Interview Questions

General Questions

What did you learn yesterday/this week?

What excites or interests you about coding?

I've always been fascinated by the idea of thought experiments - creating an abstract "universe" around a set of simple assumptions, and carrying out those assumptions to their logical conclusions. Programming makes it possible to do this.

What is a recent technical challenge you experienced and how did you solve it?

Talk about your preferred development environment.

Which version control systems are you familiar with?

Most recently git - because it's universal, powerful, flexible, uses little resources, can handle extremely hairy conflict situations, scales to thousands of programmers, and by the way, if it's good enough for the Linux kernel development team it's good enough for me. I can also handle svn (old reliable), but any team still using svn is probably also running databases using Microsoft Access.

Can you describe your workflow when you create a web page?

Can you describe the difference between progressive enhancement and graceful degradation?

Progressive enhancement is making small changes at a time; graceful degredation is letting something die slowly.

How would you optimize a website's assets/resources?

Use CDN, profile the page loading, put the assets and resources at the end of the page source so they load last

How many resources will a browser download from a given domain at a time?

What are the exceptions?

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

If you jumped on a project and they used tabs and you used spaces, what would you do?

Describe how you would create a simple slideshow page.

Use Google Slides, or use a Javascript library that would allow me to put together some simple slides and page through them with arrows/page up/page down

If you could master one technology this year, what would it be?

Explain the importance of standards and standards bodies.

What is Flash of Unstyled Content? How do you avoid FOUC?

Not gonna lie, my site suffers from FOCU. It happens when you load a site, and there is a second where the site appears wtihout styling applied. It's confusing to know how to avoid this - because you're not "supposed" to load heavyweight javascript libraries like Angular at the beginning (to keep pages from loading slowly). Welp...

Explain what ARIA and screenreaders are, and how to make a website accessible.

Strips styling and layout to display plain old readable text. Make websites accessible using libraries like Bootstrap.

Explain some of the pros and cons for CSS animations versus JavaScript animations.

What does CORS stand for and what issue does it address?

CORS is cross-origin resource sharing - loading resources from a different domain. It "addresses" the issue of being able to include more stuff, but of course, it creates a cross-site scripting back door through which nasty or malicious things can be loaded.