Life of an HTTP Request

shellycloud.com

66 points·grk··7 comments

This has been one of my favorite questions when interviewing candidates for jobs. The beauty of this question is that you can branch out and go deep into any of the several technologies that power the web - "how does the browser know it has to contact your server" or "how does your browser know how to display content" is a great filter for good devs. Best part about this question - it can be quite educative even for bad candidates.

I was interviewing candidates for an entry level web developer position.

I asked the candidates to describe one difference between a GET and POST in HTTP. Only about 20% of the candidates could respond with anything that made sense. It's a great quick filter for backend heavy development.

Yes, a great interview question. And it's quite surprising how many devs do not know those things and still manage to build successful web applications, if not necessarily the most performant/secure/maintainable.

Yes a bunch of morons. I would even ask them to write everything in 1's and 0's to see what they really know.

I'd like to see something like this for an authenticated POST, PUT or DELETE request.

Frankly I'm surprised by the popularity of this post. :)

It seems there is a big demand for knowledge about how the web actually works under the hood. I will make some time to describe the other HTTP verbs, and not necessarily in the context of Shelly Cloud. It will probably be a longer blog post anyway, with diagrams to describe the concepts. Hmm, a good topic for a presentation perhaps?

The only difference in this case would be that Varnish will always pass those requests through.

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