Kilian Valkhof

Programming principles for front-end developers

Like many front-end developers, I don’t have a formal computer science background. I rolled into this discipline as a designer wanting more control over the end product. Because of that, a lot of computer science things are lost on me.

All I know about capital-s Software Development, I learned as I went from various sources. The result is that I now carry with me a number of maxims, sayings and rules-of-thumb that help me make development choices while I’m building something. Late last year I finally sat down and wrote about these principles over on Piccalilli:

Programming principles for front-end developers

The article really resonated with people. Not only was it the most read article on Piccalilli in 2025 (despite being released at the end of November), I also got numerous messages from people about how this helped them think about their code in new ways. It was difficult to find the right way to articulate my approach in a way that made sense (The article idea was on my backlog for well over a year) and didn’t just present the end result but instead showed how to think about code in a way that works for you.

I’m very excited to share that I will be presenting this topic as various conferences throughout the year. The first will be at Confoo in Montreal, at the end of February. Later this year I’ll be presenting it at a conference in Europe too, but that hasn’t been announced yet.

I’d love to give this talk at more conferences and meetups. If you checked out the article and think it would be a good fit for your audience, please reach out!