Here are some questions that will help you explore the stuff that

really matters:

1. Can you name two programming paradigms important for

JavaScript app developers?

JavaScript is a multi-paradigm language,

supporting imperative/procedural programming along
with OOP (Object-Oriented Programming) and functional
programming. JavaScript supports OOP with prototypal
inheritance.

Good to hear:

 Prototypal inheritance (also: prototypes, OLOO).

 Functional programming (also: closures, first class

functions, lambdas).

Red flags:

 No clue what a paradigm is, no mention of prototypal oo

or functional programming.

Learn More:

 The Two Pillars of JavaScript Part 1 — Prototypal OO.

  The Two Pillars of JavaScript Part 2 — Functional
Programming.

2. What is functional programming?

Functional programming produces programs by composing

mathematical functions and avoids shared state & mutable data.
Lisp (specified in 1958) was among the first languages to support
functional programming, and was heavily inspired by lambda
calculus. Lisp and many Lisp family languages are still in common
use today.

Functional programming is an essential concept in JavaScript (one

of the two pillars of JavaScript). Several common functional
utilities were added to JavaScript in ES5.

Good to hear:

 Pure functions / function purity.

 Avoid side-effects.

 Simple function composition.

 Examples of functional languages: Lisp, ML, Haskell,

Erlang, Clojure, Elm, F Sharp, OCaml, etc…
  Mention of features that support FP: first-class
functions, higher order functions, functions as
arguments/values.

Red flags:

 No mention of pure functions / avoiding side-effects.

 Unable to provide examples of functional programming

languages.

 Unable to identify the features of JavaScript that enable

FP.

Learn More:

 The Two Pillars of JavaScript Part 2.

 The Dao of Immutability.

 Composing Software.

 The Haskell School of Music.

3. What is the difference between classical inheritance and

prototypal inheritance?

Class Inheritance: instances inherit from classes (like a

blueprint — a description of the class), and create sub-class
relationships: hierarchical class taxonomies. Instances are
typically instantiated via constructor functions with
the `new` keyword. Class inheritance may or may not use
the `class` keyword from ES6.

Prototypal Inheritance: instances inherit directly from other

objects. Instances are typically instantiated via factory functions
or `[Link]()`. Instances may be composed from many
different objects, allowing for easy selective inheritance.

In JavaScript, prototypal inheritance is simpler

&
more flexible than class inheritance.

Good to hear:

 Classes: create tight coupling or

hierarchies/taxonomies.

 Prototypes: mentions of concatenative inheritance,

prototype delegation, functional inheritance, object
composition.

Red Flags:

 No preference for prototypal inheritance & composition

over class inheritance.
Learn More:

 The Two Pillars of JavaScript Part 1 — Prototypal OO.

 Common Misconceptions About Inheritance in

JavaScript.

4. What are the pros and cons of functional programming vs

object-oriented programming?

OOP Pros: It’s easy to understand the basic concept of objects

and easy to interpret the meaning of method calls. OOP tends to
use an imperative style rather than a declarative style, which reads
like a straight-forward set of instructions for the computer to
follow.

OOP Cons: OOP Typically depends on shared state. Objects and

behaviors are typically tacked together on the same entity, which
may be accessed at random by any number of functions with non-
deterministic order, which may lead to undesirable behavior such
as race conditions.

FP Pros: Using the functional paradigm, programmers avoid any

shared state or side-effects, which eliminates bugs caused by
multiple functions competing for the same resources. With
features such as the availability of point-free style (aka tacit
programming), functions tend to be radically simplified and easily
recomposed for more generally reusable code compared to OOP.
FP also tends to favor declarative and denotational styles, which
do not spell out step-by-step instructions for operations, but
instead concentrate on what to do, letting the underlying
functions take care of the how. This leaves tremendous latitude
for refactoring and performance optimization, even allowing you
to replace entire algorithms with more efficient ones with very
little code change. (e.g., memoize, or use lazy evaluation in place of
eager evaluation.)

Computation that makes use of pure functions is also easy to scale

across multiple processors, or across distributed computing
clusters without fear of threading resource conflicts, race
conditions, etc…

FP Cons: Over exploitation of FP features such as point-free style

and large compositions can potentially reduce readability because
the resulting code is often more abstractly specified, more terse,
and less concrete.

More people are familiar with OO and imperative programming

than functional programming, so even common idioms in
functional programming can be confusing to new team members.

FP has a much steeper learning curve than OOP because the broad
popularity of OOP has allowed the language and learning
materials of OOP to become more conversational, whereas the
language of FP tends to be much more academic and formal. FP
concepts are frequently written about using idioms and notations
from lambda calculus, algebras, and category theory, all of which
requires a prior knowledge foundation in those domains to be
understood.

