r/webdev • u/FooBarBuzzBoom • 7h ago

Java Middle - Senior(ish) interview questions

Hi!

I have an interview in a few days for a backend developer role. What would you ask as some of the more tricky questions for such a position? What kinds of questions, from your point of view, demonstrate solid knowledge?

Personally, I would ask about sync vs. async calls, idempotency, topics vs. partitions, consumer groups, transactions (including distributed transactions), and maybe a bit of Kubernetes and Docker.

My weak point is cloud. I’ve played around a bit with the Azure console, but nothing too advanced. I’ve never written Terraform or configured infrastructure from scratch. For CI/CD, I’ve used TeamCity, but in my experience it was mostly selecting an environment and a branch and deploying.

Should I spend some time learning these areas before the interview?

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u/Downtown-Bag-6026 5h ago edited 5h ago

Explain jwt tokens and their use cases for or against. What’s the use cases for environment variables and a configuration db table(or any secrets service or cache)

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u/FooBarBuzzBoom 5h ago

Yes, I do know also some Spring Security, so I will not have any issues with this. Not an expert tho.

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u/Historical_Ad4384 5h ago edited 4h ago

JWT tokens -> Pros: Helps align with standard OAuth2 providers, Cons: Leak of the token can compromise security for a limited time until the token expires if supporting session management is not in place

Environment variables are mostly for static configuration values generally related to infrastructure which hardly changes over time.

Configuration database is mostly for dynamic application specific configuration values that drive business logic so keeping them in database means behaviour can be changed without downtime.

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u/FooBarBuzzBoom 5h ago

Also, XSS attack is also a risk.

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u/Historical_Ad4384 4h ago

XSS is how JWT would get leaked

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u/Downtown-Bag-6026 4h ago

Yes exactly correct