Interview with Janko Jovanovic, Janko at Warp Speed

Web developer Janko Jovanovic is the owner of Janko at Warp Speed and knows a lot about web development on a Windows platform and web development for the front-end. He specializes in ASP.NET, C#, Transact SQL, LINQ, WCF, jQuery and XHTML & CSS. This young man from Serbia has written tons of tutorials and other articles about web development. Catch Janko on twitter and read through his articles. He is a perfect candidate for an interview on Fuel Your Coding. Enjoy the answers Janko gives to the following questions.

Are you a freelancer?

Currently no, but I was working as a freelance developer earlier.

What is the best part about being a freelancer?

Freelancing has its own pros and cons, but for me it was a freedom of planning, organizing and decision making.

What are your best methods for finding/attracting clients?

Probably the exposure in the community, be it online or offline. If you run a blog or if you are active in niche forums, groups or speak at public events you position yourself as an expert and improve your chances to attract clients. They usually turn to people they have heard of.

How did you get started in your field? Did you study something in particular or are you self-taught?

I studied “Information technology in Business” and gained MCSD certificate about same time, which gave me broad knowledge not only in enterprise development but also in working with clients, project management basics and understanding of the full project life-cycle. However, I actually started to work some ten years before my studies, when I was 13 years old.
Apart from development I am very interested in web design. I’m an artist at heart, drawing and painting since childhood. My talent and artistic skills gave me an opportunity to bring computers and art together and I started with web design, illustrations, digital paintings and so on.
So I am both self-taught and educated.

Please tell us more about your programming background and what made you become a developer?

There is one person that is to blame for me becoming a developer and that is my father. He was working as a programmer (an “old school” programmer) in the late 80s and I was fascinated by programming. Eventually he bought us a computer, it was PC 286 that worked on 16MHz and had 512KB of RAM. Then I started to work with Clipper and dBase III+. Just a few years later I was freelancing with my cousin and we continued to freelance for a couple of years. Twenty years has passed since then and it’s actually sweet to remember those times.

What do you feel are the most important skills for a designer to have/develop?

I believe that good problem solving by thinking outside the box and being open-minded is what can make you better. Technologies, tools and patterns can always be learned, but more important is the way you use them and the way you think when you use them.

Where do you go for development inspiration, where do your ideas come from?

For me, getting an inspiration for development or design is the same as getting an inspiration for painting. I like to watch and study the world around me and try to understand it in many ways. That helps me think wider about problems and find solutions besides patterns. Reviewing different applications and websites, reading various articles and discussing things with friends also help me get inspired. Music also, especially hard-rock.

How do you typically start a new project?

Since I work within teams and often as a team leader I have more or less clear rules on how to start and run a project. Once we get user requirements from clients we start with analysis, decomposition, estimation and so on. This is a demanding and time consuming process, but our goal is to understand and describe the system the best we can. After the planning phase we move to development, testing and deployment. Basically I follow MSF Process model, but lately I’m trying to move to Scrum. Since switching to Scrum is not easy and fast I’m still in the middle of transition ?

Do you have any favorite websites for interacting with others in the development community?

I mostly use twitter because I have the ability to interact fast with most of my friends and colleagues. There are a couple of blogs that I read and comment on regularly.

What does your typical day look like?

I get up very early and due to the fact that my kids show no mercy, I am already tired once I get to work. Just kidding. At work, I am usually occupied with everyday issues and the time spent there always runs fast. Afternoon is when my wife and I spend time with the kids. Usually play a game or take a walk. Once they fall asleep (and that is the toughest daily task) I usually write blog posts, read interesting articles, try out some new concepts and if it’s not too late, sometimes even paint.

What are your 5 favorite sites online?

It will be tough to pick out just five of them, but let’s say it’s jquery.com, smashingmagazine.com, nettuts.com, visitmix.com and dotnetkicks.com

Who, in the online world, would you say has had the biggest influence on you?

I’d say two of them: Steven Snell and his blog on vandelaydesign.com and Scott Guthrie with his blog and sessions on public events. Both provided valuable information that helped me start my own blog and determine my direction with it.

What are the tools you couldn’t live without?

Basically I easily adopt new tools/technologies, but I definitively work to the bone VisualStudio, Visio, ArtRage, Firebug, InkScape, Google Mail & Reader, Twitter, my drawing pencils set, my watercolors set, Wacom tablet… there might be some more but I can’t remember now.