I did use Sass and Less in the past, and one of my favorite features was the nesting. Not only me but the whole community was asking about that constantly over the years. The browser vendors heard that plea, and today, we have CSS nesting.

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.

Last year or so, I worked on a platform where I would publish video courses. The first one is on web fundamentals (in Bulgarian), and it's almost ready. You can check it out here. But this article is not about that. It's about a platform feature I built - an in-house validator to exercise the gained HTML, CSS, and JavaScript knowledge. After each lesson, I give a task to the students, and they can work on it right in the browser. The small application became an inspiration for another project - iloveweb.dev. So, I decided to share how the validation works.

A short movie for Kent C. Dodds.

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.

Hot topic last couple of years is state management. Especially in the front-end apps. There are lots of problems and lots of solutions. One thing thought is totally ignored in this context - the JavaScript module system. I'm very often reaching out to this approach and decided to share it here.

These days I did (again) a bunch of changes in Google tag manager. This time however was more of a refactoring exercise. So, I had to prove that the tags that were placed before the refactoring exist after the refactoring. And what we programmers do in such cases - we write tests.

I'm recently working on two OS libraries. Both I'm unit testing with Jest. There is some logic that leads to a warning which I'm doing with console.warn. In the unit tests this is happening quite often so I want to suppress it. Also I want to verify that it happens on the right place.

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.

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.)

I ❤️ markdown. I like its simplicity and minimalistic API which is good enough to cover most of needed HTML markup. At least for textual content. At work we have a small node based microservice that delivers data from Contentful in exactly markdown format. It's all working well but we started having cases where part of the text is in Contentful and the other part is in that microservice. For example when we have a button with a catchy design. We want to content manage the label of the button but the actual markup to be on our side.

These days I had an interesting problem to solve. At work, on our staging environment, we have basic authorization. It works really well but for some older versions of Chrome we experienced a weird issue. The browser did not pass the authorization header. The app runs fine but as soon as it does a fetch request to a local endpoint the request fails with 401 not-authorized error. In the modern browsers that's not happening because the browser kinda knows that we came here with basic auth and automatically includes authorization: basic ... header.

We spent a day with Open Source-“Wunderkind” Max Stoiber in Vienna. Despite his young age of only 23, Max has achieved incredible things: he's created react-boilerplate and styled-components, his start-up, Spectrum, was recently acquired by GitHub and he gives talks all over the world. Learn more about his journey - and how he dropped out of university (twice!) - in this mini-doc.

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.

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.

Starring Lee Byron, Dan Schafer and Nick Schrock (co-creators of GraphQL) and other big names from the #GraphQL community, "GraphQL: The Documentary" explores the story of why and how GraphQL came to be and the impact it's having on big #tech companies worldwide, including Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb and Github.

With the help of Sarah Drasner, Taylor Otwell, Thorsten Lünborg and many others from the Vue.js community, Evan You tells the story of how he fought against the odds to bring Vuejs to life.

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 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 small library that has a logger. I'm bundling the app to a single file and I want to disable the logger for the production version. In this blog post we will see how I removed the logger.log calls from my bundle using AST (abstract syntax tree).

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.

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.

Епизод 23 на малко позабравения NADCAST е тук. Този път гости ми бяха Яни (https://remoteit.world/) и Ния (https://influencer.bg/). Поговорихме си за маркетинг, брандинг, hiring и работа от разстояние. Приятно слушане.

Just recently I became a fan of the iterable protocol. I knew about it for some time now but never actually integrated it on my own. I ended up using it to provide a nice API for one of my libraries and I thought that this approach worth sharing.

I really like Redux. I Love its ideas. The reducers for example - small pure functions that apply changes without side effects are nice way to model the mutations in the state. Redux also teaches us to use the one-direction data flow which makes our apps more predictable and stable. These two things fits well for what we are doing on the front-end - building user interfaces.

Of course there is nothing perfect and Redux as every other library has its own problems. In this article I want to explore some ideas for new APIs that will help solving the problems that I encounter. I’ll be happy to see your comments below.

Last weekend I was part of the ReactNotAConf conference and this 22th episode was live recorded on stage there. Kudos for the organizers and the speakers. It was an awesome event and it looks like we've made a really interesting panels. Enjoy.

Една седмица преди React.NotAConf с Радо обсъдихме някой важни подробности около събитието. Ако се чудите за какво точно ще говорят лекторите или ако все още не сте решили какво да правите на 11 май изслушайте епизода. Ще се радвам да се видим в Interpred WTC.

The hooks API is a wonderful idea. There are some slick patterns involved that push the React development to a more functional approach. I'm interested in trying that new API and decided to use it for my latest project. However, after a couple of days, it looked like I can't build my app only with hooks. I needed something else. And that's mainly because each hook works on a local component level. I can't really transfer state or exchange reducers between the components. That's why I created Jolly Roger. It has similar helpers but works on a global app level.

