How to prepare for a technical interview - Ruby Newbie

When you're actively looking for a new position, you'll need to be ready to take technical interviews.

Step up your game

• Start getting ready with a high-level intro about you.
• Prepare to talk about your previous jobs, projects, education and training.
• Refresh your knowledge on concepts, technologies and skills mentioned in the position.
• Be read to explain a real-life scenario of a typical production application and everything you need to run it efficiently and securely.
• Map the requirements of the position with your own experience, there might not be a 100% match, but it's important that you can talk about that.
• Review your CV and make notes of things you would ask to yourself

Get some questions ready

• What is the tech stack you're currently in the projects?
• What are the coding guidelines?
• Are there any current pains or challenges on the projects? How are you working on them or around them?
• What's the culture about documentation and mentorship?
• How do you test a new feature that is being released?
• How does your testing suite like?
• What other CI/CD elements are important to you?
• Do you have big initiatives coming up? (Single sign on, upgrade, etc)

Practice, practice, practice

• Try to do a mock interview or practice with someone else.
• If you haven't worked with the technologies they are requesting, make sure you can run and test some code locally.
• Take a look at some of your previous changes/pull requests and practice doing a review.
• Review their source code of a couple of libraries you use frequently.
• Choose a small project to perform all the activities you would do if you were working on it: install, run tests, CI pipeline, deployment, logging, monitoring, etc.

Test your setup in advance

• Make sure you test the conference link in advance, it might require installing a new tool or there might be a pending update.
• Test all your audio configuration with the headphones you'll be using that day.
• Make sure you can share you're screen, sometimes the system will require additional permissions (or a restart)
• Review your video configuration and background, keep it simple and professional.
• Plan to arrive a 5-10 minutes early in case you missed something.

Important things to remember during the interview

• Keep your eyes to the camera and your head up.
• Speak with confidence about your achievements and skills.
• Don’t limit yourself, talk about positive elements you can skip your shortcomings and limitations.
• Talk slower and louder than you would normally do (We tend to lower the voice and rush when nervous)
• If you don’t have the answer to a question, instead of just saying “I don’t know”, speak about other similar things you’ve done or ask them for more details instead.
• If you don’t understand the question, you can ask or repeat what you understood to confirm.