How to Interview Your Ruby on Rails Developer

We at RubyGarage want to share our knowledge about how to interview a Ruby on Rails developer. Since our main purpose is to sell great code, we require great coders. This article will come in handy for a Chief Technical Officer who needs to test a Ruby on Rails programmer but isn’t sure what questions to ask the Rails interviewee. Ruby on Rails developers may also be interested in these questions.

We’re not going to include all the questions you could ask, as that would take more than one article. For example, we decided to omit questions about code idioms and cunning expressions in Ruby. Also, we don’t want to give away all the questions which we might ask during an interview with a Ruby developer. We don't want a Rails developer to simply look for answers on the Internet, as our main purpose is to ensure that we check the developer's grasp of the language and framework. We merely want to see how a Ruby software engineer expounds his or her knowledge of the domain.

Now let's chalk out the structure of a Ruby on Rails interview. The article will be divided into several parts since we usually check separate domains of knowledge. Here is the structure we typically use:

• Ruby questions;
• Rails questions;
• A pair programming task;
• A home task.

Now it’s time to start asking questions to your Ruby developer to find out what they know!

Ruby questions to test a web developer

Why do we ask Ruby-related questions to a Ruby developer? Because the Rails framework is written in Ruby. This means that when we write code for Ruby on Rails, we’re using Ruby. The main issue we encounter with programmers is actually that they don’t completely understand the basics – the programming language itself. We want to hire forward-thinking software engineers who will create high-quality code, and so we want to assess their Ruby competence.

Our Ruby questions usually concern the Object Oriented Programming paradigm and object oriented design patterns. Class hierarchies, encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism are key concepts that every Ruby on Rails web developer should know well.

Read more at rubygarage blog https://rubygarage.org/blog/how-to-interview-your-ruby-on-rails-developer

Sviatoslav Andrushko is a content manager at RubyGarage. Sviat adores writing about web development, web design, testing, and other IT-related topics.