Interview with Darrin Massena, Picnik CTO

To make sure that our articles don't get too stale here at Switch on the Code we like to change things up a little every now and then. That is why we are having this interview. One web application that I personally like very much is an Image editing application named Picnik, which is what brings us to this interview. I decided to email the CTO and Co-Founder of Picnik, Darrin Massena, to get him to answer a few questions about himself, Picnik, and programming with Flex.

First we have short bio about Darrin from the Picnik about page:

Darrin has been avidly developing software for the last 25 years. Prior to Picnik, Darrin was a co-founder of Spiffcode, and the co-author of ground breaking real-time strategy game Warfare Incorporated, which was named "Handheld Game of the Year" by Palm Computing in 2003. Darrin was a founding member of the Palm Open Source community and brought the first Windows development tools to the platform. He previously was a development manager at Microsoft, where he was a "Leonardo DaVinci Award" winner, and where he and Mike took turns managing each other. Darrin is also a collector... of dusty handhelds his wife refers to as "the PDA museum." Original Apple Newton? Check. Sharp Zaurus? Check. Extremely rare Sony Magic Link? Believe it.

Now without further ado, the interview.

Switch on The Code (SOTC): First off, can you tell us who you are and what your job at Picnik is?

Darrin Massena (DM): I'm Darrin Massena, CTO and co-founder of Picnik.

SOTC: Why choose Flex for Picnik?

DM: We actually started Picnik with Flash 8 because we saw it was the best web-based technology for photo editing. When Flex 2 came along it solved a number of big problems we were having with the Flash IDE so we jumped on it.

SOTC: What are the major advantages you have found using Flex?

DM: The Flex framework is a rich library of code and components that we otherwise would have had to write from scratch ourselves. Flex Builder's debugger is also a huge time saver.

SOTC: On the other side, what are the main problems you have run into developing with Flex?

DM: The downside of the rich Flex framework is that it bloats our SWF size a lot. Flex 3's support for runtime caching will be a big help. Another problem has been Flex Builder's design view which doesn't deal with the complexity of Picnik's UI very well.

SOTC: Why build an image editing application?

DM: We want photo editing to be fun and easy for everyone. Not just photo pros but family and friends too. Just go to picnik.com and, without installing anything, you can quickly fix your pictures and get creative with them too. We update Picnik constantly, always adding something fresh and new.

SOTC: How long was the development cycle for the first released version of Picnik?

DM: We released our beta about a year after we first started working on the concept. Our 1.0 launch was ~9 months after that.

SOTC: What is your favorite feature in Picnik?

DM: We just added Photo History, which allows you to easily return to any photo you've edited -- with infinite undo! Before that I would have said the Firefox web page snapshot plugin. The Curves feature is a lot of geeky fun and Focal Zoom is trippy.

SOTC: Where do you and your team plan on taking Picnik over the next year or two?

DM: We're going to keep integrating Picnik into as many photo sites and social networks as we can (Flickr users have Picnik already). As for features, the sky is the limit. We'll continue bringing the capabilities of high-end packages to everyone while making it easy and fun to get fantastic results. Over the long term we plan to change the way people approach photo editing.

SOTC: What is your favorite programming language?

DM: Actionscript, yeah! No really, I mean it. It's the most underrated language out there. For server programming we go with Python.

SOTC: Windows, Linux or Mac?

DM: Hmm... I used to work on Windows so that's my primary desktop but on the road I take a Mac and Picnik's servers are all running Linux. So I guess I'm not religious about it.

Our Thoughts

It's always good to hear from people who are writing full applications using the technologies we write about on our blog. Darrin, working with a couple other guys, has built up a nice company based around Picnik - which can now even be seen over at Flickr being used as their built in image editor. Picnik also has a beautiful design that really shows off the capabilities of Flex with a great designer. Well, I hope everyone enjoyed the short interview. Let us know what you guys (and girls) think about Picnik.