John Facey 🥋👨🏽‍💻📚🩵

Is this the best software development interview question ever? “What happens when you type a URL in the address bar of a browser and hit enter?” I think it might be. It’s so open-ended, a complete answer could hit everything from GUI programming through the operating system to device drivers, Bluetooth, network stacks, network protocols and all the way back up to rendering the returned web page. There is something in the stack that every developer, no matter what their speciality is can drill into. If you’re into GUI development you could talk extensively about the keystrokes and rendering of the URL, then handling the enter keypress. If you have deeper knowledge you could talk about how the OS handles GUIs. You might even go further down and talk about device drivers. BIOS and interrupt handlers. A Bluetooth expert could dig into what happens between your wireless keyboard an computer for every keypress. A network specialist could talk about everything from Wifi, through BGP, DWDM, OTN, HTTP, TLS, DNS resolution. There’s something for everyone. What do you think? Is there a better question and if so, what is it?