I am sorry; I was caught up in various things and finally got a job after being laid off.

The gap was nearly 3–4 months after I was laid off. So, the big lesson I learned is to sharpen the sword daily.

It is mandatory to spend one hour going through the latest updates in the technologies we work with and another hour learning something new. Spend the remaining hours working on the tasks assigned by the company you work for.

Honestly, I was not up to date with the latest technologies, and after being laid off, I couldn't clear the interviews. It created a lot of anxiety. Only after a month or two did I start preparing sincerely. I spent a month preparing, identifying my knowledge gaps, and filling them.

I took a plain notebook and started thinking about and writing down the answers to interview questions as part of my preparation. For example:

1. How would you handle a performance bottleneck?
2. How would you handle a large dataset in a list—for example, 10,000 records? Suppose you fetch all the records from the backend at once, despite having a rate limiter on the backend. Once fetched, how would you render them in a table? Explain using the JavaScript library you work with.
3. What was the most challenging production issue you encountered? How did you identify and fix it?
4. How do you handle API performance?
5. How do you implement internationalization in a React project?
6. How do you handle versioning in a project or product?
7. Your React dashboard displays 5,000 records. Whenever you type into a search box, the entire table re-renders, and the UI becomes sluggish. How would you investigate and fix it?
8. How do you handle large API responses, and how do you cache the data on the UI side?

Prepare as many architectural questions as possible and answer them with the help of AI. Document your answers in a database as an app (which also covers your app development practice) or write them down in your notebook.

Make it a daily habit to prepare one question a day, or at least three times a week.

Because nobody asks direct questions anymore; most interview questions are scenario-based.