This is the fourth ‘social’ interview in a series with the jsDay 2012 speakers: it’s ‘social’ because the questions have been submitted and voted online on Facebook.

 We are happy to introduce you Brandon Keepers, a developer at GitHub.

He will give a session at jsDay called “JavaScript Application Architecture”  Wednesday May 16th at 2:30 pm on track 1.

The interview:

Things that you consider before choosing a framework for a project?
Does it take care of a lot of plumbing but stay out of your way when you need it to? How active is the community around it?

What should i learn next?
Something that brings you joy, because that will inspire you to learn something else. If you haven’t played with WebScokets yet, go build a site that uses them right now. It’s incredibly fun to interact with your visitors in realtime.

What are your throughts about functional programming?
I’m fascinated by it. The more I use functional languages, the better my code in procedural languages gets. I would love to spend more time in a purely functional language so I can’t cheat by sneaking in procedural bits.

Sheldon or Leonard?
I’m ashamed to say that I’ve never actually watched an episode of Big Bang Theory.

Who’s your programming hero?
Martin Fowler’s writing had an enormous impact on me earlier in my career, but my heroes are people that maintain active open source projects; it can be a job with a huge burden and little reward.

Who killed JFK?
The Hamburglar.

What’s the average beer per hour factor during conferences and a normal hangout?
1.437 beers per person per hour.

What do you think about Coffeescript?
I hated it at first, but it quickly grew on me. Now I barely remember pure JavaScript syntax. I think CoffeeScript is important because the language can continue to evolve even though the JavaScript implementations don’t.

Duran Duran or Spandau Ballet?
Who cares?

What do you like and what not about javascript?
Prototypical inheritance and closures.

Which opensource projects are you following the most?
ALL THE PROJECTS!

Did your love for programming cause you some troubles with your partner?
Only when I bring my laptop to bed.

Suggest a book to read.
How to Win Friends and Influence People. (which should have been titled: How To Be a Decent Human Being and Make Other People Better)

You can find Brandon on twitter (@bkeepers), on github and on his blog.