Many moons ago, I was writing a lot of Flash applications. One thing was typical, and that was a progress indication of something that we were downloading. The loaded bytes of the Flash file (.swf) itself and later of some other resource the application needs. Once I started writing everything in JavaScript, this feature disappeared. In this post, we'll see how to implement it with vanilla JavaScript.

I did use Sass and Less in the past, and one of my favorite features was the nesting. Not only me but the whole community was asking about that constantly over the years. The browser vendors heard that plea, and today, we have CSS nesting.

It's unsurprising that we all use Express.js when we need a web server. In this article, I'll show you how I built a source viewer. It's distributed as a npm package view-source and it could render the content of a directory in a nice tree-view style.

Last year or so, I worked on a platform where I would publish video courses. The first one is on web fundamentals (in Bulgarian), and it's almost ready. You can check it out here. But this article is not about that. It's about a platform feature I built - an in-house validator to exercise the gained HTML, CSS, and JavaScript knowledge. After each lesson, I give a task to the students, and they can work on it right in the browser. The small application became an inspiration for another project - iloveweb.dev. So, I decided to share how the validation works.

I did roughly 50 talks over the years, and for almost all of them, I used Reveal.js. I like it because it's HTML-based. I have complete control of everything and can easily publish the slides online. However, one thing bugs me every single time - the size of my content. I want to use all the available space. This becomes very important when I'm showing code to people. That's why I wrote SimPre. It's a 10KB HTML presentation framework that properly scales and positions my content.

These days I did (again) a bunch of changes in Google tag manager. This time however was more of a refactoring exercise. So, I had to prove that the tags that were placed before the refactoring exist after the refactoring. And what we programmers do in such cases - we write tests.

While I was working on Navigo an issue popped out. It was about using the library in the context of Web Dev Server where we have everything in TypeScript. And something was not ok with Navigo. The npm package wasn't exported properly and we were keep getting a does not provide an export named 'default' error. It turned out the problem is that Navigo is not exported properly as ES module (also known as ESM).

I'm recently working on two OS libraries. Both I'm unit testing with Jest. There is some logic that leads to a warning which I'm doing with console.warn. In the unit tests this is happening quite often so I want to suppress it. Also I want to verify that it happens on the right place.

At work we have a project that uses node:10-jessie image as a base for its docker container. That image has no vi inside so I wondered how to check the content of a file. Luckily kubectl has a neat command to copy files from and to a pod.

These days I had an interesting problem to solve. At work, on our staging environment, we have basic authorization. It works really well but for some older versions of Chrome we experienced a weird issue. The browser did not pass the authorization header. The app runs fine but as soon as it does a fetch request to a local endpoint the request fails with 401 not-authorized error. In the modern browsers that's not happening because the browser kinda knows that we came here with basic auth and automatically includes authorization: basic ... header.

I'm continuing to experiment with React and TypeScript. The weekend-long project this time was a Covid-19 data tracker. In this blog post I will share how I built c19stats.now.sh. I exposed the data as a public API at the same URL. I guess you, as many other people, follow the situation so you may want to glue your fingers on the keyboard and create something useful around the data. I got lots of fun playing with the diagrams.

I'm now actively working on a VSCode extension. I started it as a theme but then decided to add some more features. Like for example a tin line on the left side of the editor marking the current function scope. In order to do that I had to analyze the current file's code and find the lines that are included in that scope. The obvious approach will be to translate the code to AST and then traverse the tree finding the information that I need. This however will require the usage of a language server which now I don't want to deal with. So I decided to explore a brute force approach. Looping over the string characters and finding balanced matches. I quickly wrapped it into a library. I called it Pairify. It consumes text and returns an array of pairs. This blog post will show you how it works.

I just started using TypeScript. I did couple of React projects and noticed a pattern in the setup. I decided to export that to a starter kit 👉 beginning. It is based on Webpack with Babel and TypeScript loader.

I just recently moved my outset.ws domain to Zeit name servers. That's my 13 years old domain which I'm not using it anymore. It makes sense to point to krasimirtsonev.com. The thing is that I have an email which is used all over the net. I of course want to keep that email. And suddenly I wasn't able to receive messages to it. I started missing some very important emails. Like bills that have to be paid and GitHub notifications.

87% of my readers are using Chrome on desktop. This means that I have the luxury to care less about performance. However I just recently found that this blog has 56 (out of 100) points on Google's pagespeed test. That's not good. The report says that my Disqus comments are blocking the main thread for ~900ms. I want comments on my blog but I also want my users to reach to content as quickly as possible. So, after so many years using Disqus I decided to break with it and use something else.

