Twitter Bootstrap Interview Questions

[Brian Miller]

What are some good questions I can ask at an interview to gauge how much someone knows about Twitter Bootstrap?

[Brian Miller]

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Thanks.

[IceBreakerG]

Some basic questions would be to find out how much they know about scaffolding (such as what is the difference between the fluid and non-fluid grid systems), the different css classes, widgets/controls and then using some of the other bootstrap elements and styling. We're use bootstrap on one of the projects I'm working on at work, and I'd never heard of it before I got this job, so I wouldn't let their lack of knowledge about it specifically disqualify them, since it's not difficult to learn either. But those would be some things you could ask about.

[canadian]

Bootstrap is relatively easy to learn so I would focus more on your use of it and the justification or philosophy behind using it. Things such as:

- do you like twitter bootstrap? what has it helped you to accomplish?

- what are the main benefits you see bootstrap providing to us

- bootstrap 3 is expected to take a fundamentally different approach to page output than bootstrap 2 - what is that difference and why does it matter? (Answer: mobile first - responsive by default, etc)

- what is the main drawback (in your opinion) to bootstrap and how have you dealt with it in past development work

[lnmnky]

Is it really that important to know bootstrap, rather than just being really good at CSS?

I knew nothing about bootstrap until last week, I read about it for about 10 minutes and I'm more than happy that if I needed to edit / deploy / debug a website using it, then I could easily.

The only part of bootstrap that I don't like is that it's still based loosely around the visual design rather than named modules of content. The very nature of any grid system means than people are thinking in columns and rows, rather than data/copy types.

There's also the fact that if they go CSS3 column or flexbox, or grid, then they might have hardbaked naming conventions to overcome. People claim it makes the CSS easier to maintain, like people claim OOCSS does, but I'm much rather have nice HTML. It's always harder to change the HTML on big projects built in C# or some other (sometimes outsourced) build.

[threetonesun]

Most of it is just CSS, the above questions are good ones, other ones might include whether or not they understand the use of data attributes, how they go about responsive design on a site using bootstrap (more specifically, using the fluid scaffolding with media queries and the responsive utility classes), and perhaps working with bootstrap in the context of a CMS, if that's something they'll need to do.

[Brian Miller]

Really good questions guys and thanks for the feedback too.