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An interview with developer and designer Kyle Bragger

- June 22 -

Most recently, developer and designer Kyle Bragger, the genius behind Forrst.com, was kind enough to grant me an interview. As the homepage pronounces, Forrst is a “place for designers and developers to share inspiring code, screenshots, links, and other work with their peers.” What follows is my transcription of some of the questions I asked Kyle and the answers he so kindly took the time out of his busy schedule to give me. Some of the references he makes have been linked to for your convenience.

Who are you? What do you do for a living?

I’m Kyle Bragger. I am a developer (mainly for the web) and web entrepreneur.

What is your history? What are your hobbies? How long have you been doing what you do now?

I started about 13 years ago reading Visual Basic 3 tutorials I found on the internet (probably through Dogpile or something; remember them?) and wrote lots of silly little apps. I also started writing apps for TI-82 calculators, and mucked around with QBASIC, too.

Eventually, I came across an old Windows Explorer shell replacement called Cloud9ine and spent months and months trying to replicate it in VB5, following along with its source code. It taught me a bunch about the Win32 APIs, GDI, and all of that, as well as gave me my first taste of OOP.

I also started getting into web development; I bought a book (I can’t remember the title) and started making simple HTML pages before getting into PHP (I think right around the time PHP4 was released). Around the same time, I stumbled across DeskMod; DM was probably what sparked my interest in building dynamic websites. As always, I attempted to build my own website engine mimicking DM and their ModWorks engine. I’d say a lot of my early development was trial and error, and emulating other apps/sites quite a bit, trying to figure them out. 

Are you a designer or developer, mostly? Back-end or front-end? Why?

Developer, but somewhere along the way I picked up some decent design chops (nothing to write home about, but I can hold my own in Photoshop and Illustrator). Every day I wake up thankful that I happened to pick those apps up, because I can’t tell you how awesome it is to be able to imagine, concept, design, develop, and launch projects without reliance on anyone else. I’m well-versed in HTML, CSS, and JS, in addition to the back-end engineering I do. You’re doing yourself a disservice if you isolate yourself to a single specialty.

So, someone comes up to and says, “I’m a complete design/development noob.” What do you say to this person; what advice can you give them?

Try as much as you can. Be a do-er. Make lots of cool shit. Screw up a lot. I’m a firm believer that you have to actually dive in and create, it’s not the same just reading about it. (Disclaimer for Pixelvetica readers: I have no formal CS background or education and can’t speak for those wanting to get a formal CS degree. However, I don’t think they’re necessary for everyone. I also don’t think that college is the best place to learn web stuff; not by a long shot.)

What’s the most important thing for a designer to remember as he or she goes through life?

In general, get a good therapist.

Who’s your biggest role model, your inspiration?

I have a mentor (although I doubt he would call it that) named Mark that I’ve worked with at a few companies. He’s old school and an incredible dev & systems guy. I’ve learned a lot from him.

Talk about your projects. What have you created, what are you creating, what do you plan to create? We’d love to hear about the process.

I’ve made a bunch of stuff over the years— much of it hasn’t ever seen the light of day. I made a site called Placefav a few years ago, but didn’t have enough foresight to create a compelling location-based service. I made a to-do list app which I recently sold called Done.io. 

I’m always interested in building small projects to test an idea/theory, or just play with neat new tech. In terms of companies, I started one called BricaBox with a good friend named Nate Westheimer; that was probably the best thing that could have happened to me as far as cutting my teeth in a startup. It failed, but the lessons learned were worth every second. (EDIT: By the way, Kyle is currently perusing Forrst full-time.)

Give me a little blurb on Forrst— everyone wants to hear something.

In general though, my goal for Forrst is to keep nurturing community growth, and creating a place in which any developer or designer passionate about their craft feels at home.

Favourite fonts? ;)

Gotham Rounded, Avenir, Helvetica, Monaco.

Thanks for your time Kyle, I really appreciate it!

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If you didn’t visit it already, you can check out Forrst and apply for membership at Forrst.com. Once again, a huge thanks to Kyle for donating his time and expertise for Piexlvetica and for you. You can find Kyle on Twitter via @kylebragger.

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    of Forrst’s earlier users.
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