Technical Interview Tips For Bootcamp Grads

I’ve been doing a lot of mock interviews lately with people who are about to or have just graduated from coding bootcamps. While each has their strengths and weaknesses, there are a few things that I end up sharing more often than not — so here they are!

Some of these tips are specific to whiteboard interviewing. Whether whiteboard interviews are the best way to interview candidates or not (not) isn’t the point here, the reality is that most interviews do involve some whiteboarding, so you’ll need to know how to do it well.

Know how the internet works

This is of course only relevant if you’re looking for a job to build for the web, but if you are, these are some (but not necessarily all!) of the things I’d expect you to know, in varying levels of depth, depending on whether you’re a front end or back end dev:

• What DNS is and how it works (bonus: DNS cache)
• What’s in an HTTP request (headers — method, path, cookies, auth; body)
• What happens once my request hits the server — feel free to be specific based on which frameworks you know/have used, this stuff is usually applicable in others, even if the details or vocabulary is different (Bonus: what are some other things you might have to go through before you hit the server or database? Load balancers, connection poolers, etc.)
• What’s in an HTTP response (status codes, and what codes in various ranges mean, content-type…