[ericgoldberg]

Personally, I like using HTTP principles when interviewing web developer candidates. I'm not expecting people to know every detail of every RFC, or trivia type stuff in general. I more am interested in how much they know / can figure out about how HTTP-based communication works. I will ask stuff like "Explain how a redirect works, and how clients/browsers and servers interact with each other during a redirect." Also, REST is built on the concept of using HTTP verbs and resources properly, so it is nice to ask them to design a rough draft of an API to edit, add, delete, and list users via HTTP. Without asking them to do it RESTfully. It's telling if their first instinct is to have a "createUser" endpoint versus a POST to /users/

[nandemo]

> It's telling if their first instinct is to have a "createUser" endpoint versus a POST to /users/

It's telling of what exactly?

RESTful is just one style of creating application interfaces over HTTP. And as far as I know, web apps with true RESTful interfaces are somewhat rare. [1] If you don't ask the candidate to do it RESTfully, it seems like you're doing the common interview anti-pattern of asking a question that is open-ended but expecting a particular answer.

[1] http://www.intridea.com/blog/2010/4/29/rest-isnt-what-you-th...

[twerquie]

> It's telling of what exactly?

That the candidate favors transport-agnostic APIs or has limited familiarity with HTTP. One easy follow-up: "I notice you decided to call the method createUser..." and you've learned something concrete. They'll either stare blankly or discuss their preference for JSON-RPC or SOAP or whatever.

> And as far as I know, web apps with true RESTful interfaces are somewhat rare.

It's common to take advantage of HTTP's verb syntax.

[ericgoldberg]

It's telling that they don't know (or do know, but don't see the benefit in) RESTful interfaces. Which isn't a dead-end for the interview, it just leads to more questions to see what they understand about HTTP. I'm not expecting a particular answer, I'm using a question to understand where someone is at and then using the following discourse to understand how they arrived there.