robmccoll

The best interview question I've ever heard: Someone is sitting shopping online with their cursor hovering over "Add to Cart". From the moment they physically click on it to the moment the page refreshes, tell me everything you can think of that happens.

Responses are awesome because it gives you an idea of what this person's background is and what breadth of knowledge they have and what they think is cool or exciting. Maybe they start with a contact closing and signals being denounced, or an interrupt being triggered, or the OS and window manager, or the browser and DOM events, or HTTP or TLS or TCP or Ethernet or WiFi or LTE or routing and the tiers of network infrastructure or DNS or load balancing or proxies or web servers and tiers of API services or databases... It's can lead to some really fun technical conversation, follow up about how they learned the things they know and experiences they've had, and most of the time the interviewer learns something too.

fancyfish
A twist on the old “what happens when you type google.com into your address bar and press enter” question. If I were answering I’d talk about a couple areas I can adapt from the repo below, and save some time to also talk about API services and DBs to differentiate it from the usual answer. It is indeed a fun question!

https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when