Q&A with Nishant Kothary

I run a little company called Minky alongside my wife near rainy Seattle. Prior to Minky, I spent close to a decade at Microsoft and Amazon in various roles — from engineering to user experience and program management to marketing. I found ways to focus on growing my front-end skills within all the roles, and that continues to be where my heart lies. Right now I’m in the middle of growing my skills as an iOS (more broadly, mobile) developer, so I spend a great deal of my time in Xcode and Objective-C. I write a monthly-ish column titled “The Human Web” on A List Apart about the design and resultant behaviors of human beings, and their effects on the design of products, and I occasionally give talks at conferences on the topic as well. As a side note, I just wrote a chapter based on my talks and writings for Smashing Book #4  In our free time, my wife and I are learning how to day-trade (options and futures), so I spend quite some time keeping up with the stock market and growing my skills as a trader. I write on my own site, rainypixels.com  tweet as @rainypixels, and take a lot of pictures of my dog. :)

I write on my own site, rainypixels.com  tweet as @rainypixels, and take a lot of pictures of my dog

Hardware

MacBook Pro 13” Retina connected to a Dell Ultrasharp 24” LED Monitor. I have loads of devices, from an iPad Mini Retina to the Nokia Lumia 800, that I both, use daily and utilize for testing.

Software

Sublime Text 2, Xcode, LiveView, Word, iAWriter, DropBox, Transmit, iMessage, Terminal, Keynote, Chrome, and a bunch of services like Editorially.

Dream

I’m pretty happy with how things are.

Inspiration

Reading. I am heavily influenced by works that help me understand myself and people in general. The book that’s most influenced me recently is Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational. But there are many others, too.