Ivan Storck ivanoats

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.

There are many solutions to most of these questions -- some aren't listed here. Candidates get my respect for knowing esoteric solutions, but I'm looking for developers with similar practices to my own.

Render and Redirect

The normal controller/view flow is to display a view template corresponding to the current controller action, but sometimes we want to change that. We use render in a controller when we want to respond within the current request, and redirect_to when we want to spawn a new request.

Render

The render method is very overloaded in Rails. Most developers encounter it within the view template, using render :partial => 'form' or render @post.comments, but here we'll focus on usage within the controller.

`:action`

Class Project

1. How has your understanding of Ruby on Rails grown?

2. What features did you implement?

3. How is your code organized?

take us on a tour of MVC in your app

	#!/usr/bin/env sh

	# Download lists, unpack and filter, write to stdout
	curl -s http://www.iblocklist.com/lists.php \
	\| sed -n "s/.value='\(http:.=bt_.\)'./\1/p" \
	\| xargs wget -O - \
	\| gunzip \
	\| egrep -v '^#'

	#Deploy and rollback on Heroku in staging and production
	task :deploy_staging => ['deploy:set_staging_app', 'deploy:push', 'deploy:restart', 'deploy:tag']
	task :deploy_production => ['deploy:set_production_app', 'deploy:push', 'deploy:restart', 'deploy:tag']

	namespace :deploy do
	PRODUCTION_APP = 'YOUR_PRODUCTION_APP_NAME_ON_HEROKU'
	STAGING_APP = 'YOUR_STAGING_APP_NAME_ON_HEROKU'

	task :staging_migrations => [:set_staging_app, :push, :off, :migrate, :restart, :on, :tag]
	task :staging_rollback => [:set_staging_app, :off, :push_previous, :restart, :on]

	import sublime, sublime_plugin
	import os.path, string

	VALID_FILENAME_CHARS = "-_.() %s%s%s" % (string.ascii_letters, string.digits, "/:\\")

	# { "keys": ["alt+o"], "command": "open_filename_under_cursor" }
	# https://gist.github.com/1186126
	class OpenFilenameUnderCursor(sublime_plugin.TextCommand):
	def run(self, edit):
	for region in self.view.sel():

	# There are 3 ways to access the value of an instance variable:
	# @var, the getter method (eg: var), and self.var (where self is the instance itself)
	class Car
	attr_accessor :color

	def shade
	"Some kind of #{@color}."
	end

	def hue

	" Searches Dash for the word under your cursor in vim, using the keyword
	" operator, based on file type. E.g. for JavaScript files, I have it
	" configured to search j:term, which immediately brings up the JS doc
	" for that keyword. Might need some customisation for your own keywords!

	function! SearchDash()
	" Some setup
	let s:browser = "/usr/bin/open"
	let s:wordUnderCursor = expand("<cword>")

	%h1 What is Code Fellows?
	%p
	Web develop jobs abound, and companies struggle to fill engineering roles.
	Lots of technically minded folks like you are interested, but the learning
	curve is significant.
	%p
	Code Fellows offers teaching and mentoring services through bootcamps to turn
	you and other budding web developers in to professional, emplyable engineers.
	%p
	We teach industry best practices and tools (that simply aren't covered in

	{
	"font_size": 32.0,
	"ignored_packages":
	[
	"Vintage"
	],
	"trim_trailing_white_space_on_save": true,
	"ensure_newline_at_eof_on_save": true,
	"save_on_focus_lost": true,
	"tab_size": 2,