Personal Interview
I thought I would conduct a short personal interview on myself to share a bit more than just the websites I've created. The questions were taken from the Front-end Developer Interview Questions Github repository. So without further delay let's get started:
What's a cool project that you've recently worked on?
Without sounding too meta, I would say my own personal site that you are reading now is one of my favourites. I've worked on redesigning this site for a couple of months at the start of 2017 and have enjoyed updating it with everything I've learned over the last year. I've focused on performance and optimisation, making sure all my code is valid and ensuring the content is up to date. My two favourite parts of this project is the portfolio where I share all my best work and this new blog I've started.
What are some things you like about the developer tools you use?
My two main tools for writing code are Atom and VS Code (Depending on where I am). I find they have a huge community with a whole bunch of addons I use on a daily basis. These can range from auto-formatting to displaying a swatch colour next to the hex or RGB value. I use Prepros to compile my .SCSS files too, the option to live reload the page every time I save means I don't have to manually refresh, saving a few seconds of my workflow.
Who inspires you in the front-end community?
At the moment the two biggest inspirations for me are Chris Coyier (At CSS Tricks) and Harry Roberts (At CSS Wizardry). I'm subscribed to both of their blogs and Twitter accounts because they share valuable insights and provide great information to help others continue learning.
Do you have any pet projects? What kind?
This is a tough question since I'm always creating something new and experimenting. Currently I have a couple of projects on the go. My most recent pet project was a simple HTML page listing all the sites I'm currently working on. Local, staging and live sites are listed using data pulled in by jQuery using an ajax function. Since most, if not all, sites I build use Wordpress I have taken advantage of the REST API to pull that data in to my own application. I have also created a simple plugin to get all Wordpress updates and output them as part of the REST API. You can find that here.
If a pet project is worth sharing and could be useful to others I post them on my Github account.
What's your favourite feature of Internet Explorer?
I guess at this point you could include Edge in this question as well. Both are equally good for downloading other browsers. That's what they were built for.. Right?
How do you like your coffee?
Unlike most designers/developers I can't stand coffee. My ideal drink is water, it's refreshing and keeps me going. How do I stay awake during the day? I'm up at 6AM every morning and hit the gym before work. By the time I get in to work at 9AM I'm raring to go and since I love what I do I can easily keep that high level of energy throughout the day.
Wrapping up
So hopefully this short personal interview has given you a little bit more insight into who I am. If there are any other questions you would like to ask feel free to message me on Twitter or via my contact form. If there are enough good questions I might create another one of these posts.
