Why am I being asked this? What do they want to learn?

Passion

• What excites you about coding?
• Why do you want to code?
• How do you want to improve?

Interest

• Where do you go to find out more about coding (blogs/Hacker News/twitter) etc.?
• What's your favourite blog?
• Who do you look up to in the coding world?
• What new languages/frameworks interest you?

Opinionated (but humble)

• What is your favourite programming language?
• What do you like/dislike about Ruby/JS etc.?
• What do you think about the move towards everything being in JavaScript?
• Do you think there should be front-end/back-end or full-stack developers?
• When have you realised you've made a mistake? How did you handle it?

Understanding

• Name a design pattern - how would you use it?
• What does the Single Responsibility Principle mean?
• What is encapsulation?
• Why do we programme using TDD? What are the drawbacks?
• What do we mean by DRY?
• Why do we use MVC when building frameworks? 

Performance

• How would you optimise a system that is running slow?
• How would you identify bottlenecks in your system?
• What is an n plus 1 problem?