Mike Hickman chuggingCoffee

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.

Grab new backup of database

Command: heroku pgbackups:capture --remote production

Response: >>> HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_COLOR_URL (DATABASE_URL) ----backup---> a712

Get url of backup download

Command: heroku pgbackups:url [db_key] --remote production

Contract Killer 3

Revised date: 07/11/2012

Between us [company name] and you [customer name]

Summary:

We’ll always do our best to fulfil your needs and meet your expectations, but it’s important to have things written down so that we both know what’s what, who should do what and when, and what will happen if something goes wrong. In this contract you won’t find any complicated legal terms or long passages of unreadable text. We’ve no desire to trick you into signing something that you might later regret. What we do want is what’s best for both parties, now and in the future.

Chapter 1 - Object Oriented Design

The purpose of design is to allow you to do design later, and it's primary goal is to reduce the cost of change.

SOLID Design:

Single Responsibility Principle: a class should have only a single responsibility
Open-Closed Principle: Software entities should be open for extension, but closed for modification (inherit instead of modifying existing classes).
Liskov Substitution: Objects in a program should be replaceable with instances of their subtypes without altering the correctness of that program.
Interface Segregation: Many client-specific interfaces are better than one general-purpose interface.

WebSockets - An Introduction

WebSockets is a modern HTML5 standard which makes communication between client and server a lot more simpler than ever. We are all familiar with the technology of sockets. Sockets have been fundamental to network communication for a long time but usually the communication over the browser has been restricted. The general restrictions

The server used to have a permanent listener while the client (aka browser) was not designated any fixed listener for a more long term connection. Hence, every communication was restricted to the client demanding and the server responding.
This meant that unless the client requested for a particular resource, the server was unable to push such a resource to the client.
This was detrimental since the client is then forced to check with the server at regular intervals. This meant a lot of libraries focused on optimizing asynchronous calls and identifying the response of asynchronous calls. Notably t

	=Navigating=
	visit('/projects')
	visit(post_comments_path(post))

	=Clicking links and buttons=
	click_link('id-of-link')
	click_link('Link Text')
	click_button('Save')
	click('Link Text') # Click either a link or a button
	click('Button Value')

	!!! 5
	/[if lt IE 7] <html lang="en" class="no-js ie6">
	/[if IE 7 ] <html lang="en" class="no-js ie7">
	/[if IE 8 ] <html lang="en" class="no-js ie8">
	/[if IE 9 ] <html lang="en" class="no-js ie9">
	<!--[if (gt IE 9)\|!(IE)]><!--> <html lang="en" class="no-js"> <!--<![endif]-->
	%head
	%meta{:charset => "utf-8"}/
	/
	Always force latest IE rendering engine (even in intranet) & Chrome Frame

	#Model

	@user.should have(1).error_on(:username) # Checks whether there is an error in username
	@user.errors[:username].should include("can't be blank") # check for the error message

	#Rendering
	response.should render_template(:index)

	#Redirecting
	response.should redirect_to(movies_path)

	class Budget < ActiveRecord::Base
	belongs_to :user
	has_many :categories, dependent: :destroy
	end

	<div class="three-fourths first">Here's a great place to write something specific that you want your visitors to read.</div>

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