Potential questions to ask:
Something on the "working at Lancaster" list!!!!
What systems will I be working on within LUSI?
What do you all enjoy about working here?
What's it generally like day to day in the job?
What will my first couple of weeks consist of?
When will I hear back from you?



What is your greatest strength?
I would say that my greatest strength is my desire to complete an intended goal without taking the easy route by missing some steps. I have a willingness and desire to improve my knowledge and experience and to produce great quality work.


What is your biggest weakness?
I would say that my biggest weakness is that I may sometimes wish to overdo certain things, such as wanting to add extra features to something where they are not necessarily required. I sometimes just like to think that they may come of some use in the future, as a project may always have the potential to take a turn in direction.


What do you know about LUSI (Lancaster University Student Information)?
It is a responsive, dynamic web application and API underpinned by existing SQL Server databases. It interfaces with many other systems and supports the key University business processes, handling student data.


What experience do you have with SQL and APIs?
I have previously worked with SQL databases in my Databases module whilst at university, and have created APIs using Java with Spark for a previous job task.


What are the four principles of OOP? Describe them.
The four main principles of object-oriented programming are:

Abstraction
Polymorphism
Inheritance
Encapsulation

Abstraction involves storing/using only the necessary information, rather than everything possible.

Encapsulation involves exposing only what is necessary, to protect things from any outside tampering and also frees the user from unnecessarily knowing how things are implemented.

Inheritance involves inheriting methods/variables from another class.
Java Examples:
Single inheritance - extends
Multiple inheritance - implements

Polymorphism allows a variable, function or object to have more than one form.
Method overloading = static polymorphism
Method overriding = dynamic polymorphism


What is method overloading?
Having multiple methods with the same name in the same class, where the types/order/number of parameters differ.


What is method overriding?
Having a method in the subclass that had the same name as one in the superclass. The subclass method will override the superclass method.
Eg: Vehicle vh = new Motorbike(); will use the Motorbike class' method.
Eg: Vehicle vh = new Vehicle(); will use the Vehicle class' method.
(Adding static keywords for the methods in the classes would stop this)


Have you worked in a scrum environment, or any other agile software development methods?
I have worked in many scrum environments during my time at university. My degree consisted of 3 projects throughout 2 years where Scrum was used, and I believe that it definitely helped improve the communication between my groups, allowing us to thoroughly understand where the project was and everything that we each had to do, and therefore improved the overall products that we produced.
I was Scrum Master for some of the time in the projects, and found the use of sprints very useful.


What are the three roles in SCRUM?
Product Owner
Scrum Master
Scrum Team


What about agile?


What software design patterns have you used in the past?
Publish/subscribe
Facade
Template method


What is the use of "static" in programming?
It ensures that there is only one instance of that variable/method, so all instances of a class access the same thing. This saves memory.


Why use interfaces?
Decouple code


What are disparate systems? Have you ever connected two disparate systems?
A disparate systems is a system that exist separately without exchanging data or interacting with other computer data processing systems.
During the assignment for this job role, I would potentially class the API and the command line as disparate systems, which were interlinked using the same Calculator classes.


Why do you want this job specifically / why do you want to work here?
I thoroughly enjoyed my time here at university, and believe that it would be a great place to work. I think that I would be contributing to great projects that will improve student's experience during their time here.


What do you know about the company?
Lancaster University has been open just over 50 years, and ISS specifically is responsible for the distribution of the IT services for the Uni.
The university has been one of the Top 10 universities in the UK for several years running.


Tell me about a time you had a problem, and the steps you took to overcome it. (Star method?)
During my time working on the task for this application, I initially had experience working with APIs in Java, but none when working with ASP.NET.

To overcome this, I did a large amount of research and some small experiments on different aspects of ASP.NET before I began tackling the task. I also found the suggested research links in my email from Tim Chart very useful and informative.

This allowed me to go into the task with much more knowledge for how to reach my goal of creating a functioning API for the system, such as the understanding of Dependency Injection. I believe that taking the time to do an appropriate amount of research beforehand ensure that less issues arise, therefore producing a service that not only functions better, but also has the potential to take less time.


What was your most fun project at university?
I would say that my final Software Design Project was the project I found the most enjoyable to do. I thoroughly enjoyed working with IOT devices and felt that I worked really with with my scrum team.


What do you like to do in your spare time? Any hobbies?
In my spare time I enjoy playing and watching sport, and have recently been upgrading my computer's hardware.
In my free time, I also like to improve my skills and knowledge on new programming languages at home, that I may not have used during my time at university.