☛ 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.