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

Пилотния за сезон 2019 епизод е със Стефан Кънев. Поговорихме си за мениджмънт и лидерство. Приятно слушане.

Ето един малък коледен подарък - епизод номер 19 на NADCAST. Последните няколко месеца съм на вълна продуктивност. С Радо Станков и Минко Гечев си поговорихме за TEA framework. Или казано по друг начин, как да намерим повече време (time), енергия (energy) и фокус (attention). Приятно слушане.

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.

If you use React you probably know about the so called hooks. They were officially announced at this year's ReactConf by Sophie Alpert and Dan Abramov. Their presentation could be seen here. I, same as many others got intrigued by this new feature. A little bit confused by if I like them or not but kind of excited. This article pretty much sums up my thinkings around React hooks and aims to give a balanced opinion.

This episode is with Sara Vieira. She is doing a lot of interesting things with React, GraphQL, Apollo and with JavaScript in general. She's also part of bunch of conferences doing talks and workshops which itself is a big challenge. Happy listening :)

След дългата, почти два месеца пауза, епизод 17 на NADCAST е с Радо Станков. Започнахме с някои много интересни новини като предстоящия NotAHackathon и VarnaConf. След това си поговорихме за различните по вид работни среди. През freelancer-ството до работата в продуктова компания.

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.

Много ценен разговор с Владо се получи. В този 16-ти епизод дискутираме code review процеси, навици, мотивация и като за финал малко за баланса в нашата професия. Надявам се да ви хареса.

Episode #15 of NADCAST was live recorded at ReactNotAConf conference in Sofia on 28th of April. After every presentation we've made a panel with the speaker and ask topic related questions. So, if you listen the whole episode you'll get a pretty good overview of what the conference was about.

Стефан и Митьо споделиха солидни практики и опит в менторирането на по-начинаещи програмисти. Надявам се този 14-ти епизод да ви бъде полезен независимо на какво ниво сте.

MP3: http://nadcast.krasimirtsonev.com/StefanKanev_DimitarDimitrov.mp3

Фаталният епизод 13 на NADCAST е с моя добре познат събеседник Радо Станков. Основна тема на нашия разговор беше новата версия на React и предстоящите React.NotAConf (http://react-not-a-conf.com/) и Bulgaria Web Summit (https://bulgariawebsummit.com/) конференции.

Redux is a library that acts as a state container and helps managing your application data flow. It was introduced back in 2015 at ReactEurope conference (video) by Dan Abramov. It is similar to Flux architecture and has a lot in common with it. In this section we will create a small counter app using Redux alongside React.

Епизод номер 12 е с Димитър Димитров (Митьо). Поговорихме си за менторството и за това как трябва да се подхожда към начинаещите програмисти. Имаше и малко DevOps даже :)

Първия епизод за 2018 е с Мариан и Павел. Поговорихме си за Sashido.io, инфраструктури, наемане на хора и още нещо :)

(If you are lazy jump to this section to learn what is this article all about.)

Remember The Island movie from 2005. I watched it again these days and I realized that the old sci-fi titles start with something really interesting. It is funny how they create a world of flying vehicles and say something like "The year is 2019 …". Well, we are 2018 and the public transport is still on the ground. We still can't clone people (I hope so) or travel in a giant spaceship which looks like a fully-functional city.

Предколеден 10-ти епизод на NADCAST е с Радо Станков и Минко Гечев. Разговора започна с малко meta теми, но после си поговорихме за Angular, React и JavaScript като цяло. Приятно слушане и весели празници.

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.

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 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.

Епизод 9 на NADCAST е с Радо Станков. Основно си поговорихме за React и нашумелите около библиотеката теми. Приятно слушане :)

If you write JavaScript today you probably use some sort of a transpilation tool. A tool that reads your hipster code and convert it to code that works in the browser. In this article we are going to see what is actually send to the browser and how exactly libraries like Babel polyfill some of the ES6 features.

Епизод 8 на NADCAST е с Александър Тодоров. Поговорихме си за тестване, QA, release процеси, малко за React. Оказа се че тестването в компании като RedHat може да бъде доста голямо предизвикателство.

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.

Епизод 5 на NADCAST е с Христо Панайотов. Прави доста интересни неща по доста интересен начин. Поговорихме си за това как се случват по кретивните уеб сайтове в днешно време и малко за JavaScript stack-a.

There are lots of things which I like in React. Mostly the fact that it teaches interesting patterns. One of my favorites ones is higher-order component. In this article we’ll do a couple of experiments and will see how powerful this approach could be.

Това е един експеримент, който мисля от доста време. Първи епизод на моя podcast наречен "NADCAST". Поговорихме си малко с Радо Станков. Предимно за React.

