Giovanni Bielleris a freelancewebdeveloperand designer in love with coding and web solutions. He has been working with us since 2013, doing a lot of amazing projects. Giovanni graduated from the University of Pavia in communication, innovation and multimedia. He then started working for different smaller and bigger companies near Milan. After improving his development skills, he started his own business moving back to his hometown near the mountainside. From Champoluc, he manages different projects while working also as a ski instructor during the winter season.
What excites or interests you about coding?
Everytime i think about why I code and why I love, it I end up thinking that I started by studying subjects related to marketing, communication and design. So why did I start to code? Simple, my job at the time gave to me the possibility to approach coding and I quickly fell in love with it!
The first thing that I noticed about coding was order. Everything had a specific position. There was not chaos. Well… chaos was present, but only caused by “dirty” code. Proper coding appealed to me straight away because I love precision and pixel perfect things; the founding principle of the coding world is cleanness.
Another important aspect that pushed me towards coding was the variety of applications that were possible. For example, you may have completely different needs, such as the wish to implement a page view tracker or having a web page to show your new products. You can satisfy these requirements using exactly the same language and the same logical pattern. The results will be totally different but the source stays exactly the same.
the founding principle of the coding world is cleanness
Last but not least, the enormous community of Front-End Developers is growing at an exponential rate. Over the last five years, the change has occurred at the speed of light: new standards, new companies that call the shots in the web world, 785.637 js frameworks (false data but likely 🙂 ), and millions of GitHub projects with developers from all over the world who share their coding experiences.
In a nutshell, coding is awesome! It’s a really cheap but powerful tool. You can create a brand new web page with the worst pc in the world, and with just a txt file renamed as html. Just using your mind and your logical skills you can build strong and winning applications that can change people’s lives.
Can you describe your workflow when you create a web page?
First of all I analyze the design that was provided by the designer , and mentally divide the various areas of the future blocks of code. If there are assets such as images I extract them from the .psd file, to later add them to the /img folder of the project.
The next step is to create a project folder with the basic files and directories that I need. Usually a standard structure for an HTML project has an index.html file and some folders such as /css, /js, or /img. CSS and JS folders have their main.css and main.js files.
Finally I’m ready to start coding. I first open the index.html file, and start writing down the structure of the project. Then, I add all the html parts that will compose the page (menu, sliders, images, texts, forms, etc…).
At this point, I have to give style & life to the page. I need to connect the html to the the main.css; the main.js file will help me for this purpose. Main.css will contain all the styling rules of the page. Main.js , on the other hand, will give me the possibility to add interactions to the page, such as, for example, intercepting clicks of users to open a popup.
Obviously this is a simplified process. The bigger and more ambitious a project is, the more complex it will be to build the application or website. And at the end, when you are starting a new huge project made with the last modern dev stack, and you feel like a boss, it comes the Javascript Fatigue 🙂
What’s a cool project that you’ve recently worked on?
I collaborate with Waynaut, one of the coolest Italian startups! Their project of multimodal travel aAPI is really cool and ambitious.
In late 2016, we built the first example of a multimodal booking. This really enjoyable experience of booking allows to get on your smartphone, in just one click, all the tickets of the different means of transportation you’ll need for your travels.
We decided to use React for the front-end development. It was the first experience with this new library that the guys over at Facebook decided to share with the world for new fast and strong applications. I love to write javascript and discovering a new way of thinking javascript development gave me a lot of inspiration.
Now we’re planning to refactor all the front-end projects with React and Redux. It will be a new interesting adventure!
What are the things you like about the developer tools you use?
Developer tools are, of course, my best friends during coding sessions. Without them I think that doing a simple debug could be hell.
From the early versions of Firebug to date, a lot of changes have been made and the continuous progress makes it even better. For example, every month you can experiment a new feature. You may not use it after a month, but you know it’s there to help you.
Specifically, I am a big fan of Chrome. I love the way in which all elements are organized and the countless possibilities that you can have (I think I don’t use even 20% of its power). Moreover, anything doesn’t require any additional components, that’s wonderful.
Who inspires you in the front-end community?
More than people, companies and organizations that are changing the web world inspire me. I’m speaking about super realities such as Google and Facebook, that create new standards everywhere and that help people all over the world reach useful contents and informations that completely change their lives.
Non-profit organizations, such as Mozilla, one of the fathers of the modern web are also pretty inspiring. I love to think that they’re all just a big family 🙂
Actually, all the startups, freelancers and web companies in the world inspire me every day. They are just developers like me, who love to share coding experiences and help someone else in some other place in the world.
If you want to understand better what I’m talking about, try to explore a few GitHub projects or GitHub issue trackers, you will see people coming from Japan and Iceland speaking about a new feature to add to their project. They have actually never met AFK (AwayFromKeyboard), but they are friends and they contribute to one of the largest communities I have ever seen.
Do you have any personal projects?
I keep telling myself that I should develop some ideas but in the end I never do. I‘m happy to develop the ideas of other people. Perhaps I just love coding so much 🙂 But one day the Big Idea will come! I will let you know.
What’s your favorite feature of Internet Explorer?
I believe it is Microsoft Edge 🙂 No jokes, when I started to code IE6 was still one of the most platforms requested by the clients. In a period in which Firefox and later Chrome were already light years ahead, it was really exhausting. You would build a beautiful and sleek web page in Firefox and then you opened it in IE6 and it would be totally broken. Of course, the developer was to blame, but still, backward compatibility was terrible.
Now everything has changed, the requested compatibility is more manageable and Microsoft invested a lot in development and research for new technologies and tools for developers. Just think of great products such as Visual Studio Code or the Developers Tools of Microsoft Edge.
Microsoft Devil’s time is up. It’s strange to say but nowadays there are other enemies of free and common web… You know who I’m talking about!
Thank you for your time, Gio!