If you are building some sort of an app, Babel is probably part of your build system. It is that thing which converts our fancy code to valid, working in a browser, JavaScript. Just recently at work I had to design a solution that swaps a class based on the environment. Or in another words, we have logic that should not reach our users. The file should be available locally and on our staging environment but not in production. A tiny Babel plugin was the cheapest solution for me so I decided to share the result.

JavaScript is your behavior layer; the way to add interactivity to your sites, to provide a slick and delightful user experience, to make everything fast and easy and clean. But at some point everything changed: the tail started to wag the dog instead and development became JavaScript-first.

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.

This weekend I decided to play with the new kid on the block - Facebook's Recoil library for managing state. I did the trivial counter example to see how it works. It's pretty simple idea so I wondered how much it takes to replicate its features. I found the exact answer - 70 lines of code. Obviously, my implementation didn't cover everything but it was fun so I decided to share my findings.

(A side note: I did not look at the code of Recoil. I didn't want to be bias on how to write my version.)

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

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.

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.

Building high performance sites and apps is crucial to your success on the web, and never more so as people start using smartphones as their primary means of internet access. But how can you make sure you're squeezing out every last bit of performance from your projects? In this talk we'll look at the tools you need to succeed and how to integrate them into your workflow.

I'm currently working on the official site of AbsurdJS. There are a lot of code samples out there and I wanted to present them in JSBins.

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

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

sugru is the exciting new self-setting rubber that can be formed by hand. It moulds like play-dough, bonds to almost anything and turns into a strong, flexible silicone rubber overnight.

"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.

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.

@Stray and @Joel Hooks finished their book for RobotLegs. Definitely it is something that you should read. More information here.

[2]Most of the articles here are tightly connected to my daily work. As you probably know from one of my latest posts (runtime font loading/embedding) I worked a lot with texts these days. There was a request for producing curved text from a dynamic field. Of course it wasn't so easy to create such a feature. I wrote a simple class that did the job and I decided to share it.

Flash is wonderful technology and has many advantages. Before a couple of years it was really popuplar to use it for displaying fonts that are not installed on the user's machine. Flash is still powerfull tool for such kind of tasks. These days I worked on a project which had to use a lot of fonts. It wasn't possible to embed all of them so I decided to implement runtime embedding.

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.

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.