You can never get enough interviews, at least if they are a bit interesting…
This time we got an interview with Mr Jean-Baptiste Jung, a very friendly and ambitious guy with little spare time as he mentioned in his interview.

My name is Jean-Baptiste Jung (Pronounce: Young) and I’m a 27 years old blogger, web developer and web designer from the French-speaking part of Belgium.
I started blogging in 2006 by writing a blog in French about the Python programming language. I quickly dropped this blog and created a new one, Lyxia.org to discuss a lot of nice things about the Internet: Web development, Web design, blogging, WordPress and much more. After this successful experience, I decided to create a similar blog, but in English. This is how, in June 2008, I created Cats Who Code.
I’m also an author on several popular blogs as such as WpHacks, ProBlogDesign and Smashing Magazine where I provide various tutorials, how-tos and lists, mostly about WordPress. I have released some WordPress themes as well, the most popular is called OpenBook and the most recent NYC Theme. Apart from blogging, I work as a web developer in a French company and have a lovely wife and a very cute cat.

What projects are you currently working on?
Lots! I’m making big changes to wprecipes.com with a new design and lots of new featur

es. I’m working on CatsWHoCode.com to improve the blog even more. And at last, I’m on the point to publish my first blog which is not about web dev things!

What technologies will become important in your line of work in the near future?
I don’t have any particular technologies in mind, but I wish I have more spare time so I could learn programming for new devices as such as iPhone or Android. That seems so interesting.

What do you think, is the success of your blog? What would you like to do different if you could start over?
Well, I will not call any of my blog “successful”. They’re not ignored, that’s a sure thing, but they’re far from being at the level of successful blogs as such as SixRevisions.com!
I regret lots of bad or poor articles I wrote on CatsWhoCode. If I started with better posts as such as the ones I write now. CWC will be a lot more popular now.

How did you get the knowledge you master today? Where there seminars, lessons, people, self education or other ways important to become who you are today?
I attended web dev training in France some years ago, and I have learned most of my knowledge myself. I’m so proud of that.
People should realize that if they want, they can. They don’t need a teacher or anything. You want to be a good developer? Search, Learn, Work…and you’ll be good.

Do your blogs, CatsWhoCode and lyxia.org, ask a lot of time? How do you handle that workload?
I have sold Lyxia.org 7 or 8 months ago, but yes my blogs takes lot of time. You see, it is 11PM and I’m answering your interview
I have no problem handling the workload because I like what I do. It’s not a job; it is a hobby, something I do with passion.

What environment do you work on and what applications are important to you?
I mostly work on Macs but I use Linux and Windows (Although I don’t really like it) too. My favorite editors are Vi – because you can find it everywhere – and TextMate because it is powerful and load quickly. I also enjoy Photoshop a lot, but that’s another story

If you could start over again from the moment you left high school, what would you do different?
Definitely, I’d launch Premium WordPress themes the first before Darren Hoyt and Brian Gardner. I would be quite rich by now

Do you have any special hobbies or interests?
Beside blogging and web dev related things, I love travelling, especially to New York City. I’m addicted to that city. Another thing I love are animals. I love doing all I can do to help the Animal Rights cause.

What are your plans for 2010 or the future in general?
Continue to work on my blogs, do my best and maybe, make them successful.

Quick answers, just answer in maximum 5 words when you read these words:

1. Belgium love that country.
2. Apple The best computers!
3. Twitter Follow @catswhocode
4. Cats Meow! I just love them.
5. WordPress My favorite tool to build websites.
6. Framework Use lots of them!
7. Global Warming A tragedy for humans, animals and nature.
8. Programming One of my biggest passions.
9. Internet 10 years I can’t live without!

Thx a lot Mr Jung, we wish you all the best in the future, and tons of success

Well, well, well after our first interview I guess our ball got rollin’ and we are proud to present our second interview.

This time we got in contact with Jacob Gube who is the founder and maintainer of the Six Revisions weblog having over 35K RSS readers. Let’s hope we reach the same amount one day!!!

Jacob Gube, a web developer and designer who works with PHP, .NET, Flash/ActionScript, XHTML, JavaScript/jQuery/MooTools and MySQL, is the creator and primary author of Six Revisions – a weblog the provides practical, useful information for the modern, standards-compliant web designer and web developer.

What projects are you currently working on?

I’m working on a PHP/MySQL social news site start-up that’s self-funded. No release dates yet and there’s still a lot of work to be done! Also, I’m trying to finish up a JavaScript book.

What our the projects, blogs or websites you get inspired by and why is that?

I love Digg because I believe in the concept that you should let your users dictate what should be on the site: whether it’s what site features are needed or what content to display on the front page, and even what advertisements they want to see (which Digg is doing now) — otherwise, you’re just playing a guessing game with your UI and development teams.

I love Smashing Magazine because they provide great stuff on a regular basis and their writing style is in tune with my tastes: comprehensive, easy to understand, and visually appealing.

Projects that inspire me are apps released by 37Signals – they’re simple and minimalist, something that I admire since it’s easier to load things up with 100 useless features rather than create 1 or 2 that are absolutely well-done.

How did you get the knowledge you master today? Where there seminars, lessons, people, self education or other ways important to become who you are today?

That’s a question that can’t be answered in a brief manner since it’s been a long journey to get to a point where I am now. I’ve been a web professional for over 8 years, so as you can imagine there were a lot of trials and tribulations involved in that journey.

I’m mostly self-taught and I think that most of the people that innovate in this industry are self-taught or come from a discipline that is completely remote from web development. I like to use Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman whenever I talk about this topic: both accomplished book authors, creators of A List Apart, people who’ve contributed to the progression of CSS, HTML and web standards — Meyer got a B.A. in History, minoring in English, Zeldman got a B.A. in English (from the same university I went to, which I just found out just now).

