Thomas Fuchs
Who’s Thomas?
I’m a tinkerer. I like to explore possibilities, especially those the other people say are impossible to do.
Small intro about script.aculo.us Framework?
A couple of years ago I’ve worked on a project and wanted Flash-like animations, but without all the awkwardness (Flash needs to be precompiled, it’s proprietary, difficult to integrate tightly into HTML, etc.).
So I came up with the idea of doing JavaScript-based animations with DOM elements. Having programmed some game engines (for fun) in the past, it was quite easy to apply the lesson learned there to JavaScript. Turns out that it works really well, as browsers are fast enough to handle those real-time animations.
What does your typical day look like?
When I’m not travelling, which I do a lot, I’m getting up at 10am or so, take a bath (love bubble baths!) and then I’ll make my way to my office (which is a short subway ride away). I do a lot of projects together with my wife Amy Hoy (we have a company together), and also some consulting, so it’s pretty varied what I do. In the end it almost always has something to do with JavaScript however.
We sometimes work late, but try not to do that too often. :)
What are the tools you couldn’t live without?
My MacBook Pro, and my 30″ Cinema Display when I’m in the office. The MacBook Pro is perfect for me, because it’s extremely snappy (souped up version with SSD), plus I can test/run Windows in VMs, with no performance hit. I use TextMate, Photoshop and Git/Github a lot.
What do you do in your free time?
Moves, reading and some stranger hobbies like old video game consoles (I do like to watch speedruns, too). I like those old systems for what developers did on it, despite the really limited hardware.
Current favorite apps?
I couldn’t live without Mailplane, which is a Google Mail wrapper application for OS X.
What OSs do you prefer?
Mac OS X. I used to tinker a lot with Linux, but those times are past.
Favorite: Languages (PHP, Ruby), JS Framework?
I love Ruby, which changed my development life from the ground up. And I also love JavaScript, which is an amazing language and completely undervalued. Actually, Ruby and JavaScript have a lot in common. So I guess I like dynamic, object-oriented scripting languages a lot. My favorite JavaScript framework is Prototype (disclaimer: which I helped develop).
It makes JavaScript programming so much cleaner (and more like Ruby!).
The things or source that inspired you?
Ruby on Rails proved to be a big inspiration of how I see code. I come from a long history of using “enterprise” software, and the concept and design of Ruby on Rails was a real eye opener.
I do like to browse the source code of various JavaScript projects (like jQuery, Raphael, Sizzle and Dojo) and I’m amazed and amused sometimes by the various styles of programming in those, while picking parts that are good and useful for my own projects. There’s so much to learn from source code.
Your personnel projects and goals for 2010?
My wife and I want to launch a second software-as-a-service product in 2010 (next to Freckle, our time tracking application), and I want to get Scripty2 out of alpha into a 1.0 release, and we’ve a couple of still secret (ha!) projects lined up.
