Interview with Kilian Valkhof

Aug 27

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As mentioned in my previous call for participation for developers, I have received 10 responses of willing developers from the UK, USA, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and Canada.

Today´s interview goes to:

Name: Kilian Valkhof

Bio: Kilian is a Front-end developer and User experience designer located in the Netherlands. He currently works for his own company, Fluxility Design, and for the social network Wakoopa. Kilian started working professionally in 2005 with the start of his own company, but has been involved in web development for longer.

Specialities: Kilian specialises in combining user experience design with a solid technical foundation, transforming designs into working interactive websites. Language-wise he is adept in HTML, CSS, JavaScript (and a handful of javascript frameworks) and can find his way around PHP and ruby on rails.

URL: kilianvalkhof.com

Twitter: twitter.com/Kilianvalkhof

Question 1 (Colin Brown): Over the past 2 years mobile web browsing has become far more common and accessible, gadgets such as Apple’s iPhone has helped to raise the bar in this field. How important do you think developing websites for this medium is? Should mobile browsers, such as Mobile Safari be one of the web browsers we build websites to comply with?

Kilian: Obviously, we currently see that, at least for mobile webkit, both regular sites as well as special mobile sites work really well. Unfortunately, for the millions (literally) of other browsers on mobile phones, this isn’t the case. Crafting a nice user experience on these types of phones is an entirely different beast, and it’s best to throw branding and anything above single-column text out of the window.

While you can get away easily with a mobile handheld stylesheet that hides everything that isn’t primary content, it’s really best to start over and rethink the mobile website, starting with the idea “someone doesn’t have a lot of time nor attention for your website, and needs to find what they are looking for fast.” Most of the time, a logo, a small menu, a search function an a paragraph or two of homepage copy serve mobile users best.

Question 2 (Crawford Tait): Will increasingly-sophisticated javascript applications make flash redundant?

Kilian: I certainly hope so! The thing right now is that all browsers are iterating on their javascript engines and making them orders of magnitude faster with each release. I hope we soon live in a world where Javascript in combination with HTML5 with the video and canvas element do away with much of what flash is currently “needed for”. I myself have been experimenting with creating an advanced charting system (http://github.com/kilian/ico) in Javascript, with my main purpose being to be equivalent or better than the charts google analytics uses. It’s really amazing what you can currently accomplish that simply wasn’t possible or even imaginable a couple of years ago.

Question 3 (Diego Campo): Have you thought of changing your career during the last year? If so, which one?

Kilian: Absolutely not! I don’t think there is any field as exciting as web development, currently. Everything is moving really fast and at the same time you can see the industry as a whole “grow up”. It’s really satisfying.

Question 4 (Colin McMillan): As a developer you need to keep on top of emerging technology. Given that there aren’t enough hours in the day, how do you decide what technologies or languages to pursue?

Kilian: Right now, I operate on a really “I’ll learn it when I need it” level. I keep up with the latest developments in my expertise area’s, but for example, I haven’t look extensively at HTML5 yet, apart from what we can already use today. So I take a really practical approach to it. If I need it today I’ll look at it, if not then I won’t, and we’ll see if it comes up at a later time.

Question 5 (David Poblador): How has open-source/free software changed the way you develop software?

Kilian: Yes it has, quite substantially. Not only do I search for open-source solutions to problems I encounter before trying something myself, but I always ask myself if I could open source the things I’m writing and building (using either creative commons or the MIT license). It’s really true that the more you give away, the more it benefits you.

Question 6 (Kilian Valkhof): What do you strive for most in your code?

Kilian: Right now, my main goal is conciseness. Since I write HTML, CSS and JavaScript mostly, literally every bite counts. I take great pride in using the least amount of HTML to describe my webpage, and the fastest possible javascript that can be minified to make it even smaller. There has been a lot of talk about maintainability and the size of webpages in the past couple of months and that has been really valuable in highlighting the benefits of smarter written and smaller files.

Question 7 (Catherine Bartlett): Tell me about the best developer you’ve ever known.

Kilian: There isn’t any one developer that I would call the best developer I’ve known, but I have great admiration for anyone building innovative stuff and releasing it for others to use. Almost all cool things I use daily were started by a single person just trying to scratch his/her own itch, and I really admire that.

Question 8 (Erik Vold): What are some of the new technology trends that you think we will see in this century?

Kilian: In this century? Well, there is singularity for one, which I’m really excited about, but that’s supposed to happen in 2022. I believe.

Joking aside, the technology in web development is moving so fast, that I feel hard pressed to predict what trends we’ll see at the end of the year! But right now, I think mobile internet and mobile computing are going to be one of the major game changers in the next couple of years, and I foresee a shift from regular websites to smaller, single-purpose driven mobile websites. And with mobile, I don’t necessarily mean cell phones, but also increasingly the use of netbooks and tablets and ubiquitous wireless internet.

Question 9 (the contributer would like to remain anonymous): How much of your work time do you spend analysing defect reports so that future instances of the same defects may be mitigated, or altogether removed from future builds?

Kilian: A lot! Building websites is like shooting a moving target. With new versions of browsers coming out all the time, something is bound to break somewhere. Whenever something like that happens, I try to make the fix “bulletproof” and make the resulting CSS or JavaScript as simple as possible. The simpler something is, the less likely it’s going to break or do something you didn’t expect.

Question 10 (Alan Graham): We are bombarded every day with new approaches, new libraries (Prototype.js vs jQuery, Java vs .NET, PHP vs everything), new free services (Google Analytics vs ???). What criteria do you use to quickly decide what to use?

Kilian: I ask myself ‘how easy is it to start’, ‘who is already using is and what do they thing about it’ and ‘how limiting would it be in the future if I heavily invest in this technology’. The last one is especially important, I think. Luckily for front-end, if a javascript framework doesn’t work for you, you can just fall back on regular javascript and if a css framework isn’t to your liking, you use another one (such as SenCSs ) on your next project.

Question 11 (Richard Kelly – fellow online marketing dude): How much of a pain do you find developing and re-developing code for SEO?

Kilian: Not at all, actually. As I said earlier, I try to keep my HTML as concise as possible. I also take great care in making it as semantically correct as possible. This combined results in a very nice html-to-meaningful data ratio. On-site SEO, that is really all you need, given that you have good data and a solid linking structure.

Question 12 (Felicitas Betzl): Having worked in a variety of agencies I’ve seen major collisions between account/project managers and developers for a variety of reasons. Can you think of 5 tips you can give account and project managers, which you think would make developers lives easier?

Kilian: 1.   Try programming yourself/making a website yourself. It doesn’t matter if it sucks or if it’s even usable. It’s important to have a solid foundation and know what exactly you’re promising to clients.
2.   Let (some) developers talk directly to clients for specific problems. It’ll make your developers happy because they get more done, faster, and it makes your clients happy because they feel more in control.
3.   A lot of the problems I see come from time constrains and deadlines. Sure, the client wants it yesterday, but if you let your developers do a shoddy job, it’s gonna cost your client a lot of maintenance down the line and they’ll reconsider asking you for their next project. Let your developers set realistic deadlines whenever possible.
4.   Don’t measure their productivity by code written. Programming is 80% thinking and 20% writing. The more you nag them to produce code, the suckier it’ll be.
5.   Built in research time, allow your developers to comfortably make prototypes or read up on new technologies, and don’t expect them to do so only on their own time. Likewise, allow them to share cool stuff they’ve written with people outside the company. It’ll make you look better, I promise.

Question 13 (just for fun): What is your favourite cartoon character?