Some people say that 2023 will be the year of AI. With tools like ChatGPT and DALL·E the world is definitely changing. There are different opinions on how such instruments will affect the everyday tasks of the professionals. My two cents (for now) are that those are just tools to achieve what we want quicker and more efficiently. Who knows, someday I may call myself a "prompt engineer". For the time being, though, I'm still writing a lot of stuff alone and occasionally ask ChatGPT for help.

I'm working on a personal project and I'm using the awesome Google Cloud Platform. There are so many things that you can do. All the tools that you may need are probably there. This of course comes with a price. In this article I'll share a tip how to reduce your spendings there.

I did transfer MP3 files from my mac to my iPhone three times and every time I'm forgetting how it actually works. So I decided to document the process into a blog post.

В тези смутни времена се чуваме online с Радо Станков за да си поговорим за remote working. Не че по принцип не се чуваме така, но сега е малко по-различно. В този 24-ти епизод споделяме нашия опит в работа от разстояние. Приятно слушане.

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.

2020 for me started with the release of several OS projects. Two of them reached 100 stars in a week and I was thinking that would be nice sharing my workflow. Not like it is working every time, absolutely not, but leads to some good results.

I had an interesting bug in my React application. It happened that the problem was in the fact that I was using forEach instead of for.

The bug that I was encounter was

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.

(This article is part of React in patterns series.)

React is highly composable. And the API that enables that is props.children. It gives us the power to create a placeholder that is later filled with content from the outside.

Amazing art direction and storytelling in this one of a kind 360-degree musical short film from Oscar-winning animator Patrick Osborne. Watch out, it's a tear jerker!

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.

You've probably heard about ToDoMVC project. It's same ToDo application made with different frameworks. It's interesting how the same problem is solved by different programmers following different concepts. This article is about making the ToDoMVC application with AbsurdJS.

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:

The off-canvas menu is pretty popular nowadays. You know, the little button in the right upper corner which opens the navigation with a slide-in effect. That's what we are going to build in this article. The interesting things is that we are not going to use CSS neither HTML, only JavaScript.

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 had a chance to make a talk on TarnovoConf 2013. My topic was "CSS for developers". The videos are now available in YouTube.

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 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.

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.

I'm living in Varna, Bulgaria. Last year we had a great conference called VarnaConf. This year the guys behind it decided to make it again and even better - a series of conferences around my country. I had the chance to make a talk.

I just received a 250MB dump of a database and I needed to see what is it inside. As you may guess, PHPMyAdmin is not a good option in this case. I decided to use the command line.

Ok, that was a long journey. I took an already build project and I had to make some changes. It's a complex system involving flex applications, nodejs and a mobile site. Before to start making changes I had to setup the project and make it work on my local machine. I spend few days doing this. At the end I successfully compile the flex application and made the necessary corrections. I uploaded the new swf file and of course it didn't work.

Front-Trends is one of the best conferences in Europe. It's based in Poland and it's happening every year. I watched all the videos from the previous editions and I could say that it's worth it. Some of the biggest names in front-end development on one stage. All the videos are available in Vimeo, but I decided to post them here as well.

A bunch of useful things about our lovely browser - Chrome. Dev tools theming, console tips, editing of SASS directly inside the browser.

As you may know, Apple doesn't allow creation of iOS applications just like that. Especially under Windows. It's somehow a complex process, which requires several steps in a specific order. However it is still possible and you can do that without Mac.

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.

A screen capture of the discussion about Photoshop at VarnaLab.

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

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.

Sometimes we need to catch the closing of our AIR application to make some things like storing the window's position and size. We can do that in our code.

Sometimes the uploading of crossdomain.xml file is not enough to get the things working.

_"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.

Yesterday I received host name, user name and password for a MySQL server. I needed to export the data from it. I didn't have access to PHPMyAdmin, I tried to connect to the server by mysql.exe on my PC, but it didn't work. And then I found really good solution - PHPMyAdmin in only one php file. I launched it from my localhost and it works. So if you need to export data or just see it, use Adminer. I also uploaded the file on my server, you can download it from here.

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.

The solution was so easy: stage.stageFocusRect = false;Thanks to Rockabit for the post here.