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Chris Heilmann is an International Developer Evangelist for Yahoo! Developer Network, including YUI, Yahoo!'s suite of JavaScript libraries. There's not much that Chris hasn't done in the crazy world of technology. He's been involved with the Internet since the days when they thought the World Wide Web was flat! He's worked in Germany, the States and for the last few years in the UK, and he has always made sure the people who came after him could see how he had worked so they could do it themselves.
I caught up with him at Mashed08 to see what he was up to:
About 9 months ago, I interviewed Chris in a busy cafe on Shaftsbury Avenue in London, right next to the Yahoo! offices. After hours of transcription and with the job only half done, one of those cataclysmic, seismic, apocalyptic confluences of sod's law and my own buffoonery meant the rest of the interview was lost to the ages. What remains, then, is this substantial but incomplete conversation, at the end of which, like the premature death of a rock star, one can only ask what if! (Actually, I think the missing portion was Chris and myself getting giddy about bands we'd seen and music we liked, and I think it went untranscribed because it was untranscribable. We'll never know!). To some extent this is a period piece: Chris' job has moved on since then. Still, it's a good read:
Craig Smith: Do you get out to Sunnyvale much?
Chris Heilmann: I used to work for Yahoo! Answers so last year I went four times, and I’m going back soon for a summit, but I’m based in London and I working in London mainly, but that doesn’t mean I’m not talking to the guys in the States, especially for the YUI stuff. I’m the European Extension for the YUI team, so when people find and report problems here, I feed it back to the YUI team. If it’s good enough, it will be implemented in the next release.
CS: And I seem to recall you saying at Hack Day that the team in States are in an underground bunker somewhere.
CH: Well, that was a bit a joke, they work in cubicles. They are very connected to the other people over there as well. In Europe, we give them another testing environment. We have many different European countries where people have other browsers and set-ups and other needs than they have in the States, and some of the styles of the European pages are completely different to the American ones, so the UK and Europe is a different way to test things. I’m going to Hong Kong at the end of the month to give a talk at a summit there and its going to be interesting because when you look at some of the Asian sites they are so different it’s unbelievable.
CS: I think we’ve all got a lot to learn from each other – their design skills are out of the world
CH: Basically when you're building a site, an Asian designer would live with it here, except for the 12-year olds who would go ‘what are you on about’. It’s quite impressive how different cultures work. Also in terms of accessibility and usability, for example we see red as a warning colour while in China it’s good luck. Good luck that your email is invalid – it just doesn’t work.
CS: So you’ve been with Yahoo! in the UK for about a year?
CH: About a year.
CS: And you were in the States before that?
CH: I lived in the States in 2000 in LA and San Francisco working for eToys. I came back to the UK by chance. I was hired in Munich by eToys to lead their team over there and then they sent me to the UK for training. During the first week of training I said, ‘This is old stuff, when do we get the new one’. And they said ‘What do you mean, the new one?’ It was HTML 3.2 back then and I’m like ‘HTML 4.0 and CSS’ and they were like ‘Oh, we didn’t cover that yet’ and I’m like ‘it’s a shame because it's already usable’. So I became a trainer after two weeks and stayed in the UK for two months, and they sent me over to LA for a three week stint which became seven months, and in those seven months I heard that the Munich office was going bankrupt. So when I came back I had to work in the UK and that’s how I ended up here.
CS: I remember you saying trainers should be paid as much as programmers, if not more, because they need programming skills and they also need to be able to explain things clearly. Now I see how you came to that point of view!
CH: (Laughs) Possibly. I think it’s a disgrace that teachers and trainers don’t get paid much. I had a lot of training with other companies and mentoring systems. Finding trainers who aren’t disillusioned is really hard.
CS: My mum was a primary school teacher, so I’m a big advocate for teachers and teacher’s rights.
CH: The main job of a teacher or trainer is to motivate people to be interested, to entice them to play with the stuff themselves once the training is over. But most of the corporate training is two weeks and then the student is expected to use their new knowledge on a product, but they don’t get any extra time to play with it. It’s a shame.
CS: So, going back to Germany, how did you get into computing?
CH: I lived in a three thousand inhabitant village, and it was so boring I had to make contact with the outside. So I started on the demo, cracking and hacking scene, sending floppy disks Europe- and worldwide. Later on, I co-ran a BBS with a friend of mine. That was basically how I connected with the world.
CS: When was this?
CH: 1988 through to 1994, something like that. My first job was working as a travel agent. And then I asked to be put back for a year for National Service, which we still have in Germany, but they said no, because I’d got ‘A’ Levels in Physics and they said I had to be a soldier, you’ve got to go to the Army. And I refused to go to the Army and went for the Red Cross instead, and worked with handicapped people for a year, driving children around, Meals on Wheels and, later on, looking after a group of handicapped people for the whole day - going shopping with them, building things with them.
