I hit an interesting "bug" while working on a SPA application. Clicking an anchor link that points to a fragment on the page fires the History API's popstate event. This triggers some logic on my end, which was not my intent. I fixed that with a bit of JavaScript, and I had to share the snippet.

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'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'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.

In this article we will see some use cases of Riew. Those are patterns which I found repeating while using the library. There are other blog posts part of the same series and I will suggest checking at least this one so you get a basic understanding before jumping into the code snippets below.

Riew is a library based on communicating sequential processes (CSP). It is made to help with communication and synchronization between your view and business logic. It's distributed as a npm package, it has 0 dependencies and adds ~8KBs (gzip) to your application on production.

CSP is a formal language for describing patterns of interaction in concurrent systems. It's used in Go, Crystal, Clojure's core.async and a couple of other places. The idea in its core is nothing so complicated but it offers some interesting capabilities. Surprisingly enough it is not really popular in JavaScript. Recently I'm exploring this pattern and here are my findings.

Something bugs me last couple of years. I'm using React for some time now and there is always this doubt if I'm placing the business logic on the right place. I'm trying to be pragmatic, to follow best practices and listen what the community is saying. However, I still feel that something is not ok. This blog post presents the idea of the reactive view. That is nothing new per se but I came up with this term because it fits well in my idea.

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

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.

If you are writing React applications you probably know about higher order components or render props (which by the way I think is kind of a form of higher order component pattern). In both cases we have a component that encapsulates logic and passes props down to children. Recently at work we came to the idea that we may push this further and represent some functionalities which are out of React in the same fashion - with a single tag in our components tree.

This article is about Stent - a Redux-liked library that creates and manages state machines. Stent implements some of the Redux’s core ideas and in fact looks a lot like it. At the end of this post we will see that both libraries have a lot in common. Stent is just using state machines under the hood and eliminates some of the boilerplate that comes with Redux’s workflow.

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.

(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.

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.

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.

The Flux implementation discussed in this article is available here github.com/krasimir/fluxiny. Feel free to use it in a browser directly or as a npm dependency.

I’m obsessed by making my code simpler. I didn’t say smaller because having less code doesn’t mean that is simple and easy to work with. I believe that big part of the problems in the software industry come from the unnecessary complexity. Complexity which is a result of our own abstractions. You know, we (the programmers) like to abstract. We like placing things in black boxes and hope that these boxes work together.

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.

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 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.

Google Chrome is my favorite browser. I'm spending a big part of my working hours there, so it makes sense to use it for everything. Last week I posted "Sorry, Chrome killed the terminal". The article was about Yez!, an extension that brings terminal-liked functionalities to the browser. Today, I'll show you how I use Chrome in my Node.js development workflow.

That's right. I'm not using the terminal anymore. Instead of that I'm using Chrome. Yes, the Google's browser. There is an extension called Yez! that connects to a Node.js module via web socket. It executes the shell commands and returns the result. And even works under Windows.

We all know what responsive means nowadays. We, as developers, normally develop responsive applications. There is a dozen of instruments helping us achieving our goals. Some of us use extensions and even pay for them. However, I'm using one thing - Google Chrome browser. In this article, we will see what the Chrome's capabilities for testing responsiveness are.

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.

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.

If you believe in responsive design you probably use a lot of media queries. That's a CSS feature which gives us the power to add something like if statements. We are able to apply rules only if the current page meets certain conditions. In this article I'll show you how I use media queries in JavaScript.

(The router here is now placed in its own project - Navigo. There is also another article Deep dive into client-side routing which you may find interesting)

Nowadays the popular single page applications are everywhere. Having such application means that you need a solid routing mechanism. Frameworks like Emberjs are truly build on top of a Router class. I'm still not sure that this is a concept which I like, but I'm absolutely sure that AbsurdJS should have a build-in Router. And, as with everything in this little library, it should be small, simple class. Let's see how such a module may look like.

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 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.

Last month I'm working on my own extension for Chrome. It adds two things - a much simpler new tab page and fully working interactive console. The command prompt is actually added in the DevTools panel.

That's a guest blog post provided by Chatwing.

The cinemas will be filled with new movies again and I will be expecting more honest reviews from film buffs and wannabes from different parts of the world. Well, one can say that there are always new stuff in the Internet—new trend, new meme, new films, and new books. Everything becomes old in the Internet so fast. Along with these new things, my favourite chat box has started launching new updates. Wait—what is my favourite chat box?

