[⬆] General Questions:

 What is polymorphism? (Variable of type Shape could refer to an object of

type Square, Circle... Ability of a function to handle objects of many types)
 What is encapsulation (Packing of data and functions into a single component)
 What is inversion of control? (A design in which custom-written portions of a
computer program receive the flow of control from a generic, reusable library)
 What is tail recursion? (A tail call is a subroutine call performed as the final
action of a procedure)
 What is virtual function?
 What is virtual method table?
 What is dynamic binding?(Actual method implementation invoked is
determined at run time based on the class of the object, not the type of the
variable or expression)
 How does garbage collector work? (Mark and sweep: mark: traverse object
graph starting from root objects, sweep: garbage collect unmarked objects.
Optimizations: young/old generations, incremental mark and sweep)
 What is semantic versioning? (http://semver.org)

[⬆] Architecture:

 Design principles. (SOLID, DRY, KISS, YAGNI, Worse is better, convention over
configuration, separation of concerns, principle of least knowledge, tourist
principle, single source of truth, single version of the truth)
 Drawbacks of not using separation of concerns
o Adding new features will take an order of magnitude longer
o Impossible to optimize
o Extremely difficult to test
o Fixing and debugging can be a nightmare (fixing something in one
place can lead to something else breaking that seems completely
unrelated).
 Microservices are a style of software architecture that involves delivering
systems as a set of very small, granular, independent collaborating services.
 Pros of microservices (The services are easy to replace, Services can be
implemented using different programming languages, databases, hardware
and software environment, depending on what fits best)
 The Twelve-Factor App (http://12factor.net)
 What is SOLID?
Rule Description

Single responsibility A class should have one and only one task/responsibility. If class is perfor
principle task, it leads to confusion.

Open/closed The developers should focus more on extending the software entities rat
principle them.

Liskov substitution
It should be possible to substitute the derived class with base class.
principle

Interface It’s like Single Responsibility Principle but applicable to interfaces. Each in
segregation responsible for a specific task. The developers should need to implement
principle doesn’t need.

Dependency Depend upon Abstractions but not on concretions. This means that each
inversion principle separated from other using an abstract layer which binds them together.

 Design patterns. (Creational:Builder,Object Pool,Factory

Method,Signleton,Multiton,Prototype,Abstract
Factory.Structural:Adapter,Bridge,Composite,Decorator,Facade,Flyweight,Proxy
.Behavioral:Chain of
Responsibility,Command,Interpreter,Iterator,Mediator,Memento,Observer,Stat
e,Strategy,Template Method,Visitor.)
 Integration patterns, SOA patterns.
 3-tier architecture? (Presentation tier, Application tier, Data tier)
 3-layer architecture? (DAO (Repository), Business (Service) layer, Controller)
 What is REST?
 What is idempotent operation? (The PUT and DELETE methods are referred to
as idempotent, meaning that the operation will produce the same result no
matter how many times it is repeated)
 What is nullipotent operation? (GET method is a safe method (or nullipotent),
meaning that calling it produces no side-effects)
 Naked objects, Restful objects.
 What is aspect-oriented programming?
 Why do you need web server (tomcat, jetty)?
  Inheritance vs Composition.(Inheritance - is-a relationship, whether clients will
want to use the subclass type as a superclass type. Composition - has-a or
part-of relationship).
 Multiple inheritance problem.
 What is uniform access principle?(client code should not be affected by a
decision to implement an attribute as a field or method)
 Advantages of using modules. (reuse, decoupling, namespace)
 Domain driver design.

[⬆] WEB:

 WEB security vulnerabilities (XSS, CSRF, session fixation, SQL injection, man-in-
the-middle, buffer overflow)
 CSRF prevention. (CSRF-token)
 What is JSONP, CORS? (A communication technique used in JavaScript
programs running in web browsers to request data from a server in a different
domain, something prohibited by typical web browsers because of the same-
origin policy)
 HTTPS negotiation steps.
 What is HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS)? (Prevents Man in the Middle
attacks)
 Browser-server communication methods: WebSocket, EventSource,
Comet(Polling, Long-Polling, Streaming)
 What is character encoding?
 What is role-based access control and access control list?
 What is session and persistent cookies, sessionStorage and localStorage?
 How to implement remember-me?
(http://jaspan.com/improved_persistent_login_cookie_best_practice)
 Authentication using cookies, JWT (JSON Web Tokens).
 How OAuth 2.0 works?