Good to hear:

 Mentions of trouble with shared state, different things

competing for the same resources, etc…

 Awareness of FP’s capability to radically simplify many

applications.

 Awareness of the differences in learning curves.

 Articulation of side-effects and how they impact

program maintainability.

 Awareness that a highly functional codebase can have a

steep learning curve.

 Awareness that a highly OOP codebase can be extremely

resistant to change and very brittle compared to an
equivalent FP codebase.

 Awareness that immutability gives rise to an extremely

accessible and malleable program state history, allowing
for the easy addition of features like infinite undo/redo,
rewind/replay, time-travel debugging, and so on.
 Immutability can be achieved in either paradigm, but a
proliferation of shared stateful objects complicates the
implementation in OOP.

Red flags:

 Unable to list disadvantages of one style or another —

Anybody experienced with either style should have
bumped up against some of the limitations.

Learn More:

 The Two Pillars of JavaScript Part 1 — Prototypal OO.

 The Two Pillars of JavaScript Part 2 — Functional

Programming.

5. When is classical inheritance an appropriate choice?

The answer is never, or almost never. Certainly never more than

one level. Multi-level class hierarchies are an anti-pattern. I’ve
been issuing this challenge for years, and the only answers I’ve
ever heard fall into one of several common misconceptions. More
frequently, the challenge is met with silence.

“If a feature is sometimes useful

and sometimes dangerous
and if there is a better option
then always use the better option.”
~ Douglas Crockford

Good to hear:

 Rarely, almost never, or never.

 A single level is sometimes OK, from a framework base-

class such as [Link].

 “Favor object composition over class inheritance.”

Learn More:

 The Two Pillars of JavaScript Part 1 — Prototypal OO.

 JS Objects — Inherited a Mess.

6. When is prototypal inheritance an appropriate choice?

There is more than one type of prototypal inheritance:

 Delegation (i.e., the prototype chain).

 Concatenative (i.e. mixins, `[Link]()`).

 Functional (Not to be confused with functional

programming. A function used to create a closure for
private state/encapsulation).
Each type of prototypal inheritance has its own set of use-cases,
but all of them are equally useful in their ability to
enable composition, which creates has-a or uses-a or can-
do relationships as opposed to the is-a relationship created with
class inheritance.

Good to hear:

 In situations where modules or functional programming

don’t provide an obvious solution.

 When you need to compose objects from multiple

sources.

 Any time you need inheritance.

Red flags:

 No knowledge of when to use prototypes.

 No awareness of mixins or `[Link]()`.

Learn More:

 “Programming JavaScript Applications”: Prototypes

section.
7. What does “favor object composition over class inheritance”
mean?

This is a quote from “Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable

Object-Oriented Software”. It means that code reuse should be
achieved by assembling smaller units of functionality into new
objects instead of inheriting from classes and creating object
taxonomies.

In other words, use can-do, has-a, or uses-a relationships

instead of is-a relationships.

Good to hear:

 Avoid class hierarchies.

 Avoid brittle base class problem.

 Avoid tight coupling.

 Avoid rigid taxonomy (forced is-a relationships that are

eventually wrong for new use cases).

 Avoid the gorilla banana problem (“what you wanted

was a banana, what you got was a gorilla holding the
banana, and the entire jungle”).

 Make code more flexible.

Red Flags:
  Fail to mention any of the problems above.

 Fail to articulate the difference between composition

and class inheritance, or the advantages of composition.

Learn More:

Introducing the Stamp Specification

Move Over, `class`: Composable Factory Functions Are Here
[Link]

8. What are two-way data binding and one-way data flow, and
how are they different?

Two way data binding means that UI fields are bound to model
data dynamically such that when a UI field changes, the model
data changes with it and vice-versa.

One way data flow means that the model is the single source of
truth. Changes in the UI trigger messages that signal user intent to
the model (or “store” in React). Only the model has the access to
change the app’s state. The effect is that data always flows in a
single direction, which makes it easier to understand.

One way data flows are deterministic, whereas two-way binding

can cause side-effects which are harder to follow and understand.

Good to hear:
  React is the new canonical example of one-way data
flow, so mentions of React are a good signal. [Link] is
another popular implementation of uni-directional data
flow.

 Angular is a popular framework which uses two-way

binding.

Red flags:

 No understanding of what either one means. Unable to

articulate the difference.

Learn more:

9. What are the pros and cons of monolithic vs microservice

architectures?

