Interview with Lukas, our lead front-end dev.

What was your favorite project last year and why?

I’ve worked on so many projects that it’s hard to pick only one. I enjoy cooperation with the Dutch agency Li Moon, supplying us with interesting projects with thoughtful designs that are easy to be transformed into little Pattern Labs. Thanks to Pattern Labs I can easily expand the sites if needed. Other project I enjoyed was website for Prague Municipal House, where I finally tried CSS property display: grid; of course with flex fallback.

I also became more interested in the UX / UI design. I designed some prototypes. I liked working on the prototype of the Feedmetoo mobile application, where I had plenty of space to combine new ideas with established application design practices.

You like to create Pattern Labs, can you describe what it is and what does it bring to the client?

Website creation is largely re-using of the same elements, only slightly modified. Ordinary button may have a magnifying glass in the search, in the basket there might be different background color. A Pattern Lab is a way to organize all these elements, small and large, and modify them.

For a client, this might mean a bit slower start of work, but in the future it means certainty that the code of all pages will not grow much in size and will remain clear. Pattern Lab over time prevents 5 different forms appearances, because in one place we see that text fields, buttons and headings already have their appearance defined. So new modifications will not be so complicated.

Where, on the contrary, do clients lose the most time? Do you know of something that comes to you as a futile job?

Sometimes it may happen that the client does not have all the resources for the website, or does not exactly know what he wants. Unnecessary work would be to nod this thing and try to work with it. However, we avoid this and we try to always guide the client in the right direction.

What technology do you see as a trend for this year?

This year it will be a progressive web applications – a website that can behave as a desktop / mobile application (available offline, with notifications, etc.). I underwent PWA training by Ray Viljoen. In addition to having learned PWA creation process, I also learned a very important fact that never occured to me before.

Lots of users after buying the phone visit App Store or Google Play only once or twice. They download Facebook and a few other essentials, and then never turn on the store again. Getting a new app to these users is very complicated. With PWA we can get back to these users again. In addition, PWA is easier to develop than a common mobile application, so the client can save or invest more money in its tuning, marketing, or other features.

But I also think the chosen technologies are not so important these days. We already have a bunch of great tools to work with. Now it’s all about choosing the right ones and using them right so that we can maintain them easily in long time process.

And what are your personal goals?

Well, there are plenty of them! I want to get more into the world of JavaScript frameworks, I want to improve in designing the user interface. I also plan to learn how to develop simple games using HTML5 and JavaScript. But these are actually professional goals, right?

Personal goals for this year are to move to a new apartment, to make a few trips (Iceland, Masurian lakes, Tatra Mountains, Bohemian Forest), to finish the game Kingdom Come Deliverance and meet at least part of all the professional goals.

Well, good luck with that.