Interview Prep Questions

interview_prep.md

Process

• Phone
• Tech
  • Pairing
  • Whiteboarding
• Culture

What should you get out of the interview process?

Questions

Interview Questions:

1. Name some similarities & differences between Ruby & Javascript
2. Describe encapsulation. Open up an editor and code me an example of encapsulation.
3. What is a class?
4. What is an object?
5. Write an algorithm to sort an array and describe it's worst case runtime.
6. When would you use an Array or Hash? (why pick one over the other?)
7. What the difference between the internet & the web?
8. When testing, what is mocking/stubbing? What are the pros & cons?
9. Name some parts of an HTTP request and response.
10. What form do the response & request take?
11. HTTP is stateless, what does that mean?
12. What technique is used to track state over HTTP?
13. I just pulled up the website you built and the browser is displaying a blank page. Walk me through the steps you'd take to troubleshoot the problem.
14. Name 3 ways to decrease page weight.
15. Explain how prototypal inheritance works. How does it compare to class based inheritience?
16. How do you go about testing your JavaScript? What are some good design decisions that help create testable Javascript?
17. Explain AJAX in as much detail as possible
18. Explain private, public, and protected as they apply to Ruby.
19. Describe the difference between a linked list and an array.
20. Describe the difference between a get and post request?
21. What's a parameterized SQL query?

Your Life as a Developer

1. What industry sites and blogs do you read regularly?
2. What are a few of your favorite development tools and why?
3. What skills and technologies are you the most interested in improving upon or learning?
4. What did you learn yesterday/this week?

Front End

1. Explain what "Semantic HTML" means.
2. Name 3 ways to decrease page load time. (perceived or actual load time)
3. Describe what a "reset" CSS file does and how it's useful.
4. Explain CSS sprites, and how you would implement them on a page or site.
5. Have you ever used a grid system, and if so, which do you prefer? why?
6. Describe event bubbling.
7. Explain how you would get a query string parameter from the browser window's URL
8. Explain the same-origin policy with regards to JavaScript

OO Design Patterns

1. Describe encapsulation. Open up an editor and code me an example of encapsulation.
2. Desribe polymorphism. How is polymorphism accomplished in strongly typed languages? How is it accomplished in weakly typed languages?
3. When would you use inheritence? What are it's benefits and drawbacks?
4. What is a class?
5. What is an object? Are only instances of classes objects?

Standard Algorithms -- You don't need to memorize these, but should be able to implement them given a description.

1. Sorting (insertion, merge, bubble)
2. Linear Search
3. Binary Search

Data structures (be able to implement these in the language of your choice)

1. Array
2. Hash
3. Linked List, Double Linked List
4. Set
5. Find a CS 101 set of drills

How the internet works

1. What's the difference between the internet and the web?
2. What are some common networking protocols?
3. What is DNS?
4. What's an IP address?
5. What is a packet?
6. What does routing do?

How HTTP works

1. Desribe an HTTP request and response.
2. HTTP is stateless, what does that mean?
3. What technique is used to track state over HTTP?
4. What is an HTTP response code? What are some common codes?

Plain ol' Ruby

1. Classes
2. Modules
3. Objects
4. class methods, instance methods
5. method_missing
6. Blocks/procs/lamdas
7. self
8. public/protected/private
9. Enumberable

Plain ol' Javascript

1. Scope
2. this
3. Private variables
4. Module pattern
5. Object literal vs Contructor
6. fn.apply fn.bind fn.call

TDD

1. Can you write an rspec test outside of Rails?