Designer Interviews

Q. I love your main home landing page on Snook.ca. It says, “I am a father husband developer designer writer speaker entrepreneur I am Jonathan Snook”. For those that don’t know you, and don’t think your statement is enough of a glimpse inside what makes you tick, can you tell us a bit more about yourself, and maybe a bit on why you think those words define you?

A. My splash page was actually inspired by Bryan Veloso’s personal site , which I thought was a great approach. I wanted to have something simple that fed people into the main site and that described me better than just “developer”.

Q.Living in Ottawa, Ontario Canada, you live far from what some would consider the more popular areas of web development and design, can you tell me what it is like being a web developer there and has it effected your business at all?

A.Any city is likely to have a web development community of some size, it just might be a little harder to find. As it turns out, Ottawa has a great community of people including some higher profile folks like the people that run Shopify who are heavily involved in the Ruby community, and Derek Featherstone who is well known for his accessibility work.

There’s plenty of business here but it doesn’t sway my business one way or the other. I have clients from around the world and right here in the city, which has given me a great deal of flexibility.

Q.I would love to know more about your other projects. I am a big fan of Snook.ca/Jonathan, but you also have some other things on the go. What are WithCake.com and Haylia?

A.With Cake was originally a blog site where I talked of my development with CakePHP but it made more sense to have that stuff within Snook.ca. In its place, I put up a free job site for CakePHP developers and companies looking for developers. It’s a simple site to help the community that has helped me.

Haylia is a blogging site specifically targeted to the adoption community. I’ve, unfortunately, let the site lay dormant instead of finishing off the functionality and putting it live. This is on my to-do list for this year and would like to finally open the doors on a project that means a lot to me, having two adopted children myself.

Q.You also have partnered up with some other talented designers and developers to create Sidebar Creative. Can you tell me about the other members of the group and how that came about?

A.Sidebar Creative was an idea that came about a couple years ago between Dan Rubin and Bryan Veloso and then extended to myself and Steve Smith. The initial idea was to establish a collective that could come together to work on larger client projects. In the end, though, we’ve discovered the desire to work on our own projects and have been putting together sites ever since. We’ve also recently taken to putting on a semi-regular traveling workshop. Our first one was in DC last fall and we’re looking to do a 2 or 3 in 2009.

Q.You are one of the few developers that also has a flair for design. Usually, people can do one or the other. Do you have any idea why you are able to do both effectively, and do you enjoy writing advanced code more than designing an interface?

A.I’m always happy to hear people like the design work I do. For me, design is about solving problems and, in that sense, is much the same as coding. I have days where I enjoy designing more than coding and vice versa. It’s one of the reasons I really enjoy freelancing, as it has given me the flexibility to do both.

I’ve also tried to learn from designers I admire, picking up plenty of inspiration from those in the community and learning from people who get it right (whether they’re in web design or not).

Q.You have written for some popular websites, and blogs, including Digital Web Magazine and Sitepoint. Can you tell me about how you were able to get your writing on those prominent sites?

A.As it turns out, it’s relatively easy. Magazines (and book publishers) are hungry for content. If you’ve got a decent topic, get in contact with them. You’ll be surprised at how easy it is.

Q.You have co-authored two books, Accelerated DOM Scripting with Ajax, APIs and Libraries as well as The Art and Science of CSS. What were your experiences like in working on both of those projects? Any interesting or funny stories stick out in your mind?

A.Writing verbosely is hard for me and that’s not a good thing when you’re trying to write 300 pages worth of content. I also heavily underestimated the level of research and testing that would be involved. It’s one thing to build something and do some testing in all browsers to make sure it works. It’s another thing to have to write about the nuance of each step and know that you can prove every word of it. Even then, you’re bound to get something wrong.

With that said, I still have the desire to write again. There’s a sense of pride that comes from having your name on the cover of a book sitting on your bookshelf.

Q.You have also made the conference circuit, having spoken at a variety of events all over the world, including Web Directions North, Future of Web Design, SXSW, @media, and more. Which has been your favorite, and are you planning on continuing to speak and attend such events?

A.It’s hard to pick out a specific event and say it was my favourite. Any time I get a chance to attend an event, it’s a good time. I do wish to continue speaking and attending but am being selective in how often I speak. I’ve already got two events lined up including the Atlantic Internet Marketing Conference in April and An Event Apart in December — plus we’ll have the Sidebar Workshops.

Q.You’ve recently said that you don’t want to be a manager and have employees because of a lack of confidence in your skills in that respect. I have to admit that your admission of that surprised me. It would seem then that you would do better working for a company and be managed then, but earlier in the post, you talk about how you were going to sign up with a company, and realized that you have what you want from your career, so will you always be a one-man company working for yourself?

A.It’s a bit of a conundrum, really. Yes, I’d probably do well working for a company and being managed. I had been doing well in that regards up until I decided to go freelance. Freelance, for me, is about freedom and that’s not something you can easily get when you work for somebody else.

Will I always be a one-man show? Who knows. Maybe things will change in the years to come and maybe they won’t. But as long as I’m happy and I’m still able to feed the family and provide a future for them, I can’t complain.

Q.I have a feeling people interested in balancing design and development skills could learn a fair deal from you. Have you thought about taking time off freelancing to set up a course to teach your skills to others?

A.Currently, I share what I know through speaking, workshops, writing and, of course, the blog. I’d like to break out into doing more screencasts and even podcasting. I’ve been really impressed with Ryan Irelan’s screencasts and have been thinking of doing something similar. Like everything else, it’s a matter of not having enough time in a day.

Q.Book or E-book? You seem to be thinking about both, and while we all know in a perfect world, you would do both, you might only end up with enough time to work on one or the other. Which is more likely to be worked on in 2009 and what would it or they be about?

A.Interestingly enough, both may actually happen in 2009. I’ve put together an outline for a publisher to do another book on JavaScript but it’s still in preliminary stages, so I’m not sure if it’s going anywhere.

I’ve started writing the e-book and I hope I can maintain the momentum to get something published sooner rather than later. I’ve nearly completed the outline, although I suspect it’ll evolve as I build out the entire book. I’ve also begun writing the first chapter. Things are looking good right now but I know that I may ultimately lose interest along the way. We’ll just have to see what happens!

Q.What are some of your favorite books, ones that you’ve enjoyed and would recommend others read?

A.I actually don’t do much book reading, except to review technical books. I’ve always been the kind of person who learns more from doing. So, no recommendations, sorry!