Laravel developer interview - what do they actually test beyond basic CRUD?
I've got a mid-level Laravel developer interview coming up in 10 days and I'm trying to figure out what depth of knowledge they're looking for. I've been building with Laravel for about 2 years - I know Eloquent relationships, basic middleware, queues and jobs, and the usual MVC patterns. But interviews have a way of going deeper on framework internals that I've never needed to think about explicitly.
Last time I interviewed 8 months ago I got caught on a question about service container bindings and how dependency injection actually works under the hood. I answered it but not confidently. Same interview asked me to explain the difference between singleton and scoped bindings, which I fumbled. I've since learned both but it reminded me there's a lot of framework internals I use without really understanding.
What topics do Laravel interviews typically push into? I'm specifically wondering about service providers, event and listener patterns, testing with PHPUnit in Laravel, and newer features in Laravel 10 and 11. Is there a reasonable way to do targeted prep in 10 days or am I better off deepening a few areas rather than trying to cover everything?
Newer features like Folio, Volt, and the pipeline changes in L11 show up in cutting-edge teams but most companies are still on L10 at best. Deep knowledge of core concepts matters more than knowing the latest additions.
Event and listener patterns come up a lot because they're easy to get wrong in production. Know the difference between sync and queued listeners, when you'd use observers vs listeners, and how to test events with Event::fake(). Those are standard questions.
10 days is enough to solidify 4-5 areas if you're deliberate about it.
Testing is an underrated interview topic. A lot of candidates can't explain the difference between unit tests and feature tests in a Laravel context, or don't know how to use RefreshDatabase vs Transactions for test isolation. If you can speak fluently about testing it really stands out.
Service providers and the container are the most common deep-dive topics in mid-level interviews. If you can explain the boot vs register lifecycle clearly and give a real example of a custom binding, you'll be ahead of most candidates.