What is an opinion? Wikipedia says that “an opinion is a belief that may or may not be backed up with evidence, but which cannot be proved with that evidence. An opinion is neither right nor wrong. It is normally a subjective statement and may be the result of an emotion or an interpretation of facts; people may draw opposing opinions from the same facts.”

However. Understanding and analyzing opinions is fine for geeky twitter-blogosphere-analysts, marketing soldiers (who want to know how their products perform in the public) or, somehow more evil, for political governments to check the people’s opinions about public topics. The last approach could should be inverted: Analyze political publications, quotations in the media and parliament protocols to really understand the opinion and intentions of individual politicians or parties. This can be a tool for positive democratic development.

In November 2009 there is an interesing workshop about this field: http://sites.google.com/site/tsa2009workshop/

The suggested topics are:

• Opinion retrieval, extraction, categorization, and aggregation
• Topic and sentiment alignment in opinion analysis
• Applications of topic-sentiment analysis, e.g. corporate reputation measurement, political orientation categorization, customer preference study, public opinion study
• Issues in using topic-sentiment analysis as a new research method for mass opinion estimation, such as reliability, validity, sample bias, etc.
• Sentiment identification and filtering at various text granularity
• Domain-dependency of sentiment analyzers
• Evaluation methodologies
• Performance issues, scalability and efficiency
• Web-based system demonstration
• Novel algorithms, tools and systems
• Construction of benchmark data sets

In my current job I am responsible to interview new candidates for the developer team. Since this is the first time that I am sitting at this side of the table I had to develop my own system of questions that would lead to the informations I need to decide whether someone is suitable for the team or not.

I want to share those questions:

1. Methodology

• What is agile software development? Do you know or have any experiences with the agile principles? What is your opinion about agile team and organizations.
• What is code refactoring? What is it used for? Do you have some best practices how you refactor your code?
• The topic is debugging: How do you handle bugs?
• What is Test-Driven-Development? What is your opinion about TDD? What would you say if I tell you that I do not like TDD at all.
• Do you know design patterns? Did you use them already? What is your favorite one? How do you learn design patterns?
• What is AJAX? How does AJAX work? What is the difference between AJAX and Web2.0?
• Can you handle the words cohesion and seperation of concern?

2. Thinking

• I tell you to learn a new programming language, say Ruby. How do you organize the learning? What will you do first?
• What would you do if I give you 5 million Euro to launch a start up?
• What is the most important thing you want to do within the next two years?
• What is my company, the company you want to work for, doing? How do you figure the underlying technology we’re uisng to do exactly this?
• Which 5 books did you read last?

3. Common chat questions

• Do you like google? What do you like about it?
• What are current innovations in the java ecosystem?
• It is your task to design a database which holds personal data about some million people. What is the significance of data privacy protection?
• How did the internet change techologically during the last 5 years? How does the future look like?

4. Java Questions

• What stands transient for?
• What are annotations? What are they used for? What is your opinion about using annotations?
• What are the principles of programming servlets?
• What is the session scope? Are there other scopes? What are they used to?
• Tell me about the life cycle of a standard java application and a servlet.
• Is it possible to use Multithreading in Servlets? Should you?
• What is the differnce between a stack and a queue?
• What are the technical principles o a hash map?
• What are Generics? How do you use them? What is your opionion about generics?
• Describe the deployment of a Java Application.
• What is JDBC? What is Hibernate? When do you use them?
• Why is the main method static?
• Which impacts does the final modifier have on object references?
• How do you let the JVM execute some code right before the main method is invoked?
• What is reflection, what is introspection?
• What is the basic idea of a java bean?
• How do you optimize the performance of a loop?
• What is the difference of a servlet and an applett? What does they have in common?
• How do you forward a http request from a servlet to a JSP? Which pattern can you realize by doing this?
• What are the priciple of RMI?
• How do you integrate some native C-code to a Java Class?
• What is JUnit and how do you use it?
• Is it possible to realize a Callback mechanism in JAVA?

5. PHP questions

• Tell me about arrays in PHP? What are the principles? What do you not like about arrays in php?
• Can you name some array sorting functions in PHP?
• How do you write multiple variables using echo? What is the fastest way doing that?
• What dou think, is PHP object oriented? Why?
• What is the difference between “1″ and “True”?
• How do you write to the end of a file?
• How do you define constants in PHP classes?
• Is it possible to overload methods in PHP?
• How do you use callback functions in PHP?
• What additional features do you think should a future version of PHP provide?
• What is Zend?
• What is Pear?
• What about type safety in PHP? Any opinions?

6. Logic

• Connect all dots using just 4 lines:
  
• There is a town with two hospitals. One is very big, the other is quite small. On one day the newspaper says: 3 boys and 9 girls were born yesterday. What do you think: Which hospital is more likely to have such rates?

7. Opbject Oriented Principles

• What is the difference between an abstract class and an interface? When do you use the one or the other? What impacts does each have?
• What do you understand by encapsulation?
• What is polymorphism? Can you give me an example?
• What are alternatives to object oriented languages? When do you use them?
• What happens when you instantiate an object?