[⬆] SQL:

 SQL join types (inner join, left/right outer join, full outer join, cross join )
 SQL normal forms (1.The domain of each attribute contains only atomic values,
and the value of each attribute contains only a single value from that domain.
2.No non-prime attribute in the table is functionally dependent on a proper
subset of any candidate key. 3.Every non-prime attribute is non-transitively
dependent on every candidate key in the table. BCNF.Every non-trivial
functional dependency in the table is a dependency on a superkey.)
  Isolation levels and Anomalies (Read Uncommitted, Read Committed,
Repeatable Read, Serializable

Lost_update
Non_repeatable_reads
Isolation_level\Anomaly (because of Dirty_read P
second_lost_update
rollback)

Read Uncommitted - may occur may occur m

Read Committed - - may occur m

Repeatable Read - - - m

Snapshot - - -

Serializable - - -

[⬆] NoSQL:

 Types of NoSQL databases?

o Document Stores (MongoDB, Couchbase)
o Key-Value Stores (Redis, Volgemort)
o Column Stores (Cassandra)
o Graph Stores (Neo4j, Giraph)

[⬆] Transactions:

 What ACID?
 What is 2-phase, 3-phase commit?
 What is pessimistic/optimistic locking?

[⬆] Scalability:

 Horizontal and vertical scaling.

 How to scale database? (Data partitioning, sharding(vertical/horizontal),
replication(master-slave, master-master)).
 Denormalization.
  What is synchronous multimaster replication? (Each server can accept write
requests, and modified data is transmitted from the original server to every
other server before each transaction commits)
 What is asynchronous multimaster replication? (Each server works
independently, and periodically communicates with the other servers to
identify conflicting transactions. The conflicts can be resolved by users or
conflict resolution rules)
 When to use messaging queue?
 MongoDB, Redis.
 Hadoop basics.

[⬆] Load balancing:

 sticky/non-sticky sessions
 Sticky sessions vs storing sessions in Redis.

[⬆] Cloud computing:

 What is cloud computing? (Cloud computing platform is a fully automated

server platform that allows users to purchase, remotely create, dynamically
scale, and administer system)
 Amazon web services

[⬆] Distributed:

 What is CAP theorem? (It is impossible for a distributed computer system to

simultaneously provide all three of the following
guarantees: consistency, availability, partition tolerance). "Please stop calling

databases CP or AP")
 What is map-reduce? (Word count example)
 Sharding counters.
 Distributed software:
o Distributed streaming platforms: kafka
o Distributed key-value store: zookeeper
o Map-reduce: hadoop, spark
o Distributed file system: hbase
o Cluster management: mesos, kubernetes
 Herlihy’s consensus hierarchy. Every shared object can be assigned a
consensus number, which is the maximum number of processes for which the
object can solve wait-free consensus in an asynchronous system.
1 Read-write registers
2 Test-and-set, swap, fetch-and-add, queue, stack
⋮ ⋮
∞ Augmented queue, compare-and-swap, sticky byte

 Consensus number. Maximum number of threads for which objects of the class
can solve consensus problem.

[⬆] Cache:

 What is write-through and write-behind caching? (write-through

(synchronous), write-behind (asynchronous))
 HTTP cache options?

[⬆] Concurrency:

