About
Bobby van der Sluis works at Refunk, an award-winning creative agency based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, that specializes in Adobe Flash. He has a formal background in marketing and communications and is a professional front-end web developer since 1997. Bobby has worked with many different agencies and has mainly developed websites for big local and global brands, including ING Bank, HP, Randstad, Nike, Heineken, Electronic Arts, Nintendo, Philips, TomTom, McDonald's and Rabobank.
He is a big fan of both web standards and Adobe Flash, and occasionally has the urge to write about these topics on this personal website or for an online magazine. In the past years Bobby has written a series of articles that focus on CSS design, unobtrusive JavaScript and progressive enhancement, JavaScript best practices, and Adobe Flash Player embed methods. He is also the author of UFO and the co-author of SWFObject 2.0, which are both open source JavaScript libraries to embed Flash content.
Why a web worker? Bobby strongly believes that you can only be happy within your professional life when it is lead by those things that you are most passionate about and that it is your own personal interests that will determine how much you will grow during your career. During his studies Bobby fell in love with the Internet as an emerging medium and currently he is extremely happy to have the opportunity to build for a medium that will possibly only reach its full maturity at the time that he will reach his pension.
Bobby has always enjoyed the limitations and technological impossibilities that come with the web, while its new opportunities and utilisation is slowly impacting our society and the ways we think. Although the constant technological advance and the growing pains of a slowly maturing medium are often misunderstood by many, they are also the main reason why our work has a certain charme and a primal separator of who are the boys and the men in the industry.
Why this website? Bobby is happy to take part in the different front-end web communities, a realm where geographical borders fade and mind alikes can discuss all kinds of topics, or can help each other by sharing an experience or solution. It's a place where a fruitful idea can pop up and blossom into a trend, or a well-argumented general opinion can emerge. It's also a place where knowledge and code is often openly shared, so that at the end of the day everybody can be a little bit richer. In return, the public nature of the web and open source communities gives people the opportunity to improve software by bypassing the limitations of their own knowledge and to gain many new insights almost every day.