in-person trial dates.