A monolithic architecture means that your app is written as one

cohesive unit of code whose components are designed to work
together, sharing the same memory space and resources.

A microservice architecture means that your app is made up of lots

of smaller, independent applications capable of running in their
own memory space and scaling independently from each other
across potentially many separate machines.
Monolithic Pros: The major advantage of the monolithic
architecture is that most apps typically have a large number of
cross-cutting concerns, such as logging, rate limiting, and security
features such audit trails and DOS protection.

When everything is running through the same app, it’s easy to

hook up components to those cross-cutting concerns.

There can also be performance advantages, since shared-memory

access is faster than inter-process communication (IPC).

Monolithic cons: Monolithic app services tend to get tightly

coupled and entangled as the application evolves, making it
difficult to isolate services for purposes such as independent
scaling or code maintainability.

Monolithic architectures are also much harder to understand,

because there may be dependencies, side-effects, and magic which
are not obvious when you’re looking at a particular service or
controller.

Microservice pros: Microservice architectures are typically

better organized, since each microservice has a very specific job,
and is not concerned with the jobs of other components.
Decoupled services are also easier to recompose and reconfigure to
serve the purposes of different apps (for example, serving both the
web clients and public API).
They can also have performance advantages depending on how
they’re organized because it’s possible to isolate hot services and
scale them independent of the rest of the app.

Microservice cons: As you’re building a new microservice

architecture, you’re likely to discover lots of cross-cutting concerns
that you did not anticipate at design time. A monolithic app could
establish shared magic helpers or middleware to handle such
cross-cutting concerns without much effort.

In a microservice architecture, you’ll either need to incur the

overhead of separate modules for each cross-cutting concern, or
encapsulate cross-cutting concerns in another service layer that all
traffic gets routed through.

Eventually, even monolthic architectures tend to route traffic

through an outer service layer for cross-cutting concerns, but with
a monolithic architecture, it’s possible to delay the cost of that
work until the project is much more mature.

Microservices are frequently deployed on their own virtual

machines or containers, causing a proliferation of VM wrangling
work. These tasks are frequently automated with container fleet
management tools.

Good to hear:
  Positive attitudes toward microservices, despite the
higher initial cost vs monolthic apps. Aware that
microservices tend to perform and scale better in the
long run.

 Practical about microservices vs monolithic apps.

Structure the app so that services are independent from
each other at the code level, but easy to bundle together
as a monolithic app in the beginning. Microservice
overhead costs can be delayed until it becomes more
practical to pay the price.

Red flags:

 Unaware of the differences between monolithic and

microservice architectures.

 Unaware or impractical about the additional overhead of

microservices.

 Unaware of the additional performance overhead caused

by IPC and network communication for microservices.

 Too negative about the drawbacks of microservices.

Unable to articulate ways in which to decouple
monolithic apps such that they’re easy to split into
microservices when the time comes.
  Underestimates the advantage of independently scalable
microservices.

10. What is asynchronous programming, and why is it important

in JavaScript?

Synchronous programming means that, barring conditionals and

function calls, code is executed sequentially from top-to-bottom,
blocking on long-running tasks such as network requests and disk
I/O.

Asynchronous programming means that the engine runs in an

event loop. When a blocking operation is needed, the request is
started, and the code keeps running without blocking for the
result. When the response is ready, an interrupt is fired, which
causes an event handler to be run, where the control flow
continues. In this way, a single program thread can handle many
concurrent operations.

User interfaces are asynchronous by nature, and spend most of

their time waiting for user input to interrupt the event loop and
trigger event handlers.

Node is asynchronous by default, meaning that the server works in

much the same way, waiting in a loop for a network request, and
accepting more incoming requests while the first one is being
handled.
This is important in JavaScript, because it is a very natural fit for
user interface code, and very beneficial to performance on the
server.

Good to hear:

 An understanding of what blocking means, and the

performance implications.

 An understanding of event handling, and why its

important for UI code.

Red flags:

 Unfamiliar with the terms asynchronous or

synchronous.

 Unable to articulate performance implications or the

relationship between asynchronous code and UI code.

Conclusion
Stick to high-level topics. If they can answer these questions, that
typically means that they have enough programming experience to
pick up language quirks & syntax in a few weeks, even if they don’t
have a lot of JavaScript experience.
Don’t disqualify candidates based on stuff that’s easy to learn
(including classic CS-101 algorithms, or any type of puzzle
problem).

What you really need to know is, “does this candidate understand
how to put an application together?”

That’s it for the spoken interview.

In real interviews, I place a much stronger emphasis on coding

challenges and watching candidates code. Those topics are
covered in depth in my “Master the JavaScript Interview” series.