Abel AbelLai

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.

Generate private key (.key)

# Key considerations for algorithm "RSA" ≥ 2048-bit
openssl genrsa -out server.key 2048
    
# Key considerations for algorithm "ECDSA" ≥ secp384r1
# List ECDSA the supported curves (openssl ecparam -list_curves)
openssl ecparam -genkey -name secp384r1 -out server.key

	# In Java, the following expression
	# Integer.toHexString(1286933134)
	# produces:
	# "4cb50a8e"
	# and
	# Integer.toHexString(-1286933134)
	# produces:
	# "b34af572"
	# ref doc: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/lang/Integer.html#toHexString(int)

	1.

	LOGIN_PAGE=http://localhost/users/sign_in
	curl --cookie-jar cookie_file $LOGIN_PAGE \| grep csrf-token

	2.

	<meta content="csrf-token" name="csrf-token" />

	source :rubygems

	# We are not loading Active Record, nor Active Resources etc.
	# We can do this in any app by simply replacing the rails gem
	# by the parts we want to use.
	gem "actionpack", "~> 3.2"
	gem "railties", "~> 3.2"
	gem "tzinfo"

	# Let's use thin