The Geek Talk

Who is Viktor Klang?

I’m a senior systems analyst at Yves Rocher during the day, where i do Java development, system architecture, project management and other Swiss-army-knife duties, and at night I wear a colorful spandex outfit and fight crime… and contribute code, thoughts and time to the Akka project as well as the Atmosphere project. I’m currently writing a chapter on Actors using Akka for an educational Scala book in Swedish which will hopefully be out in stores before the end of the year.

Ruby or Scala? and why?

Truth be told I don’t feel I have as much experience with Ruby to make any fair choice here. But I’m a static typing kind of guy even though I sometimes find myself deep into JavaScript I’ll have to go with Scala. A wise person said recently on Twitter that all large systems built with dynamic languages end up having a poorly implemented type system bolted on, and I’d like to think of static types as compiler-verified unit-tests.
Aside from that I’m very much in love with Scala as a language, it’s lovely mix between the pragmatic and the academic, it’s intriguing way of always make me think _before_ I start typing _anything_.

About Lift?

Actually, Lift was the reason I started doing Scala back in 2007. In all honesty I must have had the worst commit-loudness ratio so far this millenium. But the Lift community is a great group of people with a lot of different backgrounds and inputs to all sorts of things. Lift as a product is really interesting from many angles and I love how David has borrowed the best features and the lessons learned from other frameworks and has tried to really take advantage of Scala to enable high productivity – low boilerplate for the user of the framework. I’d really encourage people to have a serious look at Lift if they haven’t already done so.

What does your typical day look like?

I usually get up 7.50, shower, get dressed, go to work. Then I pick some breakfast up in the cafeteria and go to my office for some breakfast and e-mail catchup. After that I attend the daily Sprint meeting and synchronize statuses with my colleagues. At the moment I’m “mentoring” a new recruit in parallel with my regular tasks. Then I do development or meetings or talking to users until lunch, which is surprisingly often sushi (love that sashimi!). Then it’s Java all day long until about 18:00 where I punch out and go home for some dinner. After dinner I catch up on e-mails and hack on Akka for an hour or so, then I chill out with the missus until about midnight when it’s time to go to bed.

What do you do in your free time?

Mostly coding, spending time with the missus, hanging out with friends. But I also organize SoftPub – a bi-weekly pub event where developers from a lot of different companies get together to have a beer and talk. I’ve very recently started playing the guitar, which I find is a really mentally relaxing activity that I hope to do more often.
Other than that I have a real sweet spot for fly-fishing although I rarely take the time to actually go fishing.

Current favorite apps?

SBT (Simple Build Tool), it’s simply amazing.
GMail, honestly wouldn’t want to be without it.
Instant Rimshot (http://instantrimshot.com/), office irony would be very pale without it,

What OS do you prefer?

Definitely OS X, I’m too old to recompile kernels and I never bought into the Vista marketing.
Android seem to shape up nicely though, I’m currently on an HTC Magic running the CyanogenMOD Android distribution.

Small picture for your Workplace?

Favorite: Language, JS Framework?

I have a small crush on jQuery, sometimes I catch myself giggling like a schoolgirl because it just looks so damn slick. I just need to get myself around to migrate to 1.4.x, got quite a few plugins that needs some upgrade-love.

Name something that has inspired you recently?

I’m constantly inspired by the people I follow on Twitter. It’s truly amazing to be surrounded by all these geniuses, it always puts things into perspective. I also have a colleague, John Nilsson, who always manages to come up with interesting thoughts and papers.

What are your personnel projects and goals for 2010?

One of my bigger goals is to spend more quality time with my missus, who is a big part of my life and a great support in my coding adventures.

Aside from that I’m aiming to help put Akka on the world map – It’s a truly amazing piece of technology, and Jonas and the other guys are doing a great job refining it.

Then we have the Scala book project , I’m hoping to attend some conferences and will hopefully speak at a few of them.