53 Ruby on Rails Interview Questions and Answers

Questions you may be asked in a junior or intermediate Ruby on Rails role interview

I’ve interviewed over a hundred developers for Ruby on Rails positions and interviewed for more than a couple of positions myself. These are questions I’ve either received or given.

It may surprise you how many big companies still use Rails in 2020 including Shopify, Airbnb, GitHub, Dribble, Etsy, Kickstarter, Zendesk, Twitch, 500px, and Instacart.

I hope this is a helpful guide whether you’re interviewing for a job or interviewing candidates to hire.

Let’s get to the questions, in no particular order.

1. Walk me through the request/response cycle for accessing a list of articles in a blogging application?

The user clicks a button and a GET request is made to the URL,/articles. The web server receives this request. Rails then executes the corresponding controller action, #index, based on URL/controller mapping in routes.rb.

The controller calls Article.all which loads a collection of articles from the database via the Article model. This collection is assigned to an instance variable.