Senior Software Developer Question:

☛ What is something substantive that you've done to improve as a developer in your career?
☛ Would you call yourself a craftsman (craftsperson) and what does that word mean to you?
☛ Implement a <basic data structure> using <some language> on <paper|whiteboard|notepad>.
☛ What is SOLID?
☛ Why is the Single Responsibility Principle important?
☛ What is Inversion of Control? How does that relate to dependency injection?
☛ How does a 3 tier application differ from a 2 tier one?
☛ Why are interfaces important?
☛ What is the Repository pattern? The Factory Pattern? Why are patterns important?
☛ What are some examples of anti-patterns?
☛ Who are the Gang of Four? Why should you care?
☛ How do the MVP, MVC, and MVVM patterns relate? When are they appropriate?
☛ Explain the concept of Separation of Concerns and it's pros and cons.
☛ Name three primary attributes of object-oriented design. Describe what they mean and why they're important.
☛ Describe a pattern that is NOT the Factory Pattern? How is it used and when?
☛ You have just been put in charge of a legacy code project with maintainability problems. What kind of things would you look to improve to get the project on a stable footing?
☛ Show me a portfolio of all the applications you worked on, and tell me how you contributed to design them.
☛ What are some alternate ways to store data other than a relational database? Why would you do that, and what are the trade-offs?
☛ Explain the concept of convention over configuration, and talk about an example of convention over configuration you have seen in the wild.
☛ Explain the differences between stateless and stateful systems, and impacts of state on parallelism.
☛ Discuss the differences between Mocks and Stubs/Fakes and where you might use them (answers aren't that important here, just the discussion that would ensue).
☛ Discuss the concept of YAGNI and explain something you did recently that adhered to this practice.
☛ Explain what is meant by a sandbox, why you would use one, and identify examples of sandboxes in the wild.
☛ Concurrency
☛ What's the difference between Locking and Lockless (Optimistic and Pessimistic) concurrency models?
☛ What kinds of problems can you hit with locking model? And a lockless model?
☛ What trade offs do you have for resource contention?
☛ How might a task-based model differ from a threaded model?
☛ What's the difference between asynchrony and concurrency?
☛ Are you still writing code? Do you love it?
☛ You've just been assigned to a project in a new technology how would you get started?
☛ How does the addition of Service Orientation change systems? When is it appropriate to use?
☛ What do you do to stay abreast of the latest technologies and tools?
☛ What is the difference between "set" logic, and "procedural" logic. When would you use each one and why?
☛ What Source Control systems have you worked with?
☛ What is Continuous Integration? Have you used it and why is it important?
☛ Describe a software development life cycle that you've managed.
☛ How do you react to people criticizing your code/documents?
☛ Whose blogs or podcasts do you follow? Do you blog or podcast?
☛ Tell me about some of your hobby projects that you've written in your off time.
☛ What is the last programming book you read?
☛ Describe, in as much detail as you think is relevant, as deeply as you can, what happens when I type "cnn.com" into a browser and press "Go".
☛ Describe the structure and contents of a design document, or a set of design documents, for a multi-tiered web application.
☛ What's so great about <cool web technology of the day>?
☛ How can you stop your DBA from making off with a list of your users’ passwords?
☛ What do you do when you get stuck with a problem you can't solve?
☛ If your database was under a lot of strain, what are the first few things you might consider to speed it up?
☛ What is SQL injection?
☛ What's the difference between unit test and integration test?
☛ Tell me about 3 times you failed.
☛ What is Refactoring ? Have you used it and it is important? Name three common refactorings.
☛ You have two computers, and you want to get data from one to the other. How could you do it?
☛ Left to your own devices, what would you create?
☛ Given Time, Cost, Client satisfaction and Best Practices, how will you prioritize them for a project you are working on? Explain why.
☛ What's the difference between a web server, web farm and web garden? How would your web application need to change for each?
☛ What value do daily builds, automated testing, and peer reviews add to a project? What disadvantages are there?
☛ What elements of OO design are most prone to abuse? How would you mitigate that?
☛ When do you know your code is ready for production?
☛ What's YAGNI? Is this list of questions an example?
☛ Describe to me some bad code you've read or inherited lately.