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.

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).

The replace method in JavaScript is pretty much the same as in the other languages. Replace part/s of a string with something else. However, there are some tricky moments and I wanted to write this article, because I met this problem several times in the past. Actually, very often I use my blog as a documentation for myself and this is one of those cases. Probably I'll be in the same situation after week or so and I'll just check here for the proper solution.

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.

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.

Two talks by Peter-Paul Koch which are very informative.

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.

A little code snippet for detecting iPhone or iPod. You can easily edit it to match iPad.

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.

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.

"Your browser is one of the most and best instrumented development platforms -- you may just not realize it yet. In this episode we'll take a whirlwind tour of how to analyze network performance, rendering and layout pipeline, as well as detecting memory leaks in your Javascript code, and using audits and extensions to build faster and better apps!". A nice screencast by Ilya Grigorik. I strongly recommend the subscription to GoogleDevelopers channel.

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

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/.

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.

Did you ever wonder how to write your class. That's a very helpful article. I strongly recommend it. Check it 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.

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.

Are you wondering what you can do with Canvas and WebGL. Check http://mrdoob.github.com/three.js/ to find out.

Just a great article. Period! http://anarchycreek.com/2009/05/26/how-tdd-and-pairing-increase-production/

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.

Today I received my Pomodoro Robotlegs timer. Special thanks to Stray and Robotlegs team for this little gem.

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.

_Search marketing consultant Mark Buckingham destroys his 10 favourite search engine optimisation myths and asks leading experts such as Google's Matt Cutts and Search Engine Land's Matt McGee for their opinion._Check out here.

Sometimes, when you work on some project, you find something that is small, but very interesting and useful. Usually I'm adding such kind of things in classes that I like to call helpers. The following tips are part of my helpers.

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.

I'm absolutely sure that you are using external data in your flash/flex applications. It is a good practice to transfer information in XML format. Most of the projects that I'm working on also use XML and in most of them I have a class that converts the data to JSON object. The problem with this workflow is that the parser's logic is always different because the XML is different. These days I wrote a class that solved this problem and directly converted every given XML file to a JSON object.

"Wallaby" is the codename for an experimental technology that converts the artwork and animation contained in Adobe® Flash® Professional (FLA) files into HTML. This allows you to reuse and extend the reach of your content to devices that do not support the Flash runtimes.

I already wrote an article on this topic (Object Oriented Programming in JavaScript (Extending / Inherit classes)), but last few days I realized that there are some things that I didn't explain.

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.

Absolutely free icons for commercial and non-commercial projects. Check out here.

The selectors are one of the most powerful features in CSS. Sometimes they can save you a lot of additional work. In this article I'll show you how to set the style of a specific child in a list of elements.

As you probably know JavaScript is not exactly OOP based language. Of course there are some ways to handle with this and you can still create classes and inherit them. It is much much better to use classes. Your application will be well structured and split to modules.

I know that you've met this problem. You have a lot of bitmaps in your library and you have to edit all of them one by one. There are several solutions of this problem. One of them is to use JSFL. There is another one - an extension for Flash provided by ArsThanea. Check it out here.

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

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.

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.

In my work as a flash developer very often I receive from the client just one photoshop file with the design of the application/site that has to be coded. In the last project the designer made the ComboBox in the style of the site. So I couldn't use the default look of the Flash's drop down component.

TweenManager is ActionScript3 class that helps you to animate your objects in flash. You don't need to create timeline type animations, because you can control every property of the object. Also it helps you to create a sequence by different animations/events. In the examples below I'll show you how to use the manager to solve different problems during your daily flash work.

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

Very helpful solution that will save you maybe several hours. I used JSFL language and very short script to parse all the items in the library. Then for every item just embed the characters that I wanted. Get the script from here http://www.outset.ws/files/jsfl/embedCharactersInTextField.jsfl. In flash: Commangs -> Run command (or simply Ctrl+R) and point the script file.You can download the jsfl documentation from here http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/main/flash_cs3_extending.pdf.

Thanks to Mike Scutari for the great review of SVET. Check out here.

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

"Look under the hood of Google Chrome in this comics interpretationof key engineering decisions, by Scott McCloud."