Fixate on Code | Weekly interviews on how to write better code, for frontend developers

Over the past 6 months Larry Botha has had the privilege of chatting with some of the best devs in the industry, learning what makes them tick, how they’ve gotten to where they are, and how they develop their skills. Here's a summary of the some of the biggest takeaways from Season 1.

Chris is the creator of CSS-Tricks, a co-founder of Codepen, and a host on the popular dev podcast, ShopTalk. With Chris’s involvement in making CSS, Javascript, and SVG more accessible to developers, Chris has had a profound impact on both everyone using the web, and everyone building for the web.

John has been building for the web since the early 90’s. With his timeless article, The Dao of Web Design, his book, Developing with Web Standards, and as co-founder of the Web Directions conference series, John has made a massive impact on the lives of designers and developers the world over.

Rachel is an award-winning cartoonist and graphic novelist who now cuts her teeth as an expert on web animations. With her webanimationweekly.com newsletter and slack.animationatwork channel, courses on Lynda.com and Frontend Masters, and her latest book, Animation At Work, Rachel is an authority on improving user experience through using motion on the web.

Ada is a developer advocate and senior developer at Samsung. Previously a PlayStation developer, Ada now dedicates her time to pushing the limits of WebVR, and experimenting with client-side APIs.

Before becoming a full-stack Javascript developer, Aimee spent 15 years as a competitive figure skater. The grit and hard work required for her former career has made Aimee a force in the web development world. With her work on the JsJabber podcast, creating developer meetups, and speaking on stage, Aimee is passionate about helping junior developers make careers for themselves.

David works on Microsoft's Visual Studio Live Share, a service that enables developers from anywhere in the world to collaboratively code, debug, and more from the comfort of their own Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code editors.

Jeremy is the founder of ClearLeft - a passionate group of UX and digital strategists based in the UK - where Jeremy now heads research and development. He is the author of a number of books on web development, including his latest book, Resilient Web Design, has been seen on stages like An Event Apart and South By South West, and is also the creator of the world’s first Science Hack Day!

Jake is a developer advocate for Google Chrome where he speaks regularly about Service Worker, application performance, and offline-first apps. Before joining the team at Google, Jake worked at Lanyrd honing his performance skills, and before that worked at the BBC creating an inclusive experience for users with disabilities.

Kent is a one-man JavaScript task force! While working at PayPal, Kent creates a lot of open source projects like Downshift and Glamorous, and makes contributions to Webpack, Babel, and ReactJS, to name just a few. In addition to his open source work, Kent created the Angular Air and JavaScript Air podcasts, runs a short podcast called 3 minutes with Kent, and writes about Javascript on a weekly basis on his blog and newsletter. Kent is an instructor on both Egghead.io and Frontend Masters, is a Google Developer Expert, and represents PayPal on the TC39, which is the ECMAScript Committee that maintains the JavaScript language standard.

Luke, a serial open-source contributor, and partner at HumbleSpark in Chicago, has a burning passion for Elm. Luke is also the creator of Ellie - The In-Browser Live Editor for Elm! When not speaking at conferences around the world, and producing audio and video, Luke can be found discussing Elm with the ever-expanding community.

Juho is the creator of SurviveJS - a project that promises to take you from apprentice to master in both ReactJS and Webpack. On top of that, Juho is also a core contributor to Webpack! When not writing books or code, Juho can be found on stage at conferences around Europe, having already added KharkivJS, HelsinkiJS, Web Dev And Sausages, and ReactJS Barcelona to the notches on his belt.

Tereza is a front-end developer obsessed with the Elm language. NoRedInk, a platform helping millions of students learn how to write, nabbed her after spotting her skills. Tereza is also the creator of Elm Plot - a graph plotting library built in Elm.

Peter is a Corporate Entrepreneur at MobileLife, the innovation hub of Danske Bank in Copenhagen. Peter helps maintain Assetgraph, an optimisation framework for web pages and applications, and is also a core contributor to MochaJS. On top of that, Peter was also involved in organising CopenhagenJS, a monthly meetup for lovers of all things javascript.

Ruth loves creating art with code, and spreading the love for MIDI! She’s also a serial conference speaker, a skilled wielder of the Web Audio API, and leverages her skills as a developer for VJing. If you haven’t visited Ruth’s codepen and experienced her awesome audio visual pens, what are you waiting for?!

Kyle has a simple recipe for developer success: understand the problem before you try to fix it. With Kyle's widely read "You Don't Know JS" book series, learning JavaScript more deeply is something every developer can and should take on as a challenge. Not only is Kyle an author, but also a teacher, speaker, and chronic contributor to the world of open source software. Kyle offers corporate training workshops for JavaScript and is currently working on a new startup to take developer education to the next level.

Anjana is a philosophy major and English teacher turned computational linguistics aficionado. After completing graduate studies in speech technology, machine learning, and computer assisted language learning, Anjana joined the engineering team at UberResearch in Germany, where she is implementing a query language that interfaces with scientific research funding data.

Jonathan is the creator of the influential SMACSS methodology for writing scalable and modular C-S-S. He has worked his magic at Xero, Yahoo!, and Shopify, and has appeared on stage at conferences such as Generate, CSSConf, and the Smashing Conference. With 3 highly-acclaimed books, Jonathan has - a - knack for influencing devs around the world and earning the respect of the top people in the industry.

Harry Roberts is a heavy-weight in the world of front-end architecture. While working at Sky, Harry began developing approaches to writing manageable and scalable CSS, revolutionising the way people think about front-ends. Harry now consults for a long list of companies like Google, The UN, The BBC, and Deloitte.

Sara is a freelance front-end web developer, author, and speaker from Lebanon. She was named Developer of the Year in the 2015 .net magazine awards, and awarded a Web Platform Award from O’Reilly. Sara is the author of Codrops CSS Reference, and is the co-author of Real-Life Responsive Web Design, which focuses on smart “responsive” workflows, effective UX patterns, and powerful front-end techniques.

Amjad is the CEO and founder of repl.it, a simple and reliable cloud coding interface supporting more than 30 languages; built to assist teachers in the classroom, and make prototyping painless for software engineers. Amjad was also tech lead on the Javacript infrastructure team at Facebook, worked at Codecademy at its founding stages, and even spent some time at Yahoo! before that. On top of that, Amjad is also a core contributor to BabelJS and ReactNative.

Chris works at Microsoft on the Edge team, heading developer experience and evangelism. Prior to Microsoft, Chris helped push HTML5 support forward at Mozilla, and before that was a front-end architect at Yahoo! where he helped build products and train other Yahoo!ers. Beyond that, Chris has been seen dozens of times giving talks at conferences all around the world, has been involved in writing a number of books, and has contributed to most every major web development blog or publication you can think of - all in the name of making the web better.

Safia works independently, making an impact on businesses with her skills in data analysis, front-end development, and technical writing. Safia is a serial open source contributor, and is the creator of Legit - a command line tool to make adding licenses to projects and files a cinch. On top of that, Safia is a regular speaker at dev conferences.

Brian is the lead user experience engineer at Salesforce. More importantly, Brian is the first person in history to leverage highly educated stop-motion hedgehogs to make functional programming accessible to javascript developers! He is a regular speaker at conferences, an author, a podcast host, and a teacher who has a knack for making complicated content fun to learn.

Garth is a designer and developer with a passion for all things open source. He is a front-end developer on Adobe’s PhoneGap team and has appeared as a speaker on conference stages across the world. When he’s not busy at Adobe, he spends his time discussing the power of design and how to improve designer / developer collaboration.