Kasper Kuijpers

So I'm Kasper, Kasper Kuijpers. I'm a technical lead at a design agency called Your Majesty and we are based in Amsterdam.

Sure. So a design agency technical lead works with all the technical stuff that we as a design agency are trying to do.

So maybe to help clarify. The design agency is not just print design or, you know, making graphics and posters and those type of things. We come from background of making websites or digital applications on your iPhone or on your Android phone, or other things that have a little bit of a technical framework around it.

And what we are trying to do is when we're designing things and making things interactive for our users to work with, we want to make sure that goes as easy as possible. And that requires a little bit of programming.

Sometimes that requires making sure that if you write something on an email or a text box that had the information arrive somewhere where it can be collected in a safe and secure manner. And as a technical lead, you know, we kind of do the invisible part that makes the design experience a lot more intuitive and a lot more friendly.

Making sure that all of those things are working smoothly together, I would say that's the majority of the technical lead role.

What a typical day looks like for me really depends on what kind of day it is.

Most days involve having meetings in the morning. So we're talking to either my fellow colleagues, like a project manager or a designer about what kind of problems are we trying to solve today or in this project for this coming weeks,and how we're going to do that. And then we decide on a path forward, sometimes that's just for a day, maybe sometimes that's for the full project. And then it depends a little bit if I'm involved myself in making sure that those problems are solved or we come up with solutions for these things.

If I work with other team members that are also technical I then instruct them on how can we make these specific things happen so that we create those solutions for clients.

And then throughout the day I might have different meetings, discussing other things that might have happened on another project. Or something has changed in the project, so we need to rethink what we do. Sometimes I just sit down and do some of the technical work myself and that means opening up my computer and just writing a little bit of code.

So as a technical lead the way we work, or I work, with other people is really trying to understand their different points of view. So what are the problems they're facing and how can I work with them to solve those problems?

Sometimes when you work in the technical space things can be very abstract,and that needs to be sort of translated back to either team members or to clients to sort of at a more higher level try to explain how we solve things or how we can solve things for our clients or with our team members. So that's kind of how we work together. Of course, we always think the best idea doesn't have to come from one direction. So we work together as a group to try to solve the problems together. And, you know, the different perspectives really help.

I would say the best, especially in an design agency, about my job is the variety. I rarely do one thing the same day or the same week or the same month. I'm always doing something else. I'm always solving another problem. I'm always using another technology to solve that problem. It's rarely the same thing.

And that is really inspiring because you're always sort of learning when you're working. And you're always sort of, you know, tinkering, like trying to figure out how can we use the stuff that we have today to help our clients move forward in the direction that they want to go. And I think that's really what keeps it interesting, what keeps it never boring because it's always something different.

The worst thing about my job is also that same variety, I would say. It's sometimes there's a little bit of I'm not quite sure if this is going to work. You know, you have to take some risks that you can figure it out. Sometimes you have to go out on a limb, that's a little bit sometimes scary, I would say, but also very rewarding if it works.

And I think the other thing is that because I'm working on different projects at the same time, sometimes I have to think in different modes throughout the day. And sometimes that's a bit, like, I'm thinking of this one problem, oh, in the next hour I need to think about this other problem. Now I have to step out of this way I was thinking to just understand this other problem in a different way. So that's the quite challenging part.

But I think at the end of the day, it's the worst thing but it also makes it probably the most inspiring thing at the same time.

I wouldn't say there was a particular inspiration there but I think it was a coming together of a couple of interests that I always had.

When I was a kid, when I was, you know, 16, somebody told me how a website works. I was like, oh, that's interesting. I want to do that too. But at the same time, I always was creative, I always was busy drawing comics and these type of things. So I was like, oh, is there a way I can combine these two?

So initially, when I went to my next year education, I studied what's called digital design and I thought that was really interesting. So I learned how to use the tools to design for websites and these type of things. But then later on I was like, oh, still my technical part was itching. I also want to be able to build these things that I design.

So I want to be able to do these things. And then at the end of the day, I'm just, you know, doing the same thing that I was doing as I was younger but for other people, not just for myself. So the best place to do that is within a design agency.

So the one piece of advice somebody would've told me when I was younger... there would be quite a few things but if I would name one thing it would be trusting your intuition. Trusting your gut in that sense, like you already have experience with doing particular things that you're doing because you're interested by them on your own.

And you have a sort of personal feeling that that's sort of the right direction but you might not be able to put the right words to it. You know, kind of, where that direction goes. Just try to follow that and sort of trust that direction is going to be more or less the right direction.

You won't be a perfect straight line but it definitely helps guide you where you would want to be, where you feel most comfortable in the things that you are doing as a professional. And I'm still trying to that today as well.