I just spent ~2 hours on this and I had to blog about it. I bet I will come back to the same problem and it will be nice to have a quick solution at hand. And the problem that I'm talking about is the non working Go to definition or Go to implementation feature of VSCode. Or in other words the JavaScript IntelliSense was not working for me. Of course it was annoying because I had to navigate to files manually via the folder tree on the left or typing the name of the file in the Cmd+Shift+P popup.

I'm working on a project in my own git branch. At the end of my working day I want to do one thing - run Prettier so my code is nicely formatted before I submit the PR for code review. Of course I know about the VSCode Prettier extension but right now my editor is kinda broken and I don't want to mess with it. I'm still on my branch and I run Prettier from the terminal. All good but the amount of changes that happened is so big that my 50+ loc updates are like a needle in a haystack. It is like that because apparently there are already malformatted files in the project. It is definitely not possible to understand what I did because of so much noise. So ... I want to run Prettier but only on the files that I touched in that particular branch.

I'm working on a small library that has a logger. I'm bundling the app to a single file and I want to disable the logger for the production version. In this blog post we will see how I removed the logger.log calls from my bundle using AST (abstract syntax tree).

Yesterday was one of those days. I stumbled a task and wanted to find the right tool for it. That same task is on my way at least twice a week and I always refuse to optimize it. Because it was a weekend I decided to spend some time and research a proper tool for the job. Well, I find nothing that suites my need. I time-boxed a hour and said F.ck it!. I will code it myself. That's how Hopa was born - a zero config CLI that runs JavaScript and TypeScript. Transpiles, bundles, watches and executes code.

The first post in this blog was published on 25th of August 2008. This place was always living on a shared PHP/MySQL hosting. It was driven by a custom made PHP CMS for over 10 years. It is time to move forward and follow my actual language of choice - JavaScript. I spent some time recently migrating it to Zeit and this article is showing my process.

The hooks API is a wonderful idea. There are some slick patterns involved that push the React development to a more functional approach. I'm interested in trying that new API and decided to use it for my latest project. However, after a couple of days, it looked like I can't build my app only with hooks. I needed something else. And that's mainly because each hook works on a local component level. I can't really transfer state or exchange reducers between the components. That's why I created Jolly Roger. It has similar helpers but works on a global app level.

I had some time during the weekend and decided to work on my slides for an event at the end of the month. I reached the part where I have to do a live coding session and I was wondering what tool to use. At the end I created my own called Demoit. This is a short article explaining how it works.

If you use React you probably know about the so called hooks. They were officially announced at this year's ReactConf by Sophie Alpert and Dan Abramov. Their presentation could be seen here. I, same as many others got intrigued by this new feature. A little bit confused by if I like them or not but kind of excited. This article pretty much sums up my thinkings around React hooks and aims to give a balanced opinion.

If your users deal with images (photos, product images, etc.) it will be great if they have the ability to apply some basic editing after upload, e.g. adjust brightness and contrast for sharper view, crop, add some text, etc. However, if image editing is not the primary feature of your product, the profit from investment in such secondary feature won't cover the costs. Integrating a 3rd party image editor appears to be a wiser choice.

Recently we had an interesting task at work. The user makes a selection of items and clicks a button. Then for every selected item we have to make a request to our API. The thing is that the user may click as many items as he/she wants. In order to speed up the process we decided to handle four requests in parallel and once some of them is finished we pull the next one. If you ask why exactly four requests in parallel read this paper.

(If you are lazy jump to this section to learn what is this article all about.)

Remember The Island movie from 2005. I watched it again these days and I realized that the old sci-fi titles start with something really interesting. It is funny how they create a world of flying vehicles and say something like "The year is 2019 …". Well, we are 2018 and the public transport is still on the ground. We still can't clone people (I hope so) or travel in a giant spaceship which looks like a fully-functional city.

Sometimes when you learn something new you get really excited. Excited to that level so you want to teach it to someone. That is the case with the concept which I found a couple of months ago. It is an implementation of the command pattern using generators. Or the well known saga used in the redux-saga library. In this article we will see how the idea makes our asynchronous code simpler and easy to read. We will also implement it ourself using generators.

Recently I started questioning the state management in React applications. I’ve made some really interesting conclusions and in this article I’ll show you that what we call a state management may not be exactly about managing state.

