PHP Community Marketing Expert

This question can give you an idea of how in-tune they are with the latest industry trends and technologies, as well as how passionate they are about webdev. It'll help separate the people who do it as a career AS WELL as a hobby from those who might simply be in it for the big developer paychecks.

I've learned from each boss I've had. From the good ones I learnt what to do, from the challenging ones - what not to do.

Early in my career, I had a mentor who helped me a great deal, we still stay in touch. I've honestly learned something from each boss I've had.

Check if “display_errors” is equal “on” in the php.ini or declare “ini_set('display_errors', 1)” in your script.

Then, include “error_reporting(E_ALL)” in your code to display all types of error messages during the script execution.

Enabling error messages is very important especially during the debugging process as you can instantly get the exact line that is producing the error and you can see also if the script in general is behaving correctly.

<?php

class dragonBall{

private $ballCount;

public function __construct(){

$this->ballCount=0;

}

public function iFoundaBall(){

$this->ballCount++;

if($this->ballCount===7){

echo "You can ask for your wish.";

$this->ballCount=0;

}

}

}

?>

This question will evaluate a candidate’s knowledge about OOP.

1. Zend Engine 3 performance improvements and 64-bit integer support on Windows

2. uniform variable syntax AST-based compilation process

3. added Closure::call()

4. bitwise shift consistency across platforms

5. (null coalesce) operator

6. Unicode codepoint escape syntax

7. return type declarations

8. and scalar type (integer, float, string and boolean) declarations.

Finally, I always ask what tools they have used in the past. Generally speaking, I would expect a combination of OSE, Majestic SEO and Ahrefs for link analysis. Either Screaming Frog or Xenu for architecture diagnostics and AWR would normally come out top for rank analysis. And of course, Google Analytics the most likely tool for traffic monitoring.

Find a developer that has experience similar in size to the project you're putting together. Developers with high traffic, large scale site expertise may offer skills that smaller-sized developers don't, such as fine tuning apache or optimizing heavily hit SQL queries. On the other hand, developers who typically build smaller sites may have an eye for things that large scale developers don't, such as offering a greater level of visual creativity.

All objects in PHP have Constructor and Destructor methods built-in. The Constructor method is called immediately after a new instance of the class is being created, and it’s used to initialize class properties. The Destructor method takes no parameters.

Understanding these two in PHP means that the candidate knows the very basics of OOP in PHP.

soundex()

The soundex() function calculates the soundex key of a string. A soundex key is a four character long alphanumeric strings that represents English pronunciation of a word. The soundex() function can be used for spelling applications.

<?php

$str= “hello”;

Echo soundex($str);

?>

metaphone()

the metaphone() function calculates the metaphone key of a string. A metaphone key represents how a string sounds if pronounced by an English person. This function can also be used for spelling applications.

<?php

echo metaphone(“world”);

?>

Find out if their future interests match the direction of the position (or the company in general).

☛ Zend Engine is used internally by PHP as a compiler and runtime engine. PHP Scripts are loaded into memory and compiled into Zend opcodes.

☛ These opcodes are executed and the HTML generated is sent to the client.

☛ The Zend Engine provides memory and resource management, and other standard services for the PHP language. Its performance, reliability and extensibility played a significant role in PHP’s increasing popularity.

Memcache is a technology that caches objects in memory such that your web application can get to them really fast. It is used by sites such as Digg.com, Facebook.com and NowPublic.com and is widely recognized as an essential ingredient in scaling any LAMP.

A: Using Composer is a tool for dependency management. You are able to declare the libraries your product relies on and Composer will manage the installation and updating of the libraries. The benefit is a consistent way of managing the libraries you depend on and you will spend less time managing the libraries you depend on in your project.

Traits are a mechanism that allows you to create reusable code in languages like PHP where multiple inheritance is not supported. A Trait cannot be instantiated on its own.

It’s important that a developer know the powerful features of the language (s)he is working on, and Trait is one of such features.

A pretty broad question as there are no right or wrong answers. Its more about what works. This question is purposely open ended as I just want to know what the interviewee has worked on in the past. The answer, for me is not based on how well you know Facebook and Twitter, but simply given the opportunity, do you have enough knowledge to be able to leverage social platforms to achieve a particular goal.

Standards compliance in web development is where everything is (hopefully?) going. Don't ask them to recite the w3c's mission statement or anything, but they should at least have a general idea of who they are.

No, the value of a constant cannot be changed once it’s declared during the PHP execution.

PSRs are PHP Standards Recommendations that aim at standardising common aspects of PHP Development.

An example of a PSR is PSR-2, which is a coding style guide. More info on PSR-2 here.