Ifti Mahmud IftiMahmud

Originally published in June 2008

When hiring Ruby on Rails programmers, knowing the right questions to ask during an interview was a real challenge for me at first. In 30 minutes or less, it's difficult to get a solid read on a candidate's skill set without looking at code they've previously written. And in the corporate/enterprise world, I often don't have access to their previous work.

To ensure we hired competent ruby developers at my last job, I created a list of 15 ruby questions -- a ruby measuring stick if you will -- to select the cream of the crop that walked through our doors.

What to expect

Candidates will typically give you a range of responses based on their experience and personality. So it's up to you to decide the correctness of their answer.

	<?php
	//Bad Email...
	$badEmail = "bad@email";

	//Run the email through an email validation filter.
	if( !filter_var($badEmail, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL) ){
	echo "Email is no good.";
	}else{
	echo "Nice email.";
	}

	<?php
	// basic email validation, needs to be updated to support new longer domains
	$email = '[email protected]';
	$regex = "/[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}/i";
	$valid = preg_match( $regex, $email ) ? 'yes' : 'no';
	?>
	<strong>Email:</strong> <?php echo $email ?><br />
	<strong>Valid:</strong> <?php echo $valid ?>

	<?php
	#!/usr/bin/env php
	//usage: php envato-screenshots-downloader.php /path/to/save/screenshots http://url/to/screenshots/page
	set_time_limit(0);
	$dir = $argv[1];
	$source = $argv[2];
	print_r($argv);
	mkdir ($dir);
	$src = file_get_contents($source);
	$pattern = '/src="(https:\/\/0.s3[a-zA-Z0-9_\-\.\/%]+)"/i';

	<?php

	$endpoint = "http://api.someservice.com";
	$userId = 101;

	$urls = array(
	$endpoint . '/profile/' . $userId,
	$endpoint . '/orderHistory/' . $userId,
	$endpoint . '/currentBalance/' . $userId
	);