There are lots of things which I like in React. Mostly the fact that it teaches interesting patterns. One of my favorites ones is higher-order component. In this article we’ll do a couple of experiments and will see how powerful this approach could be.

I'm a proud father of two and programmer for more then 15 years. My kids are small so I'm really into parenting right now. A bit of a problem for me is to stay up-to-date with the latest technologies in the Web. I really love my job but I just don't have enough time to look after all these frameworks, libraries or tools. I used to read Twitter, monitor RSS feeds and spend hours reading Reddit or Medium. However, no time for that anymore.

One of my favorite conferences Bulgaria Web Summit 2017 is just around the corner. I’m happy to attend again. The organizer prepared a good set of speakers and the event is two days this year.

One of the ways to stay up-to-date with the latest technologies is to watch talks from popular conferences. Here are two of my favorite ones:

I’m writing code for approximately ten years now and at some point the word “writing” became more important then “code”. I found out that it is easy to generate code but it is difficult to write code. Writing means creating something meaningful. Something that other human beings will read. The code is indeed sent to machines and they do understand ugly code. Not the same for humans though. An important part of our job is to make sure that our code is clear for other teammates.

If you are front-end developer dealing with single page applications you probably know that JavaScript ecosystem is not perfect at all. A few things may go wrong and break your build. In this article I’ll go through those features. Features which are, by my humble opinion, problematic.

Last week I landed on an article by Manuel Wieser called Dominant Colors for Lazy-Loading Images and I found the topic really interesting. It’s about lazy-loading of images. Something that Medium is using.

You probably heard about Kik, NPM and left-pad saga this week. Shortly, a company Kik asked a developer Azer Koçulu to give the ownership on a NPM module. The module name matches the name of the company. The developer refuses and the company reaches the registry (NPM). The module was transfered to the company based on a NPM policy. The developer then decided to remove all his modules from the registry. The bad thing is that one of these modules left-pad is a dependency of many other modules. As a result of the un-publishing all the packages that depend on left-pad can not be built. Some really popular tools like Babel and React started getting broken builds.

It's finally done. My first self-publishing ebook is released. The book is available here. I'm running a free giveaway for the next five days. So, subscribe for my newsletter at this address http://eepurl.com/bKt0TD and you'll get a free coupon that will lower the price to 0$.

Destructuring is one of my favorite ES6(ES2015) features. It just shortens my code and helps me be more explicit with my statements. Let’s see it in action.

You have no idea how fun is to transpiler JavaScript. I’m digging into that last few weeks and there is a step where I have to transform an AST into valid code. There is one tree node which I really like - sequence expression.

Well, I kind of lied in the title of this article. Of course that it is the end of the function. Once we call return everything else after that is simply not executed. Ops … I did it again, I kind of lied again.

Two months ago I published a starter pack for React based on webpack. Today I found out that I need almost the same thing but without the React bit. This simplifies the setup but there are still some tricky parts. So, I made a brand new repository webpack-library-starter and placed all the stuff that we need for creating a JavaScript library.

I love using functions like map, filter or reduce. They are an important part of my arsenal and I simply can’t stop using them. Today I had to solve an interesting problem and I ended up using reduce.

The new ES6 specification of JavaScript simply works better for me. It helps expressing my ideas in a shorter and cleaner way. So, I want to write ES6 everywhere. Even while I’m testing my applications.

I recently finished watching Mr. Robot. If you didn’t check out the show please do. Last few days I felt like I’m hacking something. Just like Elliot in MR. Robot. This blog post is about fixing a weird bug. Really strange problem with a failing HTTP request.

GitHub’s pull requests are an important part of my/our development process. That’s why I was thinking about creating a template that will enforce the standards.

We had to update some of our old pages adding new elements. This means mixing old and new code. Placing HTML markup and JavaScript in legacy pages is not that difficult. Yes, it brings some issues but they are easily solvable. However, the CSS is a whole new story. That’s why I did CSSSteal. It helps me extract the needed styles.

So it's been a few months since I published something here. It’s not because I’m lazy (that’s true though) but because I was working on my second book. Now the book is almost finished and I’ll start actively blogging again. In this article we’ll see how to use the local storage of the browser as a communication channel.

I like npm and the fact that I can install tons of stuff. It’s great piece of software and helps me solve problems everyday. Yesterday I had to use a postinstall script and hit a problem.

Christmas is just around the corner. I thought that I should post something. Recently I watchedvideos from two big front-end conferences. So, here is my present for you. A few talks that I think worth attention.

I don’t think that we have to discuss the importance of having tests. That’s not something that we add to the project in addition. That’s something that the project is based on. And because testing is so important we have bunch of tools in our disposal. We all know (I hope) how to test our back-end code. However, once we move to the front-end is a bit different. At the moment we are working on a big single page application and testing is one of our main focuses. In this article you will see how to unit test our client-side JavaScript.

I’m reading and watching a lot of interesting things regarding client-side performance. I’m interested in the browser’s processes happening before and just after the page’s load. There are tons of stuff to think about. Before a couple of days, I joined the online workshop of Vitaly Friedman. I had a great time and learned some clever facts about performance optimization.

Every front-end developer that starts reading about CSS preprocessors thinks “Oh, finally variables in CSS". Indeed, the ability to create and use variables in CSS makes our code much more flexible. However, I think that there is no need to use a preprocessor to create flexible stylesheets.

Before a couple of months my first book Node.js Blueprints was published by Packt. There are a couple of reviews in Amazon about chapter two. It’s about Express. One of the most popular frameworks in the Node.js ecosystem. The book mentions version 3.0 but the truth is that the code samples are for version 4.0. I feel that I still have to point out the differences and mark these parts of the chapter that are not valid for the newest version of the library.

The browsers nowadays are smart. They optimize everything and help us to produce better applications. They process our code as fast as possible and even on mobile devices deliver a pleasant experience. However, at the same time, it is possible to write buggy code and make the browser freezing. We are not talking about slowing down the rendering. We are talking about no rendering at all. There are cases where we want so much from the browser that it just can’t handle it.

CSS is easy? CSS is messy! And as a project grows, it only gets messier. You find yourself throwing !important at everything or fighting with long selectors just to get a style to overrule another. Projects eventually become unmanageable and you pray for the next redesign when you can burn it all down and start from scratch.

It's again Sunday and I'm planning to watch talks. Last week few conferences shared their recordings. I got some nice videos from Twitter and again my bookmarks bar is full with YouTube and Vimeo links. So, it's time to clear it a bit and make room for the next weekend. Here is my plan:

You may not realize it but we, as web developers, have special powers. We could control the Web. Here are two annoying things that I was able to workaround just because I know how to use DevTools.

Node.js is one of those new technologies, which are attracting more and more developers every day. Mainly, because it's JavaScript driven, a lot of people are interested working with it. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to use AbsurdJS together with Express. Express is one of the popular Node.js frameworks. However, the other instrument is really fresh one and I hope that you will find it useful.

Okey, I normally don't write such articles. The things that I am writing about are technical stuff, concepts, experiments related to my job. However, this time will be a little bit different. I had a chance to speak at Codefront conference. And because it was so awesome I decided to share my experience.

There are only two weeks left before the international front-end conference in Linz - Codefront.io. It's organized by the guys from WebBox and it's scheduled for 10th of May. You still have a chance to buy a ticket and listen interesting talks about our lovely Web.

Before a couple of weeks I published Techy. It's a flat CMS based on Node.js and Markdown. I made it because I wanted to write my articles in Markdown format and avoid the annoying publishing workflow which I'm using now. I feel that it's not very clear how Techy works and decided to create a simple blog illustrating the processes.

This blog post is part of series about AbsurdJS. I'll continue filling the library with small and self organized black boxes. In the last article we talked about creating a JavaScript router. This time we will go through the process of making Ajax requests.

Today I had to rename a bunch of image files to the same names, but in lower case. Here is how I did it.

I like the quote that the programming is all about managing complexity. Maybe you've heard that the computer world is a giant construction of abstractions. We simply wrap things and produce new tools over and over again. Just think for a minute. The languages which you use have build-in functionalities and they are probably abstracted functions of other low level operations. It's the same with JavaScript.

I'm a Windows user and I'm working on a ExpressionEngine based site. I'm using EasyPHP as a server and everything works as expected. However, once I decided to upload a file I got "Thumbnail could not be created for the image. Please make sure the thumbnail directory is writable.".

AbsurdJS became one of my favorite projects. I spent a good amount of time developing it and it's getting more and more interesting. I also received some positive feedback, so I think it is time to write a bit more about the module and explain how it actually works and what exactly is made for.

I'm currently working on a JavaScript application which is using the facebook API. There are some things which I need to pass from one page to the other. So, I decided to use cookies. The storing works like a charm, but the deleting doesn't. I needed one hour to find the exact problem.

While I worked on AbsurdJS I needed a function which accepts numerous objects and combines their properties. I.e. something like the _.extend method of UnderscoreJS. What I did is actually to use one more dependency just because of such method. John-David Dalton nicely pointed out my mistake and added a simple function which solved the problem. I change it a bit and now it acts as UnderscoreJS's version.

I just answered on that question at StackOverflow. That's actually asked a lot last few months.

Luckily, I have time to watch screencasts from various conferences. Last few weeks I'm watching videos from Fronteers2012. They are all great and it worths checking out. However, there is something which I found really interesting. It's about animating pseudo elements.

I just answer on that question in StackOverflow. I think that this is a common quetion so it worths writing about it.

Yesterday I made a talk about CSS common use cases and architecture. Floats, pseudo clases, animations, OOCSS, SMACSS, Atomic design and tons of other interesting stuff.

I like the CSS only solutions. Very often I need to select a specific DOM element. Sure I could add a new class, but it is always nice if I can do that inside my stylesheets. It just looks better and keeps my HTML markup clean. first-child, last-child and nth-child are made exactly for this purpose.

I just read this very interesting article published on know.cujojs.com. It's about aspect oriented programming. At the beginning I thought "Oh, that's kinda cool", but when I start thinking about how I'll use it in practice I notice something bad. The blog post itself is well written and informative, but doesn't include any cons of the used technique.

These days I'm working on this little thing. It's a CSS micro framework following atomic concept. My preprocessor of choice is SASS. That's why I wrote several articles on this subject. Today's post is about media queries mixin.

I really like SASS and I use it a lot in my daily job. There are tons of useful features. However there are some things which I want to do, but I can't. There are limitation in the syntax and missing functionalities. Sharing what I found, I want to know if you meet those limitation and how you get around them.

I'm currently working on OrganicCSS - a micro framework based on atomic CSS concept. I'm thinking a lot for name conventions, classes and of course mixins. I decided to combine three mixins in a file called _box-model.scss. They will provide a shortcuts for margin, padding and border properties.

In my company, we have a lot of WordPress sites. Some of them require contact form with captcha field. The short way for solving such task is to use a plugin. However, as you may guess, the add-ons are available for everyone, which means that they could be easily explored and probably hacked. That's why I suggested a simple, custom script, which is developed by us.

I used LESS a lot. These days I decided to try SASS and to be honest it's a better choice for CSS preprocessor. It just gives me more functionalities and better control on my code. There are few instruments for architecting your CSS logic - @mixin, @extend and placeholders. However there are differences between them and specific use cases.

Nowadays is really difficult to be up to date with the latest technologies, concepts or tools. There are several ways to accomplish this. You could use RSS, check blogs regularly or follow as many people as possible in Twitter/Facebook. My way is to watch videos from various conferences.

Everyday I'm reading or watching something which I find helpful. Normally I bookmark those things, but at the end I have dozen of folders and subfolders which I never check. So, I decided to make such blog post where I'll share valuable things in the net.

I created a simple JavaScript library for running functions in a sequence. The story behind this is published here. Today I made few interesting changes which deserve a new blog post.

While I'm working on Auxilio I end up in a sitatuation where I have to call few javascript functions in a sequence. It's an interesting how this could be solved and I'll be happy if you share your opinion for such problem.

Don't get me wrong, Jasmine is a wonderful framework. I'm using it for testing JavaScript in both places - front-end (in browser) and back-end (Nodejs). However, the client side has some disadvantages, which I just fixed. I hope that someday these changes will be moved to the official version (or at least I'll make a pull request very soon).

Jonathan Ive, Senior VP Industrial Design at Apple describing the design process of the Mac Book. Very engrossing!

In this article I want to share my thoughts regarding responsive design. I made several talks on this subject and this post is some kind of summary. The article presents concepts like mobile first and design in the browser.

Everyday I'm reading or watching something which I find helpful. Normally I bookmark those things, but at the end I have dozen of folders and subfolders which I never check. So, I decided to make such blog post where I'll share valuable things in the net.

I found ExpressionEngine framework very good. It brings the flexibility which I need and still has a good amount of features. However, as many other similar tools, the deployment could be a little bit difficult.

That's a super simple function for adding new css or javascript files in the current document. I didn't test it in all the browsers, because I'm using it in the chrome extension and I need only Chrome supported.

It's really interesting to work on an extension for Chrome. However, sometimes it's a little bit difficult to debug. Especially when you work on a dev tools add-on (i.e. a new tab).

I'm currently working on a Google Chrome extension and I need to run a JavaScript in the context of the current page. The obvious choice for such a logic is the content script. However it is not so easy, because the content script has an access only to the DOM of the current page. It can't run global functions or use global objects.

Really simple GET request from a flex based application. However it fails if GET parameters are passed.

It's a little big difficult for me to write long articles. This one is maybe the longest, which I ever wrote :) It collects my experience with responsive design. I believe that the ideas described in the material are important for our work as web designer and developers. David Walsh was really kind by publishing the article on his blog. You can find it here http://davidwalsh.name/design-responsively.

Ok, I should admit that mod_rewrite and regular expressions are not my strongest part. Today - as every other day I realize how little knowledge I have. Actually it's good to have such moments. I lost almost two hours fighting with a really really simple mod_rewrite rule in my .htaccess file.

Take a 20 minutes' break and read this. That's how Medium is created. It's really inspiring.

Everyday I'm reading or watching something which I find helpful. Normally I bookmark those things, but at the end I have dozen of folders and subfolders which I never check. So, I decided to make such blog post where I'll share valuable things in the net.

I'm a Windows user. I also have a virtual machine with Ubuntu installed and coding there from time to time. I use Git a lot and in general I prefer console mode over the GUI. Under Unix everything works just great, but Windows's command prompt requires more efforts from our side. However I found some helpful tips, which could make your life easier.

Presentation's slides. All my talks at VarnaLab are available here.

The goal is to achieve a background of the text inside an inline element.

I'm going to start a new project with ExpressionEngine. So, I made a short review of the framework's capabilities. The article is available at my account in tech.pro.

Computers are tools that help people accomplish tasks by making the process easier, faster, cheaper, less error-prone, or just more fun. But what tasks? And by what process? What parts of the process can the computer make better? How can users interact with the computer to make it do its part of the process? Only lastly can we ask: what must be presented to the user and how?

Everyday I'm reading or watching something which I find helpful. Normally I bookmark those things, but at the end I have dozen of folders and subfolders which I never check. So, I decided to make such blog post where I'll share valuable things in the net.

A bunch of cool stuff ;-)

Some of the cool and helpful things which I found in the net.

float property is one of those CSS rules which are somehow difficult to understand. Before a couple of days I had a problem with floating divs. I solved it and decided to write an article about the solution. The article also covers some basics about floating.

Everyday I'm reading or watching something which I find helpful. Normally I bookmark those things, but at the end I have dozen of folders and subfolders which I never check. So, I decided to make such blog post where I'll share valuable things in the net.

Slow JavaScript code on your pages? Chrome provides both a sampling, and a structural profiler to help you track down, isolate, and fix the underlying problem. Tune in to learn how to use both profilers, and how to improve your own workflow to build better, faster browser applications! We'll talk about chrome://tracing, the built-in JS profiler in DevTools, and much more.

If you are wonder what exactly "Retina display" means I'll suggest to check this great article in SmashingMagazine. I searched a lot for a simple explanation and that's the best one.

AssetsPack is a NodeJS module which helps in organization, compilation and minification of assets. It's meant to be used in local environment during the development process. It was made generally for HTML/CSS/JavaScript based applications.

A screencast of the discussion at VarnaLab on subject "Web assets - tips for better organization and performance". The slides are available here.

Douglas Crockford’s Function Challenges. Test your knowledge of function scope and and learn to compose functions that can be called multiple times through function returns.

Edge Conference is a different kind of conference, for developers with experience to share, who want to see and bring improvements to the web platform. Their emphasis is on creating a good environment for productive debate and discussion, rather than presenting the experiences of a single speaker. The videos from the conference are now available and you should definitely check them out.

PHP is one of the most popular back-end solutions available. However, I think that there is something wrong with the way we are using it. It is really popular to use some giant framework, with a lot of features. Generally, I'm not a big fan of this approach. Even if the framework is well documented and has big community it still adds some restrictions and complexity. Many people are trying to build the perfect framework, which covers as many cases as possible, but the true is that it is not possible. In this article I'll present you my vision about PHP programming and I will be very happy if you share yours.

I was planning to post this article a few weeks ago, but today I finally finished the examples and I can't wait to share it. We all know that the testing is a big part of our daily tasks and we should use every existing tool to make our lives easier. I really like test driven development and once I found the concept of the headless browsing I started to think that we can automate every single aspect of the testing. In this post I'll show you how to use Nodejs to test a simple php site.

A great event is coming in VarnaLab - http://www.varnalab.org/2012/09/varnalab-challanges.html

Today is a day for posting videos. Another interesting conference - JSConf 2012. The videos are available here http://2012.jsconf.us/.

If you are in Varna, Bulgaria this Saturday please visit "Chernorizets Hrabar" Free University of Varna. Really interesting conference, with great speakers. More about the event, lecturers and everything else here http://varnaconf.com/.

Agile or Agile Development – we hear these words more often these days. But do we really know what it is all about? How can it help us become more effective, while having lots of fun developing software? How can we use it to communicate with business people and make this communication easy and constructive for both sides?http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/general/the-principles-of-agile-development/

There’s a lot of bad information on the Web (I’m looking at you, W3Schools) that leads new PHP users astray, propagating bad practices and bad code. This must stop. PHP: The Right Way is an easy-to-read, quick reference for PHP best practices, accepted coding standards, and links to authoritative tutorials around the Web.http://www.phptherightway.com/

For some time, I bring a lot of attention to the tests of everything that I'm working on. Actually Test Driven Development changed a lot my vision for programming. Dale Emery shares really interesting thoughts regarding automated testing. Checkout here. If you wonder what are the characteristics of a good test suite read this article http://arlobelshee.com/what-makes-a-good-test-suite.

Maybe one of the best explanations of the prototype in the context of JavaScript language.http://javascriptweblog.wordpress.com/2010/06/07/understanding-javascript-prototypes/

_Programming and the Profession of Programming are quite different things. Programming is being able to efficiently tell a computer exactly what to do in a repeatable manner. The profession of programming is being able to efficiently convert business requirements into bugs._Read the full article here.

Did you ever wonder how Facebook's release management looks like. Here is an interesting article about that http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/04/exclusive-a-behind-the-scenes-look-at-facebook-release-engineering.ars/1

In this article, Keith Peters discusses object creation in JavaScript using prototypal inheritance as an alternative to the new operator. Check out here.

I'm not exactly a performance perfectionist, but currently I'm working on a tool which will be used in a large system. It will deliver texts to a multi-language environment and there will be several sites/apps which will performe big amount of request to it. It is the right moment for me to choose how to speed up my code and the work of the tool overall.

We all know the annoying message of Internet Explorer about non secure items. I just found a simple web tool which helps to find those items and repair them.http://www.whynopadlock.com/

The Dependency Inversion Principle relates to the stability and reusability of higher-level components within an application. The principle states:_A. High-level modules should not depend on low-level modules. Both should depend on abstractions.B. Abstractions should not depend upon details. Details should depend upon abstractions._Read more here.

In my opinion that principle is really important and stays in the fundamentals of software design._In the context of the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) we define a responsibility to be "a reason for change." If you can think of more than one motive for changing a class, then that class has more than one responsibility. This is sometimes hard to see._Read more about this principle here.

That's a great article by Robert C. Martin. It's one of those articles that really may change something in your programming. The principle is called Open-Closed and it says:_SOFTWARE ENTITIES (CLASSES, MODULES, FUNCTIONS, ETC.) SHOULD BE OPEN FOR EXTENSION, BUT CLOSED FOR MODIFICATION._More about that here.

I had a lot of work these days and didn't have time to blog here, but I think that the tips in this article are very useful. The number of Facebook applications is increasing every day. We all know that the testing (debugging) of our code is really important. That's why I decided to share my experience in this area.

Adobe is in the midst of a fundamental transformation. We are transforming from software in boxes to solutions in the cloud, and to a world of touch interfaces on devices, and social connections everywhere. This is a time of both innovation and change for Adobe and for the Adobe community ...Read the full article here.

The European JavaScript conference is really close. It's scheduled for 01 and 02 of October. I wish I could be there. I hope that the videos from the lectures will be shared online, as this happened for the last year. I strongly recommend to watch them. There are available here http://blip.tv/jsconfeu.

Facebook became one of the most popular social platforms these days. I just finished a flash based game that uses their API and decided to share my experience.

When we are talking about maps, Google is an absolute leader. Their GoogleMaps tool is free, well documented and works really good. What I didn't find directly in the documentation is how to get the exact location based on plain text. I.e. to convert an address to google.maps.LatLng object. That's why I wrote a simple function that did this job.

We all know that the usage of InternetExplorer brings a lot of problems for us (the developers). Did you know that there is a JavaScript method createStyleSheet that you can call only 31 times.

A couple of days ago, I found very useful page about JavaScript called "JavaScript Garden". Check out here.JavaScript Garden is a growing collection of documentation about the most quirky parts of the JavaScript programming language. It gives advice to avoid common mistakes, subtle bugs, as well as performance issues and bad practices that non-expert JavaScript programmers may encounter on their endeavours into the depths of the language.

Peter (@stopsatgreen) delivered a lightning talk for us on the various CSS3 layout methods being developed by the W3C and his opinion on their potential future.

After a couple of days of using my script for file opening I decided to rewrite it and add more functionalities.

Ajax is a powerful tool for loading new content or data asynchronously. The well known problem is that we can't make requests to other hosts. In other words if your code is located at aaa.com you can't load bbb.com/getData.php. There are several solutions available.

As a huge fen of the flash platform, I always like to work with events. The events system in ActionScript3 is really helpful when we are building a big application with many modules and we want to keep them independent. JavaScript hasn't native support of events, but we can still use them.

Currently I'm working on a big JavaScript project. It has a lot of files that have to be compressed. I wrote a simple php class that merges all the files into one. It has also a useful simple obfuscator method.

I'm sure that you've already used metadata tags in your flex applications. There are several reserved keywords like [Bindable], [Embed], [Event] and so on (the full list is available here). The function of the metadata tags is to provide additional information to the flex compiler. For example information about embeding assets, dispatching events. This article doesn't explain how to use the default flex tags (you can learn that from here). It shows you how to create your own metadata tags and how to use them.

SWC file format is really useful when you want to transfer or to compact your ActionScript libraries. It is also used for exporting assets, which can be used later. Let's imagine that you want to create a .swc file for only small part of your application, i.e. pure .as files. I searched a lot for the fastest and easier solution and finally I think that the usage of compc.exe is the best option.

I'm absolutely sure that you've already met this problem. You know, these nice rounded buttons that are provided by the designer. They are really cool, but sometimes the label of the button is so long that you have to resize/scale the image. ActionScript3 provides simple way to solve this issue.

We are all filling registration forms. It's really nice when the page helps us to do that faster. The script, that I'm going to show you, is designed to be used for a country field.

Many people will say that Flash is not SEO friendly. Actually that's not 100% true. Flash is just a tool that shows your data. Exactly the same as the HTML. In this article I'll show you how to use ActionScript3 and JavaScript together to make your flash sites SEO friendly and provide a different URL for each of your pages.

Is there any way to protect your flash work? To be honest the answer is NO. As you probably know everything that is uploaded on a web server and is accessible from a web browser is downloaded to the users' computers and could be found in the temporary directories. Once someone gets your swf file he could use one of the dozen decompilers to reproduce the .fla and .as files. Anyway, there are still some ways to make stealing difficult.

I successfully finished an interactive project for one of my clients. We did a great job and finally I had to install the system on their server. I received the FTP and MySQL information from their IT team, but when I uploaded all my files the site didn't work at the first time. The server didn't show any errors and I wasn't able to find out the problem.

_"Yesterday saw Apple announce removal of the infamous restrictions on 3rd party development tools for iOS devices. Twitter lit up, the blogosphere jumped into gear and speculation began in earnest. So what’s this all about and what does it mean for Flash?"_The full article on active.tutsplus.com here.

Before a couple of days the code of my site was injected with some milware script code. In this article I will advice you how to remove this message.

There are some features in Flash that we can't work without. Tween classes are among the most used ones. They give you ability to animate objects without using the timeline, to change the animation fast and easy. The idea of these classes is very simple. That's why I think that it is a good idea to have your own tween manager that you can modify to fit into your needs.

I'm absolutely sure that all of you are working with JSON objects. It's pretty helpful to be able to print them and find out what exactly they contain. I wrote a simple function that makes this possible.

Did you ever wonder how to exclude a directory from a .htaccess file. Here is the solution, it works perfect for me.

My latest flash game. It's a fantasy RPG jump'n'run game. Check out here.

Resn - Interactive Agency

I'm working with a class for creating scrolling text field. So I'm using a MovieClip as mask and TextField. When I test the movie and close the testing window Flash just crashes. It's because I have applied the mask directly to the TextField :) The problem is described here. Thank you BKWLD !

Filmefex Studio is a special effects facility, where they design and create effects for the motion picture industry. Check out here

1. Moving background layer - sometimes you want to move the background layer. But by default it's locked. So just click twice on the layer and choose "OK" in the popup message. The layer will be transformed to normal layer.