ACM Queue Video Portrait: Nicholas Zakas

August 13, 2013

In this video interview conducted by previous Queue Portrait subject Kate Matsudaira, Nicholas Zakas discusses the current state of front-end engineering and Web development. He takes us through his journey working on the client side, and answers questions like "when should you use jQuery?"

Zakas is a web software engineer who specializes in user interface design and implementation for web applications using JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3. He is currently a staff software engineer at Box, helping the company with its front-end architecture and making the code easier to maintain going forward. Previously, Zakas was the front-end tech lead for the Yahoo! homepage and a contributor to the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) library. He is also a keynote speaker, giving talks about web development, JavaScript, and best practices, and provides recommendations on standards such as HTML5 and ECMAScript. He has written four books: Maintainable JavaScript, Professional JavaScript for Web Developers, High Performance JavaScript, and Professional Ajax.