Last weekend I was helping a friend to deal with his "broken" iPhone XR. It was stuck on the Apple logo. No mather what we do the phone was just black and the apple shows up.

We all know that one of the most challenging task in software development is state management. This is especially true for the JavaScript world. There are thousands of articles on this topic and so I decided to write another one 😁. I wanted to share my current thoughts on the different state types. I found that answering "What lives where?" question is far more important than the actual state management. Which more or less is an implementation detail.

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.

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.

Recently I stumbled upon on an interesting bug which reminded me what is actually happening with my components when React is rendering them.

I'm using Git and GitHub in particular a lot. And when I say a lot I really mean all the time. Recently I tracked a week of work and found that 62% of my working time goes into code reviews. Sometimes I'm checking out a branch locally and trying stuff but really most of my time goes into github.com. I spent some time analyzing why the code review process is so time consuming for me. I identified couple of reasons, made a tool and changed some of my habits. In this article I'll show you how I improved my code review speed and lower the time to 38%.

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.

Long long time ago in a kingdom far far away there was an app. The app was supported by the well known React and Redux families but there was a problem. It was damn slow. People started complaining and the app had to do something. It had to deliver its content quickly so it provides better user experience. Then the server-side rendering was born.

Years ago when Facebook announced their JSX syntax we had a wave of comments how this was against some of the well established good practices. The main point of most people was that it violates the separation of concerns. They said that React and its JSX are mixing HTML, CSS and JavaScript which were suppose to be separated.

In this article we will see how React and its ecosystem has quite good separation of concerns. We will prove that markup, styles and logic may live in the same JavaScript land and still be separated.

On my machine I have four applications always open - VSCode, Chrome, iTerm and Slack. I spend most of my time in Chrome and VSCode. My editor is full with awesome extensions and I feel pretty good there. What I am doing for the browser is making sure that I have fewer tabs open and install only extensions that I really use. One thing though I can achieve so far. I can't find the perfect new tab extension.

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.

Long time I was searching for a good front-end framework. Framework that will help me write scalable and easy to maintain UI. Even though React is just a library for rendering it comes with so many benefits that I can easily say “I found it”. And like every thing that I use a lot I started seeing some patterns. Techniques that are applied over and over again and I see in the code of other developers. It’s time that I start documenting, discussing and sharing these patterns.

The setup here is available at GitHub here.

Half an year ago I published A modern React starter pack based on webpack. The starter provides the basic tooling around React. However, I noticed that very often I need even less stuff than that. That’s usually when I want to hack something quickly. In this blog post we’ll see what’s the bare minimum to work with React.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The mixins in SASS are really helpful. Here is something really short which I just start using. It's a mixin which I apply on the grid's container.

That's first of (I hope) many posts with such an idea. Problems solved with pure CSS. No JavaScript.

I really don't like FlashBuilder. Mainly because I'm losing a lot of time just to setup the project. Usually when I receive the files I need around 10 hours just to compile successfully. The reasons for those problems are different Flex SDK, different directories' tree, wrong paths, missing libraries or fonts. Today I encounter a brand new type of problem.

Some of the cool and helpful things which I found 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.

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.

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.

Sometimes it is necessary to present your data in format which is popular and easy to work with. In most cases the CSV format will fit perfectly you and your clients, but sometimes you have to export the information in XLS file. These several functions will help you to do that.

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.

_"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.

As you probably know there is no simple way to distort a MovieClip in Flash. The solution that I've found uses AS3. Special thanks to Thomas Pfeiffer and Ruben Swieringa. They share their experience with this problem.

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 !