 What is deadlock, livelock? (Deadlock is a situation in which two or more

competing actions are each waiting for the other to finish, and thus neither
ever does. A livelock is similar to a deadlock, except that the states of the
processes involved in the livelock constantly change with regard to one
another, none progressing.)
 Deadlock avoidance. (prevention, detection, avoidance (Mutex hierarchy), and
recovery)
 What is starvation? ()
 What is race condition? (Behavior of software system where the output is
dependent on the sequence or timing of other uncontrollable events)
 What is happens-before relation?
 What is thread contention? (Contention is simply when two threads try to
access either the same resource or related resources in such a way that at least
one of the contending threads runs more slowly than it would if the other
thread(s) were not running). Contention occurs when multiple threads try to
acquire a lock at the same time
 What is a thread-safe function? (Can be safely invoked by multiple threads at
the same time)
 Publish/Subscripe code
 What is 2-phase locking? (Growing phase, shrinking phase. Guarantees
serializablity for transactions, doesn't prevent deadlock).
 What is the difference between thread and process? (Threads (of the same
process) run in a shared memory space, while processes run in separate
memory spaces)
 What is false sharing, cache pollution, cache miss, thread affinity, speculative
execution, ABA-problem?
  What is lock-free and wait-free algorithm?
 What is sequential consistency? (The result of any execution is the same as if
the operations of all the processors were executed in some sequential order,
and the operations of each individual processor appear in this sequence in the
order specified by its program).
 What is memory barrier? (A memory barrier, also known as a membar,
memory fence or fence instruction, is a type of barrier instruction that causes a
CPU or compiler to enforce an ordering constraint on memory operations
issued before and after the barrier instruction)
 Synchonization aids in Java
o CountDownLatch
o CyclicBarrier
o Phaser
o ReentrantLock
o Exchanger
o Semaphore
o LinkedTransferQueue
 What is data race? (When a program contains two conflicting accesses that are
not ordered by a happens-before relationship, it is said to contain a data race.
Two accesses to (reads of or writes to) the same variable are said to be
conflicting if at least one of the accesses is a write)
 Java memory model. (A program is correctly synchronized if and only if all
sequentially consistent executions are free of data races. Correctly
synchronized programs have sequentially consistent semantics. Causality
requirement for incorrectly synchronized programs. link)
 What is monitor in Java? (Each object in Java is associated with a monitor,
which a thread can lock or unlock)
 What is safe publication?
 What is wait/notify?
 Amdahl's law? (Speedup = 1 / (1 - p + p / n))
 Dining philosophers problem (Resource hierarchy (first take lower-indexed
fork), arbitrator, communication (dirty/clean forks)).
 Produces/consumer problem.
 Readers/writers problem.

[⬆] Networking:

 OSI model (Physical, Data link, Network, Transport, Session, Presentation,

Application)
 Multithreading vs select
  Switch, hub, router.
 TCP congestion.
 TCP back-pressure.

[⬆] Operating system:

 What is memory mapped file and its benefits?

 Interprocess communication methods. (Pipes, Events, Mailboxes/Ports (can be
implemented by using shared memory and semaphores), Direct Message
Passing).
 Virtual memory organization.
 Process scheduler.

[⬆] Java:

 PhantomReference, WeakReference, SoftReference, finalize(), ReferenceQueue.

 How to correctly stop a thread? (Thread.interrupt())
 What is Spring? (Spring Framework is an application container for Java that
supplies many useful features, such as Inversion of Control, Dependency
Injection, abstract data access, transaction management, and more)
o Spring is a framework for dependency injection: a design pattern that
allows the developer to build very decoupled systems by injecting
dependencies into classes.
o It elegantly wraps Java libraries and makes then much easier to use in
your application.
o Included in the framework are implementations of commonly used
patterns such as REST and MVC web framework which are
predominately use by in web applications.
 What is Spring-Boot?
 What is Hibernate and JPA (Caches, lazy-loading)?
 Garbage collection. (G1, Young/Old generation collectors combination
examples: PS Scavenge/PS MarkSweep, Copy/MarkSweepCompact)
 How to write benchmarks? (jmh)
 What are Java 9 modularity?
 What is OSGI? (Specification describes a modular system and a service
platform for the Java programming language that implements a complete and
dynamic component model. Each bundle has its own classpath. Dependency
hell avoidance. META-INF/MANIFEST.MF contains OSGI-info)
 Serializable / Externalizable
 What is a servlet (versions of servlet api, Servlet 4.0)?
  What is a servlet filter? How to implement GZipFilter? (ResponseWrapper)
 What is generics and PECS (producer extends and consumer super)?
 What is the difference between <?>, <Object>, <? extends Object> and no
generic type? link1 link2
 Explain method signature
for Collections.max(...), Collections.fill(...), Collections.copy(...), Collections.sort(...
)
 Why are arrays covariant but generics are invariant? link
 Major specs: JAX-RS, JAX-WS, JMS, JAXB, XSLT, XPATH, JNDI, JMX, JDBC,
XML(SAX, DOM, StAX)

[⬆] Javascript:

 this keyword
 How prototypes work?
 inheritance
 differences between == and === (http://dorey.github.io/JavaScript-Equality-
Table/)
 closures
 What is MVC, MVP, MVVM?
 What is promise?
 What is event bubbling and capturing? (target.addEventListener(type, listener[,
useCapture]))
 What is AMD(Asynchronous Module Design) and CommonJS?
 What is jQuery?