Do you consider yourself a lucky guy or did you earn all your success because of yourself?

I think a combination of both. I work very hard, but there are times where you just catch a lucky break.

What environment do you work on and what applications are important to you?

Server: Preferably a LAMP environment, but I’ve worked in WIMP’s (MSSQL) and WAMP’s (Apache/MySQL).

Desktop: Windows Vista (just upgraded from XP this year), it’ll be Windows 7 soon when I get to upgrading. Applications I use are Notepad++, Dreamweaver CS4, and Photoshop, Firebug, Web Developer Toolbar.

Web Applications: Basecamp, Gmail, Freshbooks.

What would you do if this was your last day on earth?

Spend time with my family.

If you could start over again from the moment you left high school, what would you do different?

I would not have spent that much time raiding the Molten Core and Black Wing Lair in World of Warcraft.

Do you have any special hobbies or interests?

I like building computers – it’s an expensive hobby. I also do a bit of photography.

What are your plans for 2010 or the future in general?

I don’t believe in making plans – I let things develop on its own, to grow organically. I have goals, but I’m ready to change and adapt when things precipitate a different way.

Quick answers, just answer in  max 5 words  when you read these words:

1.    PHP – include(/it/in/your/projects.php)
2.   date() – JavaScript 2 will fix it (hopefully)
3.   Barack Obama – no comment
4.   Clowd - Cloud computing with clowns
5.   Windows 7 – They finally did it right
6.   Design – art and science working together
7.   Pair programming – it works with OOP
8.   Design patterns – quantifies effective user interfaces
9.   Delicious – great source of links

Thx a lot for this interview, greetings and hear you next time!!!

A few weeks ago I thought it might be cool to get some interesting guys, which are occupied with projects in PHP, interviewed. And guess what, we got on contact with Mr. Stefan Koopmanschap and he was kind enough to answer all our questions.

Stefan Koopmanschap (‘left’) is a PHP developer, consultant and trainer with an eye for best practices. He works at Unet as (symfony) developer and development team leader. He is a community person and is active in the european PHP community as secretary of the phpBenelux Usergroup as well as in the Symfony community by advocating symfony and as the Community Manager.

Stefan has a wide history in Open Source, having been Support Team Leader for phpBB, documentation translator for Zend Framework and community manager, plugin developer and maintainer plus various other things for symfony.

Stefan is also a best practices advocate. He prefers easy and useful explanations of best practices over the academic and theoretical stuff found in most literature.

Hope you enjoy this interview!

Hello Stefan, first of all, thx for taking the time to answer all our questions.

Can you tell us what projects you are currently working on?

At work I am involved in a big project to build an application that will handle all the administration, provisioning and handling of user accounts etc. for the whole VOiP and connectivity of the services we offer. Aside from that, my main projects are being the Community Manager for symfony and also preparing some new talks for the upcoming conferences.

What technologies will become important in your line of work in the
near future?

Obviously, a big part of my life is currently being ruled by Symfony. It is the framework we use at my work, and because of my involvement in the project it also rules a big part of my private time. Also, other frameworks (such as Zend Framework) take a part of my life for projects I’m working on. For one of my personal development projects I’m also looking into jobqueue/message servers such as Dropr and Gearman. And of course I’m always reading into new technologies to know what they can do, so I can apply that knowledge at a later date.

How did you get the knowledge you master today? Where there seminars, lessons, people, self education or other ways important to become who you are today?

I have no Computer Science background, most of my current knowledge is self-taught or I picked up through experience over the years. Sometimes this is a good thing but often this has been a problem since over the years I have reinvented the wheel. Reading about design patterns for instance I often found out the things I “invented” were really thought about way before me by much smarter people who also considered many more things that I had considered. But by reading about many of these topics and best practices, I’ve picked up quite a bit of knowledge over the years. Combine that with the variation of projects I’ve been involved in and you get the knowledge and experience I’ve picked up.

Do you consider yourself a lucky guy or did you earn all your success because of yourself?

A bit of both. I’ve obviously done a lot of work to get to the point where I am right now, yet I also consider myself a lucky guy. The amount of conferences I get accepted to speaking at these days allows me to travel around the world and meet the brightest minds of the PHP community. I’ve gotten a lot of help, pointers, code reviews etc by people from the community that helped me improve myself. Many of these I did not ask for, yet I’ve found it very helpful.

What environment do you work on and what applications are important to you?

My personal preference is Apple computers with OSX. That environment allows me to work in the most efficient way. A good second choice, and the one I currently use at work, is an Ubuntu linux environment running KDE. The applications I run to help me in my work are an IDE (Zend Studio is my personal favorite), a MySQL frontend (phpMyAdmin is what I usually use), a webserver (Apache) with PHP installed with Xdebug. The main framework of choice would be symfony, with the help of additional components from Zend Framework, PEAR and ezComponents.

If you could start over again from the moment you left high school,  what would you do different?

I would do at least part-time study computer sciences to give me a better theoretical base on the development concepts I work with on a daily basis. But the thing that helps me most is the experience I built up over the years, so aside from that; I would not really do many things in a different way.

Do you have any special hobbies or interests?

Aside from PHP and Open Source, I like listening to music and read books.

What are your plans for 2010 or the future in general?

I want to keep promoting best practices, and hope to improve the general level of knowledge in the PHP community.

Quick answers, just answer in  max 5 words  when you read these words:
1.      IE – the bane of my existence
2.      Apple - the ultimate operating system
3.      Twitter – great communication and network channel
4.      Face book – interesting platform
5.      Analyze – important phase of any project
6.      Layout – I’m more a back end guy
7.      Religion – The root of all evil
8.      Programming - Fantastic source of joy
9.      Internet – Greatest invention ever