Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@jedfoster

jedfoster/Interview Questions.md

Last active October 23, 2021 02:59
Show Gist options
  • Star 6 You must be signed in to star a gist
  • Fork 2 You must be signed in to fork a gist
  • Save jedfoster/4596858 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Save jedfoster/4596858 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Download ZIP
Interview Questions
Raw
Interview Questions.md

  1. What brings you to web development? What's your goal? What's your passion? What wakes you up in the middle of the night?

  2. Tell me about common themes you run into working in the UI. How did you address them?

    • UX/Design changes?
    • What’s difficult, what’s fun?
    • Localization

  3. What do you do to keep up to date with technology (blogs, conferences, etc)?

    • What blogs do you follow?
    • If you could master one technology this year, what would it be?

  4. Latest techniques/technologies

    • What is HTML5? Have you used it? How?
    • What is CSS3? Have you used it? How?
    • Are you familiar with web fonts/icon fonts? Have you used it? How?
    • Explain what "Semantic HTML" means.
    • Can you describe the difference between progressive enhancement and graceful degradation?
      • Bonus points for describing feature detection
    • How would you optimize a websites assets/resources?
      • Looking for a number of solutions which can include:
        • File concatenation
        • File minification
        • CDN Hosted
        • Caching
        • etc.
    • What are some of the "gotchas" for writing efficient CSS?
    • Have you ever used a grid system, and if so, what do you prefer?
    • Have you used or implemented media queries or mobile specific layouts/CSS?
    • Are you familiar with the concept of prototyping in browser?
      • Style guide experience
        • shared styling/templates
    • Are you familiar with OOCSS or similar CSS conventions?
      • BEM
      • SMACSS

  5. What is your preferred development environment? (OS, Editor, Browsers, Tools etc.)

    • What browser do you primarily develop in and what developer tools do you use?
    • Can you describe your workflow when you create a web page?
    • Are you familiar with the command line? If so, how do you use it?
    • Do you use any preprocessors? Sass, LESS, CoffeeScript, etc.
      • If so, describe what you like and dislike about the CSS preprocessors you have used.

  6. Tell me about a new technology you learned.

    • How did you go about learning it?
    • Why did you learn it?

  7. What kind of challenges/concerns does adding AJAX to a site bring?

    • URL doesn’t change – what kinds of issues arise from that?
    • Error handling – what do you do when errors occur?
    • Testing impact – how do you test?
    • UI automation needs to wait for ajax calls to return.

  8. How would you build a dialog box on the client side to show the user a message?

    • Write the markup, CSS, and javascript to do this?
    • Browser support?
    • How would you put it in the center of the page?
    • How would you make it modal?
    • How would you render it? Would it come down with the initial payload or render on the fly in JS? Why did you choose to do it this way? What are the pros / cons?
    • Testablilty?

  9. Tell me about a time when you had changes to requirements after you had begun work.  What happened? How did you respond?

General Questions:

  • Name 3 ways to decrease page load. (perceived or actual load time)

  • Explain the importance of standards and standards bodies.

  • What is FOUC? How do you avoid FOUC?

HTML-Specific Questions:

  • What are the limitations when serving XHTML pages?
    • Are there any problems with serving pages as application/xhtml+xml?
  • How do you serve a page with content in multiple languages?
    • What kind of things must you be wary of when design or developing for multilingual sites?
  • Can you use XHTML syntax in HTML5?
  • How do you use XML in HTML5?
  • What are data- attributes good for?
  • Describe the difference between cookies, sessionStorage and localStorage.

CSS-Specific Questions:

  • Describe what a "reset" CSS file does and how it's useful.

  • Describe Floats and how they work.

  • What are the various clearing techniques and which is appropriate for what context?

  • Explain CSS sprites, and how you would implement them on a page or site.

  • What are your favourite image replacement techniques and which do you use when?

  • CSS property hacks, conditionally included .css files, or... something else?

  • How do you serve your pages for feature-constrained browsers?

    • What techniques/processes do you use?

  • What are the different ways to visually hide content (and make it available only for screen readers)?

  • Any familiarity with styling SVG?

  • How do you optimize your webpages for print?

  • How would you implement a web design comp that uses non-standard fonts?

    • Webfonts (font services like: Google Webfonts, Typekit etc.)

  • Explain how a browser determines what elements match a CSS selector?

