Daniel Hengeveld: I Look Forward to People Embracing Stability Rather Than Changing Tools Rapidly
Reactive Conference is bringing you an interview with one of our speakers Daniel Hengeveld.
What’s your personal elevator pitch?
I’m a creative programmer that’s worked on a wide variety of projects, from low-level server code to UI-heavy JS apps. I try to do a wide variety of things in my professional and personal life, because I think that gives me a fresh perspective when solving problems.
How did you end up being a web developer?
I had always played around with programming and the web when I was younger, but I didn’t think I’d ever do it professionally. When I moved to LA after college, I got a job at a small magazine, and they needed some help with their CMS. I knew some of the skills I needed, and taught myself the rest on the job. My next job after that was at a tech startup, and I’ve been making software ever since.
What is the most important project you’re currently working on?
The most important project I’m working on is the Atom editor. I joined the journey to creating it after it was already in progress, but I can talk a bit about the journey from R&D to a product.
Atom had been under development for a couple years with a very small team. We were very ambitious, and as you can imagine, the scope of a text editor project can be as big as the world if you let it. What we didn’t have was a target release date.
When we finally agreed on a date to show the editor to the public, it was like magic — we were forced to make hard decisions about what was really essential and what could be addressed later. Even though the Atom alpha that was released last February was much less polished than the Atom 1.0 of today, it was good that we shipped it. We found out very quickly what aspects of editor were important to our most passionate users, and were able to focus our roadmap in a much more productive way.
There have been plenty of technical challenges along the way, of course. We’re continuously working on performance in ways typical to most large software projects — concerns about memory, object allocation, interacting with GC, as well as the unique challenges of the web platform. Fortunately we only have to target one browser and JS runtime, and we have a good relationship with the people that work on it.
I think the most interesting aspect of Atom’s journey to me has been reacting to the needs of the package developer community. We had a good idea of what kind of extension points we needed to provide, but people are creative and have jobs to do, so these APIs were immediately pushed to their limits. Fortunately, since all the community packages on atom.io are open source, we could analyze how our whole developer community was using our APIs as we updated and improved them for 1.0.
Is there any issue in web development world that should be fixed asap?
I like to focus on the positive, so let me say that I look forward to the field maturing and more people embracing stability and predictability rather than changing tools and frameworks rapidly. :)
What will you speak about at Reactive 2015?
I plan to speak on the evolution and potential future of view systems in Atom’s core and its package ecosystem.
What do you expect from the conference?
I expect to learn some new things, and to meet a lot of smart people.
