Re: Interview questions?

On Wed, 17 Sep 2003, Brion Wikes wrote:

> Odd request.
> I am not a developer myself, but would like to know what kinds of technical
> interview questions (and possible answers) I can ask developers to try to
> find someone that really knows what they are doing.
> 
> I need to hire a postreSQL/php developer for some maintenance and upgrade
> work on my site.
> 
> The site is fairly sophisticated. I think it was built on postreSQL 6X and
> PHP. When we loaded to the server, we ended up with 7X and there seems to be
> a few wrinkles with the code on the newer version.
> A few of the main issues that I am going to need this person to deal with
> are:
> 
> 
> 
> 1) On one custom form, I am getting the error - "no OID was passed"
> 
> 2) Being able to search "non-case sensitive" AND being able to hold the
> order of the results from page to page.

substitute ilike for like or ~* for ~ in the where clause for this one.

> 3) Using an "apostrophe" anywhere in any of the forms, creates a page error

Turn on the magic_quotes_gpc, and magic_quotes_runtime parameters to fix 
this.  You may only need the first.  Test it both ways.  Either that or 
put addslashes/stripslashes all over the place.

> 4) Every time I edit one of the forms with a url, an extra "http://" gets
> put into the address

simple fix, the code is probably programmed to prepend http://.  The old 
code may have been programmed to remove the http:// during display but got 
broken somehow.

> 5) On several forms, if you have not completed all the information, and you
> get an error message, ALL of the info that was input during that session, is
> cleared.
> 
> 
> 
> I am nervous to have a complete stranger working on the code, but the
> original developer is no longer available.
> I am guessing most of these should be fairly straight forward fixes.
>
> So any help on screening questions that will help me find a developer
> capable of solving these problems, is most appreciated.

Ask them what they think of these issues and what the likely causes are.  
any competent PHP/Postgresql programmer should be able to fix 2, 3, or 4 
in an afternoon.