[⬆] Codewriting:

 Implement binary search

int binarySearch(int[] a, int fromInclusive, int toExclusive, int key) {

int low = fromInclusive;
int high = toExclusive - 1;
while (low <= high) {
int mid = (low + high) >>> 1;
int midVal = a[mid];
if (midVal < key)
low = mid + 1;
else if (midVal > key)
high = mid - 1;
else
return mid; // key found
}
return -(low + 1); // key not found
}
  Implement quick sort

void qSort(int[] a, int fromInclusive, int toInclusive) {

int i = fromInclusive;
int j = toInclusive;
if (i >= j) return;
int separator = a[i + random.nextInt(j - i + 1)];
do {
while (a[i] < separator) ++i;
while (a[j] > separator) --j;
if (i > j) break;
int t = a[i];
a[i] = a[j];
a[j] = t;
++i;
--j;
} while (i <= j);
qSort(a, fromInclusive, j);
qSort(a, i, toInclusive);
}

 Implement permutations generation

def generate_permutations(p, depth):

n = len(p)
if depth == n:
yield p
for i in range(n):
if p[i] == 0:
p[i] = depth
yield from generate_permutations(p, depth + 1)
p[i] = 0

for p in generate_permutations([0] * 3, 1):

print(p)

[⬆] Functional programming:

 What is Monad?

[⬆] Reactive programming:

 The Reactive Manifesto (responsive, resilient, elastic, message

driven http://www.reactivemanifesto.org)
 What is asynchronous and non-blocking? link

[⬆] Git:

 Git workflow? (Master: production-ready state; Develop: latest delivered

development changes for the next release; Feature Branches; Release
 Branches; Hotfixes) http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-
model/
 What is a rebase?

[⬆] DevOps:

 What is Blue-green Deployment, Canary release, A/B testing? link

 What is Docker?

[⬆] QA:

 What is unit test? (A test that purely tests a single unit of functionality)
 What is component test?
 What is integration test? (Examine several parts of a system to make sure that
when integrated, these parts behave as expected)
 What is user acceptance test? BDD?
 Unit tests advantages?
 Types of tests: acceptance testing, functional testing, smoke testing,
regression testing, unit testing, integration testing, stress testing, (Load,
Performance, Sanity, Stability, Security, Feature, Progression, Installation,
Business).
 Differences between stub and mock? (A stub is a test double with
preprogrammed behavior. Mocks are stubs with preprogrammed
expectations)
 Selenium tests and webdriver.
 How to test multithreading code?
 What is Consumer Driven Contract? link

[⬆] Agile:

 What is Agile? (http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html)

o Individuals and interactions over Processes and tools
o Working software over Comprehensive documentation
o Customer collaboration over Contract negotiation
o Responding to change over Following a plan
 What is Scrum? (Roles: product owner, development team, scrum master.
Events: sprint)
 What are the differences between Scrum and Waterfall?
( http://www.leanagiletraining.com/agile/waterfall-versus-scrum-how-do-
they-compare/)
  What is XP? ()
 What is Kanban?
 What is Lean, Kanban?

[⬆] Algorithms:

 What Ο(n), Ω(n), Θ(n)?

 What is NP, NP-completeness, NP-hardness with examples?

[⬆] Other:

 How to find memory leak. (Memory snapshot diff).

 Profiling: sampling and instrumentation.
 Regular expressions. (Examples)
 What are your goals to work in our company? (3 categories: professional,
financial, social)
 What is virtualization?
 What is total/partial order?
 How to work with legacy code?
(http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/122024)

[⬆] Machine learning:

 Bayes' theorem. P(A|B) = P(B|A)P(A)/P(B), P(B) = sum(P(Ai)P(B|Ai))

[⬆] Big Data:

 What is Lambda architecture?

 What is HyperLogLog? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperLogLog)

[⬆] Image processing:

[⬆] Cryptography:

 What is public key cryptography?

 What is public key certificate?
 RSA

select 2 primes: p,q

n = p*q
phi(n) = (p-1)*(q-1)
select 1<e<phi(n), gcd(e,phi(n))=1
d=e^-1 mod phi(n)
(e,n) - public key
(d,n) - private key
c = m^e mod n
m = c^d mod n = m^(e*d) mod n = m^(e*d mod phi(n)) mod n = m

[⬆] Security:

 What is OpenID and OAuth2.0 and OpenID Connect?

 What is access_token, SAML token, JWT token?
 Sticky session vs Session Replication.
 What is Federated Authentication ?
 What is CSP and SRI hash ?
 What is Clickjacking and Cursorjacking ? How to prevent it ?

[⬆] Android: