Developer Interview Questions

I had to interview a couple of developers yesteday for the first time in my career.  Having had plently of interviews myself I thought i’d share with my handful of readers what I asked the candidates.

Our company is looking for a PHP / Frontend developer if you’re interested and can answer the majority of the questions on here, leave your name and address 🙂

Server side

1. What version of PHP / MySQL are you most familiar with?

 

1. What frameworks have you worked on and for how long?
   1. Did you write your own at any point?
   2. Template engines used
   3. WordPress experience

1. i.      Themes / Plugins?
2. OOP/Patterns:
   1. i.      Consuming which formats
   2. i.      What approach did you take? SOAP / REST etc.
   3. i.      Nulls.
   4. What’s your CL editor of choice?

1. 1. Zend Framework experience?
2. What’s your setup?
   1. Dev environment / clients.
   2. Server set up
   3. Browser
   4. OS
   5. General – happier with a GUI or hardcore CL? Working alone or in a team?
3. What’s the largest database you’ve worked with? #records.
   1. Performance issues and how they were handled.
   2. Slow queries / tweaking the DB – how would he go about solving these.
4. What’s the highest volume of traffic any of the projects you’ve worked on has received?
   1. 1 million unique per month – benchmark.
5. What you’re approach to caching.
   1. How would you serve dynamic content in a high trafficked environment? e.g. School Closures feeds / Now playing info
   2. Ever used Memcached?

1. 1. Give a couple of examples of the last time he used a design pattern and what for.
   2. Favourite / Most over used pattern?
2. Dirty hacks!
   1. Give an example of when you’ve thrown something together you’re not proud of and what could you have done better?
3. Web Services
   1. Give a couple examples of when you’ve worked with web services or API’s

1. 1. Are you happy working with XML and JSON?
   2. JSONP – what is it?
   3. Have you ever written any API’s?

1. SQL Skills
   1. Happy writing SQL by hand?
   2. Use a GUI? PhpMyAdmin?
   3. Difference between a PK and a unique?

1. Sys admin skills
   1. Happy copying / navigating files around on the command line?
   2. Ever deleted anything you shouldn’t have?
   3. Tailing logs? Do you know how?

1. Version control
   1. Preferred client?
   2. Happy with command line access or prefer a GUI
2. Regular expressions
   1. Love em or Hate em?

Client Side

1. HTML skills
   1. Are you working with HTML 4 or 5

1. i.      If HTML 5, give examples of the things you’ve done.
2. i.      What other libraries have you used?
   1. YUI / jQuery / Ext / Prototype / Scriptaculous / Moo
3. i.      Who are Douglas Crockford and John Resig?
4. i.      Ever used sprites?

1. 1. Do you code by hand?
2. Javascript
   1. How would you rate your core (without a framework JS) skills.
   2. What’s your preferred JS library?

1. 1. Are you happy writing OO JavaScript code?

1. CSS / Design
   1. Happy to write CSS by hand?

1. 1. Photoshop / Design experience?
   2. CSS frameworks

 

General

1. Name your favourite tech sites / blogs you regularly read.
2. Development goals for this year
   1. Learn HTML 5, Cross Domain AJAX – Intelligent apps.
3. Any side projects on the go?
4. Have you ever built any intelligent applications?
   1. Recommendations / Classifiers etc?
5. Basic aims/techniques of SEO?
6. Cloud sites?
   1. Ever built any?
7. Mobile development experience
   1. Ever written any iPhone or Android Apps?
8. Facebook apps?
9. Magento Experience?
10. Facebook / Twitter / MySpace?