A friend who reviews take-home code submissions for his company sent me a list a couple weeks ago: 40 take-homes he had reviewed in the last quarter, ranked from best to worst, with brief notes on what made him push the candidate through or reject them. Looking through the list, the rejects clustered into 8 specific anti-patterns. The pass-throughs avoided most of them. None of them were about being a brilliant engineer; they were about not making any of the 8 mistakes. Here they are, ordered from most to least common. 1. The "I Used Every Library I Know" submission Anti-pattern: the project pulls in 14 npm packages to do what 200 lines of plain code would do. Authentication library, state management library, ORM, validation library, two utility libraries, a logger, a metrics collector, etc. for a 4-hour take-home with no users. Why it kills the application: it signals that the candidate cannot evaluate when complexity is appropriate.…