Working With Rails

At WorkingWithRails we’ve been looking at this because we’ve found a lot of people are telling us that they struggle to filter candidates. Please get in touch if you’d like to discuss it more.

It is very simple. Ask them to name a patch they have contributed and show you the link. Then ask them to name 3-4 blogs they follow in the ecosystem. Then finally ask them to show you how to use mixins properly and what is metaprogramming good for. If they fail at any of those they are not a rockstar.

If they aren’t involved in the community they are already outdated, if they don’t understand metaprogramming and mixins their code will suck and have to be rewritten. You might also want to ask them how they would scale an app.

All of these questions can be pulled together by reading RoR blogs.

Yes, but not every position requires a rockstar. As far as I can tell, it is perfectly possible to be an excellent Rails developer without patching the core or following blogs. It is also possible to follow blogs, have an amazing knowledge of the core, and yet not be a particularly good application developer.

Some good points raised here. I agree that Axel would weed out the community-rockstars, but also that that may not be what you need. To be honest, I’ve not patched the core at any point… but I’ve been working solidly on commercial rails sites for the past (neary three) years. So it depends on what sort of experience you’re after.

• Get them to explain MVC in Rails – and a few examples of what goes where eg: “On the ‘my orders’ page, an order should only display the edit button if it hasn’t been finalised – what methods do you need and where do you put them?”
• Get them to explain the Rails process – ie how we go from “user clicks on URL” to “page is rendered to browser” ie you’re looking for how the URL is parsed/routing, to calling a controller+action, to pulling out data for the views to picking appropriate templates and filling in the data.
• Get them to write something that requires blocks and yielding (some examples in the ruby book), or monkey-patching a class. eg: “I have an integer that represents a number of hours. I want to be able to do an ‘in_seconds’ and an ‘in_minutes’ method on it. Where would I put this and how would I do it?”
• Have they written a plugin? Have they published it? It is popular (usage stats)?

Simon,

Don’t forget to ask them open ended questions about things like their problem solving abilities! I can’t stress this enough!

Asking your candidates more than just technical questions with yes/no/multiplechoice/technicalsyntax styles of answers is so incredibly important. You want to see how they solve problems, how they interact with others, and how they are capable of working independently (not just as a team!) If you ask open ended questions, you can very quickly identify whether or not the candidate is able to learn new technologies, solve problems quickly and efficiently (rather than spend 8 days searching Google, too proud to ask another team member if they’ve solved it before), and most importantly deliver!

Anyone can learn syntax, or commonly refer to solutions made by people in the community, or quote buzzwords. But as James O’Kelly said, if they don’t truly understand more advanced concepts like metaprogramming and mixins, they’ll have the potential to blow smoke your way!

-Kevin Elliott
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