The 11 Best Live Coding Interview Questions in 2023
What are the best live coding questions? Here are the top questions to ask at your next live coding session so that you can identify your next team member. Want to learn more? Read on!
Conducting live coding interviews
Live coding interviews refer to the programming tests candidates solve in a set amount of time on a whiteboard or in a code editor during an interview process. Typically these programming challenges are used to gauge candidates’ technical skills.
Live coding tests can test various skills, depending on the testing software you’re using. For instance, on our own platform, we offer 60+ languages and frameworks, including JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Java, and more.
If you’re curious to learn more about how to assess candidates, take a look at our developer interview and developer assessment guides.
But what are the top live coding interview questions? Here are our favorite interview questions for the most popular programming languages.
JavaScript live coding interview questions
Interviewing JavaScript developers? In that case, these live coding interview questions can help you get started. The specific technical questions will depend on the coding problem you’re asking them to solve, so use these questions more as a guideline and adapt according to your needs.
1. What is JavaScript?
Answer:
JavaScript is an interpreted and lightweight programming language, which includes object-oriented capabilities. These offer more room for building interactivity into static HTML pages.
2. What are variables in JavaScript and what is their scope?
Answer:
Variables store the data value that can be changed later on. Variables have two scopes or regions in your programs where it’s defined. These are:
Global variables: A global variable has global scope. In other words, it’s visible everywhere in your JavaScript code.
Local variables: A local variable is visible within a function where it’s defined. Function parameters are always local to their function.
3. Is JavaScript a case-sensitive language?
Answer:
JavaScript is a case-sensitive language, which means that the language keywords, variables, function names, and other identifiers need to be typed with consistent capitalization of letters.
4. Explain what Strict Mode is in Javascript.
Answer:
Strict Mode adds a level of compulsion to JavaScript. Under this mode, JavaScript will show errors where no error was shown before because the piece of code might be problematic or unsafe. Strict mode is also helpful in solving mistakes that stop JavaScript from working efficiently. Enable strict mode by adding the string literal “use strict” above the file:
function myfunction() {
"use strict;"
var v = "This is a strict mode function";
}
Python live coding interview questions
Next, we have the top Python live coding interview questions. These questions will assist you in testing Python skills during a live coding session.
5. What is Python?
Answer:
Python is an interpreted and high-level programming language. Because it’s a general-purpose language, it can be built into almost any type of application. Python is also excellent for modeling real-world problems because it supports objects, threads, modules, automatic memory management, and exception handling.
Costs for maintenance go down because the language emphasizes readability. The language is also capable of scripting and it’s completely open-source. Because it supports third-party packages, modularity and code reuse are encouraged.
6. What is a dynamically typed language?
Answer:
Typing refers to type-checking in programming languages. Python is strongly typed, so the language doesn’t enable conversion of data types. Type-checking can be done in two stages. It can be static, which means that data types are checked before execution, or dynamic, so that data types are checked during execution.
Python is a dynamically typed language. It is an interpreted language and executes each statement line by line, which means that type-checking is done during execution.
7. Is all memory deallocated when you exit Python?
Answer:
All memory is deallocated when exiting Python, except modules with circular references, objects referenced from global namespaces, and parts of memory reserved by the C library.
8. What are global, protected, and private attributes in Python?
Answer:
Global attributes: These are public variables that are defined in the global scope and are used inside a function with the global keyword.
Protected attributes: These attributes are defined with an underscore prefixed to their identifier. Even though they can be modified from outside the class they are defined in, developers shouldn’t do it.
Private attributes: These attributes have double underscores prefixed to their identifier. They can’t be modified from the outside and any such attempt will result in an AttributeError.
Java live coding interview questions
Here are the top Java live coding interview questions. Use these questions to gauge candidates’ Java skills.
9. What is Java?
Answer:
Java is a high-level programming language, which is based on object-oriented programming principles and can be used to develop large-scale applications. The advantages of Java are that it’s easy to learn, write, compile, and debug. It’s also object-oriented, so it allows you to create modular programs and reusable code, and as a platform-independent language, it can be used to easily move from one computer system to another.
10. How do you remove leading and trailing whitespaces from a string?
Answer:
You can remove leading and trailing whitespaces from Java string class with two methods, either with trim() or strip(). The strip() method is recommended for removing whitespace because it uses Unicode code points. Trim() identifies any character having codepoint value less than or equal to ‘U+0020’ as a whitespace character.
String s = " abc def\t"; s = s.strip(); System.out.println(s);
11. Is Java a complete object-oriented programming language?
Answer:
Yes and no. Everything in Java is under classes and those can be accessed by creating objects. However, Java isn’t a completely object-oriented programming language because it also supports primitive data types, such as int, float, char, boolean, and double.
Over to you!
There you have it. Now you know what the top live coding interview questions are.
But how do you ensure that your live coding challenges are successful?
We offer a platform for pair programming, screening questions, and take-home challenges.