Tools, Frameworks & Implementation Proficiency Topics
Practical proficiency with industry-standard tools and frameworks including project management (Jira, Azure DevOps), productivity tools (Excel, spreadsheet analysis), development tools and environments, and framework setup. Focuses on hands-on tool expertise, configuration, best practices, and optimization rather than conceptual knowledge. Complements technical categories by addressing implementation tooling.
Command Line Proficiency and Troubleshooting
Comfortable using shell commands for system troubleshooting and administration. Key tools: ps (process information), top and htop (real-time monitoring), grep, sed, awk (text processing), curl (HTTP requests), netstat and ss (network statistics), du and df (disk usage), kill and killall (process termination), tar and gzip (compression). Know how to redirect I/O, pipe commands together, and create simple scripts. Understand how to use man pages.
Package and Dependency Management
Practical knowledge of installing updating and troubleshooting software packages and dependencies across platforms. Candidates should understand package managers and workflows for reproducible installs, lock files and version constraints, resolving dependency conflicts, isolating environments, dealing with native build dependencies, and strategies for safely upgrading or rolling back packages. The topic also includes awareness of dependency security vulnerabilities and patching practices.
Technology Stack Knowledge
Assess a candidate's practical and conceptual understanding of technology stacks, including major programming languages, application frameworks, databases, infrastructure, and supporting tools. Candidates should be able to explain common use cases and trade offs for languages such as Python, Java, Go, Rust, C plus plus, and JavaScript, including differences between compiled and interpreted languages, static and dynamic type systems, and performance characteristics. They should discuss application frameworks and libraries for frontend and backend development, common web stacks, service architectures such as monoliths and microservices, and application programming interfaces. Evaluate understanding of data storage options and trade offs between relational and non relational databases and the role of structured query language. Candidates should be familiar with cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure, infrastructure components including containerization and orchestration tools such as Docker and Kubernetes, and development workflows including version control, continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines, testing frameworks, automation, and infrastructure as code. Assess operational concerns such as logging, monitoring and observability, deployment strategies, scalability, reliability, fault tolerance, security considerations, and common failure modes and mitigations. Interviewers may probe both awareness of specific tools and the candidate's depth of hands on experience, ability to justify technology choices by evaluating trade offs, constraints, and risk, and willingness and ability to learn and evaluate new technologies rather than claiming mastery of everything.
Support Infrastructure and Tooling
Think about architecture of support systems: ticketing platforms, knowledge bases, remote support infrastructure, automation tools. How to make support operations scalable and efficient?
Software Installation and Dependency Management
Focuses on installing software reliably and resolving package and runtime dependencies. Topics include using package managers and installers, diagnosing and recovering from installation failures, handling missing or incompatible dependencies, understanding architecture compatibility such as thirty two bit versus sixty four bit, resolving version and transitive dependency conflicts, reading and using logs, dealing with permission issues, isolating environments with virtual environments or containers, using lock files and reproducible builds, rollback and upgrade strategies, and practical troubleshooting steps for conflicts after installation. Candidates should be able to describe general diagnostic approaches and concrete steps to resolve common installation dependency problems.