Episode 26 – Kevin Mack on UI, UX, and mentoring new developers

Kevin’s Bio:
Kevin Mack is a developer, designer, and consultant. His area of focus is on creating user interfaces and experiences for large-scaling websites. Kevin is also a co-founder and co-organizer of The Columbus Web Group where he actively participates in growing and educating the community centered around design, development, best practices and standards for the web. You can find him on Twitter (@nicetransition), LinkedIn, YouTube, CodePen,  or GitHub.
 
Episode Highlights and Show Notes:
Arsalan: Today we have Kevin Mack on mentoring developers. I really wanted to have you on the podcast because your different perspective. You do a lot of mentoring and teaching, and you focus on a lot of different interfaces and user experiences. So, this should be a nice and unique interview for our listeners. But, before we get into that, I’d like to you to explain to us who you are. Who is Kevin Mack?
Kevin: have a pretty crazy background. I’ve been developing since 1995, but really grew up around art. My mom was an art director at the Washington Post and she always said that I could draw before I could talk. So I grew up around art and started development around twenty years ago and sort of married the two together. So my whole life has been involved with arts, computers, and bringing people together. I love community organizations and just meeting new people and getting involved in new organizations.
Arsalan: is it fair to say that you described yourself as a programmer or software engineer?
Kevin: I focus on building interfaces and I focus on building interfaces and what I do falls between a designer and a developer. I’ve learned a bunch of languages over the years, but primarily I focus on the front end code and the HTMLs, CSS, and JavaScript. On a day-to-day basis, 90% of the code that I’m writing is in CSS and HTML. So I do sometimes call myself a developer, but I’m a UI, UX.
Arsalan: Do you remember your first encounter with programming?
Kevin: Yes, for sure. It’s kind of a funny story. My buddy and I wanted to make websites. We wanted to record clips, post them and share them so that we could have some kind of reference to them later. So started building websites and doing these really silly recordings and posting them up there along with some early day blogs before they were called blogs. I remember watching how the page was rendering and taking some of those concepts in my head. In 1995, there wasn’t all that much to do. I remember all these tables stacking next to each other. Back then you used tables to set up the grids for the layouts of your pages and no one really knew what they were doing. I was just really fascinated.
Kevin: When it really evolved later on to CSS, I remember thinking how cool x values were. The day that I started learning HTML was the day that I got hooked. That’s when I decided that I really wanted to be a developer.
Arsalan: So you were focused on user interfaces and user experiences. You code in HTML and CSS, which are the technologies or programming languages that you need to know if you want to develop a website and hand code it. You also dabble in design. Do you spend a lot of time in Photoshop?
Kevin: Over the past years I have, but recently we’ve switched over to Sketch. It’s an awesome program. The way that you design in Sketch is more closely related to the output and the output being in line with the web browsers. It’s aligned better with today’s technologies and the web browsers, but I do spend a fair amount of time in Photoshop. We always design the content first and how the content is cascading throughout the pages and then from there getting some high-level sketches out there...

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