And after that, I entered the job market again. I couldn’t be bothered going back to the travel agent so I went to the local radio station, put my CV on the desk and said, ‘I like to talk, do you have a job’. I became a trainee, so I had to do pizza delivery, and after two months I became a freelancer and worked at a radio station as a newscaster and journalist and later an audio engineer for two years. And during those two years I found the Internet. And basically it was like, this is cool because it’s a media I can support without having to pay money. Whereas if you want to be on television or on radio you have to rob a bank, so the Internet is immediate feedback, it’s 360 feedback with your end users and it’s amazing and I just wanted to be part of it. And I did a small website for myself and some for local companies. And in 1997 I think it was, BMW asked me if I want to be a contractor for a short project for them, and I did part of their Intranet, and once I’d developed my CV I could go to different agencies in Munich. And that’s how I started.
CS: When was that?
CH: Oh, 1998, and 1999 I went to America for the first time.
CS: And what was the state of play of the web in Germany at that time. I mean, it came out of Switzerland, which is not a million miles away!
CH: It was a hard start. I remember I started my small company, I said I was a web designer and they asked me if that was something artistic, whether it was knitting webs or something. I tried to get it in as an art because that would mean I got loads of money back from my tax, but that didn’t turn out. So I explained to them it was the Internet and computers and connecting people worldwide.
But Germany wasn’t bad. We had that eCommerce flood about 1998 – 1999. There were a lot of eCommerce products, a bit like home order television and similar things. In the Munich area it was always rather good, there was lots of design agencies like Razorfish. And Pixelpark were big in Hamburg. We were not that far behind. It was quite interesting to see that Ireland and the UK were quite fast as well. Ireland were good in bank software and online banking. And the States was a different issue again. But on the other hand, I always found the working ethic of Europeans is completely strange to Americans when you get over there. ‘I’m going to stay another half hour because I want to finish this off’, ‘what do you mean? You can do it tomorrow.’ It’s a blanket statement, but I found a lot more dedication in people in Europe, they want to find it out for themselves and come back next morning and do it for people. They have that dedication in the States, as well, but their way of working in cubicles and smaller teams doesn’t really help. Whereas if you have a team like we have here - we have a dedicated web development team where sharing is normal, so if you have a problem you can walk around and ask and in five minutes time you will have two people at your desk saying ‘that’s like that’, it’s done. In America, it’s a bit trickier because people are more separated into different groups. It’s different in small companies of course: at eToys was the same thing – ‘you guys do that and don’t touch the other’ so that’s a bit of a change of culture.
CS: I always think that companies as big as yours work best in small modules, little start-ups within the company.
CH: It depends where you are. Whatever works is fine. In our case, we have a core team who get allocated to different products as and when they are needed. It also prevents people from getting frustrated with one project for too long. Or for example when you give someone an important project and someone else a less important project, they other guy will get smug about it over the years and be like, ‘oh, I’m the guy for this product and I’m not going to share it with anyone else because it means I’m special’. And I think that is something we need to avoid at any costs, not speaking for Yahoo! but for the whole market.
The main problem we have is a lot of people in companies are disillusioned with contractors coming in and being the diva to solve all their problems rather than someone who will actually build something that someone can use once they leave. Too many hit and run developments have been happening in the last few years and people don’t do any handovers because it means that if the product breaks they will come back to them for another contract. I couldn’t work like that because it makes me sick. I want to finish things and when they are done then I hand them over and I don’t want to touch them again. I want to go on to the next one. So my idea of building and programming is that you programme not for yourself but for the next guy that has to maintain the code after you. And that sometimes means cutting back on clever code and really amazing features but it actually means someone can fix it in a week and not call you up at 3 am.
In September, talking at a Flash conference – I don’t know any Flash but they wanted me there as a developer – they were talking about how JavaScript emancipated itself from being something that looked dirty on your CV to becoming a really looked-after skill set, so I thought I would put that in the minds and heads of the Flash developers in the same way, because it’s time that Flash becomes known as a development platform and not just as something that’s beautiful and flashy. There’s some really clever people out there, and I think it’s a shame that not many of them come out as developers. They’re like, ‘We’re Flash developers' – no, you’re just developers, you use Flash much like you would use Swing, or would use any other interface.
CS: We’re doing well with Flex and AIR books. We were at Flash on the Beach last year, and people were craving those serious developer books.
CH: People like Aral Balkan in the UK working together with Steve Webster, who has written all sorts of Flash and ActionScript books. He’s just an amazing developer: it doesn’t matter what kind of language you put in front of him, he would grasp it. And that’s a skill set I wouldn’t expect from a Flash developer because of the way it has been branded in the past. And its just a shame that if an interface is cool and easy to sell that people fall into the trap of becoming that interface deliverer rather than an interface developer.
