code
Reported Attack Page in Firefox
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.Javascript: handling with crossdomain requests
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.Creating simple WYSIWYG editor with AS3 (Flex)
There are dozen of JavaScript WYSIWYG editors available, but most of them are too complicated and a little bit buggy. From time to time I'm using my own tool to provide such kind of functionality. It accepts and exports valid html. I decided to share it with you and explain how I built it.PHP developers - wake up!
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.Cleaning up <pre> tag content
I'm blogging for different technologies, but very often I need to add some code in my articles. This little PHP function helps me to keep the text in my <pre> tags clean for prettify. It simply removes the <br>'s and keeps the html tags.Chrome Extension: run JavaScript in the context of the current page
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.CSS: :before and :after pseudo elements in practice
By definition :before and :after are CSS pseudo elements. You can use them to insert something before or after the content of an element. There are some great articles giving the basics, but I wanted to write down a blog post for the real use cases. Or, at least, to show what I'm using them for.
PHP: simple captcha script
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.
To all devs out there
There are few things which I'm thinking about last few months. I summarize them here. Initially, I started writing this article for the company which I'm working for - East Interactive. The material is not meant to teach. It just contains few thoughts of main and I hope that my colleagues will find it helpful.JavaScript template engine in just 20 lines
I'm still working on my JavaScript based preprocessor - AbsurdJS. It started as a CSS preprocessor, but later it was expanded to CSS/HTML preprocessor. Shortly, it allows JavaScript to CSS/HTML conversion. Of course, because it generates HTML it was normal to act as a template engine. I.e. somehow to fill the markup with data.
Hungry for knowledge - Scotland JS 2014 talks
These are screencasts from the this year's Scotland JS conferences. It happened on 9th and 10th of May. If you are a JavaScript developer you will probably want to see the talks.
Feeding the beast at 60fps
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.
Node.js Blueprints book - second chapter's clarification
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.
Rethinking JavaScript readability
You probably know the famous quote that the code should be written for humans to understand and accidentally for computers to execute. Writing code that compiles is easy. Writing readable code is completely different thing. Working in a team is like sharing the kitchen with your roommates. You all should care for the dishes and keep clean. And it is not only because of the others but because of you. You don’t want your dinner in a mixed place and dirty dishes right.
Enforce standards while submitting a pull 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.
The return statement is not the end (but it should be)
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.
Let's write, not generate code. Thoughts about naming stuff.
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.
README driven development
I was doing a podcast episode with Kent C. Dodds when he mentioned README-driven development. And so I decided to try it out with a new library which I just started. Here’s what I found.
My new and shiny tool for live demos - Demoit
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.
Build your own interactive JavaScript playground
Recently I spent some time working on my own JavaScript playground called Demoit. Something like CodeSandbox, JSBin or Codepen. I already blogged about why I did it but decided to write down some implementation details. Everything happens at runtime in the browser so it is pretty interesting project.
Why and how I built my own alternative of the GitHub's UI
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%.
Hopa - zero config CLI that runs JavaScript and TypeScript
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.
Pairify - how to match balanced string pairs
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.
Create your own Covid-19 data tracker
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.