JS-Specific Questions

  • Which JavaScript libraries have you used?
  • Have you ever looked at the source code of the libraries/frameworks you use?
  • How is JavaScript different from Java?
  • What's a hashtable?
  • What are undefined and undeclared variables?
  • What is a closure, and how/why would you use one?
    • Your favorite pattern used to create them? argyle (Only applicable to IIFEs)
  • What's a typical use case for anonymous functions?
  • Explain the "JavaScript module pattern" and when you'd use it.
    • Bonus points for mentioning clean namespacing.
    • What if your modules are namespace-less?
  • How do you organize your code? (module pattern, classical inheritance?)
  • What's the difference between host objects and native objects?
  • Difference between:
function Person(){} var person = Person() var person = new Person()
  • What's the difference between .call and .apply?
  • explain Function.prototype.bind?
  • When do you optimize your code?
  • Can you explain how inheritance works in JavaScript?
  • When would you use document.write()?
    • Most generated ads still utilize document.write() although its use is frowned upon
  • What's the difference between feature detection, feature inference, and using the UA string
  • Explain AJAX in as much detail as possible
  • Explain how JSONP works (and how it's not really AJAX)
  • Have you ever used JavaScript templating?
    • If so, what libraries have you used? (Mustache.js, Handlebars etc.)
  • Explain "hoisting".
  • Describe event bubbling.
  • What's the difference between an "attribute" and a "property"?
  • Why is extending built in JavaScript objects not a good idea?
  • Why is extending built ins a good idea?
  • Difference between document load event and document ready event?
  • What is the difference between == and ===?
  • Explain how you would get a query string parameter from the browser window's URL.
  • Explain the same-origin policy with regards to JavaScript.
  • Explain event delegation.
  • Describe inheritance patterns in JavaScript.
  • Make this work:
[1,2,3,4,5].duplicator(); // [1,2,3,4,5,1,2,3,4,5]
  • Describe a strategy for memoization (avoiding calculation repetition) in JavaScript.
  • Why is it called a Ternary statement, what does the word "Ternary" indicate?
  • What is the arity of a function?
  • What is "use strict";? what are the advantages and disadvantages to using it?

JS-Code Examples:

~~3.14

Question: What value is returned from the above statement? Answer: 3

"i'm a lasagna hog".split("").reverse().join("");

Question: What value is returned from the above statement? Answer: "goh angasal a m'i"

( window.foo || ( window.foo = "bar" ) );

Question: What is the value of window.foo? Answer: "bar" only if window.foo was falsey otherwise it will retain its value.

var foo = "Hello"; (function() { var bar = " World"; alert(foo + bar); })(); alert(foo + bar);

Question: What is the outcome of the two alerts above?
Answer: "Hello World" & ReferenceError: bar is not defined

var foo = [];
foo.push(1);
foo.push(2);

Question: What is the value of foo.length? **Answer: 2

var foo = {};
foo.bar = 'hello';

Question: What is the value of foo.length? **Answer: undefined

foo = foo||bar

Question: What is the mean for? **Answer: if(!foo) foo = bar

foo>>1

Question: What is the mean for? **Answer: Math.floor(foo/2)

foo|0
foo+.5|0

Question: What is the mean for? **Answer: parseInt(foo) & Math.round(foo)

function foo(bar1, bar2, bar3){}

Question: How to get the numbers of parameters? **Answer: foo.length //this example is 3

jQuery-Specific Questions:

  • Explain "chaining".
  • Explain "deferreds".
  • What are some jQuery specific optimizations you can implement?
  • What does .end() do?
  • How, and why, would you namespace a bound event handler?
  • Name 4 different values you can pass to the jQuery method.
    • Selector (string), HTML (string), Callback (function), HTMLElement, object, array, element array, jQuery Object etc.
  • What is the effects (or fx) queue?
  • What is the difference between .get(), [], and .eq()?
  • What is the difference between .bind(), .live(), and .delegate()?
  • What is the difference between $ and $.fn? Or just what is $.fn.
  • Optimize this selector:
$(".foo div#bar:eq(0)")
  • Difference between 'delegate()' and 'live()'?

Optional fun Questions:

  • What's the coolest thing you've ever coded, what are you most proud of?
  • Do you know the HTML5 gang sign?
  • Are you now, or have you ever been, on a boat.
  • What are your favorite parts about the developer tools you use?
  • Do you have any pet projects? What kind?
  • Explain the significance of "cornify".
  • On a piece of paper, write down the letters A B C D E vertically. Now put these in descending order without writing one line of code.
    • Wait and see if they turn the paper upside down
  • Pirate or Ninja?
    • Bonus if it's a combo and a good reason was given (+2 for zombie monkey pirate ninjas)
  • If not Web Development, what would you be doing?
  • Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?
    • Hint: their answer is always wrong
  • What's your favorite feature of Internet Explorer?
  • Complete this sentence: Brendan Eich and Doug Crockford are the __________ of javascript.
  • jQuery: a great library or the greatest library? Discuss.
  • http://www.w3schools.com/ or http://w3fools.com/
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment