Mid-Level Developer Interview Questions and Answers
Mid-level interviews focus on trade-offs and ownership. Interviewers want to see that you have hit real problems such as slow queries, race conditions or re-render storms, and know how to reason your way through them.
A classmethod receives the class as its first argument (cls) and can create or configure instances, while a staticmethod receives no automatic argument and is just a function placed inside the class namespace.
A load balancer distributes incoming requests across several servers to improve capacity and availability, using algorithms such as round robin, least connections or consistent hashing.
Both integrate changes from one branch into another: merge keeps both histories and joins them with a merge commit, while rebase rewrites your commits so they appear on top of the target branch, giving a linear history.
Open the conflicted files, decide what the final code should be between the conflict markers, remove the markers, run the tests, then stage the files and continue the merge or rebase.
Use a small, pinned base image, order instructions so dependencies are cached before source code, use multi-stage builds to leave build tools out of the final image, run as a non-root user and keep secrets out of the image.
Mocking replaces a real dependency with a controllable fake so a test can run in isolation and check how the code interacts with it; use it for slow, non-deterministic or external dependencies, not for everything.
Recursively walk the array: when an element is an array, flatten it and append the result; otherwise append the element. An iterative version uses an explicit stack to avoid recursion limits.
Choose a real project with a technical or organisational challenge, explain your specific role and decisions with the STAR method, and finish with the result and what you learned.
Walk through how you noticed the issue, limited the impact, found the root cause, fixed it, and what you changed afterwards so the same class of bug could not happen again.
The event loop is the mechanism that lets single-threaded JavaScript handle asynchronous work: it runs the call stack to empty, then runs all queued microtasks (promises), then takes the next task (timers, events) from the queue.
In JavaScript every object has an internal link to another object called its prototype, and property lookups walk up this prototype chain until the property is found or the chain ends.
Debounce waits until the user stops triggering an event for a set time before running the function; throttle runs the function at most once per time interval no matter how often the event fires.
Updating state triggers a re-render, while changing a ref's .current value does not; use state for data shown on screen and refs for DOM access or values that must persist without causing renders.