I'm a proud father of two and programmer for more then 15 years. My kids are small so I'm really into parenting right now. A bit of a problem for me is to stay up-to-date with the latest technologies in the Web. I really love my job but I just don't have enough time to look after all these frameworks, libraries or tools. I used to read Twitter, monitor RSS feeds and spend hours reading Reddit or Medium. However, no time for that anymore.

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.

(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.

The first article on this blog is published on 22th of August 2008. It’s about a website which I saw at FWA. Eight years later I’m still publishing stuff here and because it is the beginning of a new year I decided to give you some statistics.

After my phone got stolen, I quickly realized just how much of my personal information and data the thief had instantly obtained. So, I let another phone get stolen. This time my phone was pre-programmed with spyware so I could keep tabs on the thief in order to get to know him. However, to what extent is it possible to truly get to know someone by going through the content of their phone?

React is probably one of the best choices for building UI. Good design, support and community. However, there are cases where we want to use an external service or we want to integrate something completely different. We all know that React works heavily with the actual DOM and basically controls what’s rendered on the screen. That’s why integrating of third-party components could be tricky. In this article we will see how to mix React and jQuery’s UI plugin and do it safely.

One of the ways to stay up-to-date with the latest technologies is to watch talks from popular conferences. Here are two of my favorite ones:

Node has a wonderful debugger. As a front-end developer I’m mainly using Chrome’s tools but sometimes I run things in Node environment and this native feature comes handy. In this article we’ll see how to debug in the terminal using Node’s debugger.

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.

I like reading code of other developers. It’s a nice way to learn patterns, techniques and small tricks. Recently I found something about Array.prototype.length which caught my attention.

I love using functions like map, filter or reduce. They are an important part of my arsenal and I simply can’t stop using them. Today I had to solve an interesting problem and I ended up using reduce.

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.

I recently finished watching Mr. Robot. If you didn’t check out the show please do. Last few days I felt like I’m hacking something. Just like Elliot in MR. Robot. This blog post is about fixing a weird bug. Really strange problem with a failing HTTP 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.

We had to update some of our old pages adding new elements. This means mixing old and new code. Placing HTML markup and JavaScript in legacy pages is not that difficult. Yes, it brings some issues but they are easily solvable. However, the CSS is a whole new story. That’s why I did CSSSteal. It helps me extract the needed styles.

So it's been a few months since I published something here. It’s not because I’m lazy (that’s true though) but because I was working on my second book. Now the book is almost finished and I’ll start actively blogging again. In this article we’ll see how to use the local storage of the browser as a communication channel.

I could split my programming experience in two parts. The first one is a little bit more creative. That's the time where the application still does not exist. You invent and architect the program. The second part is extending and fixing the already created system. They, these two parts, have their own interesting and boring sides. However, I believe that they both are in the essence of delivering quality software. This article focuses on bug fixing. It aims to give you bunch of advices how to properly handle the problems in your applications.

I like npm and the fact that I can install tons of stuff. It’s great piece of software and helps me solve problems everyday. Yesterday I had to use a postinstall script and hit a problem.

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.

Usually I don't write such articles but this time I'll share my story. I was going to fly from London to Bulgaria. The flight is two hours and a half which is (by my opinion) enough to get bored. When I was traveling from Bulgaria to London I used my phone a lot. I read lots of stuff for reactive programming, played few games, ate some snacks. However, for the way back I wasn't prepared.

I don’t think that we have to discuss the importance of having tests. That’s not something that we add to the project in addition. That’s something that the project is based on. And because testing is so important we have bunch of tools in our disposal. We all know (I hope) how to test our back-end code. However, once we move to the front-end is a bit different. At the moment we are working on a big single page application and testing is one of our main focuses. In this article you will see how to unit test our client-side JavaScript.

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.

Us JavaScript programmers like to use words like, "event-loop", "non-blocking", "callback", "asynchronous", "single-threaded" and "concurrency". We say things like "don't block the event loop", "make sure your code runs at 60 frames-per-second", "well of course, it won't work, that function is an asynchronous callback!".

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.

These days I spent some time working on Yez!. Chrome extension whose main role is to replace the annoying switching between the terminal and the browser. It uses Node.js module to run shell commands. So, I had to deal with child processes, and I decided to document my experience.

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.

There are only two weeks left before the international front-end conference in Linz - Codefront.io. It's organized by the guys from WebBox and it's scheduled for 10th of May. You still have a chance to buy a ticket and listen interesting talks about our lovely Web.

I just finishing reading Getting Started with Grunt: The JavaScript Task Runner. The same book that we (I and Packt publishing) run a contest for. You could still joint it here and win a free copy.

This blog post is part of series about AbsurdJS. I'll continue filling the library with small and self organized black boxes. In the last article we talked about creating a JavaScript router. This time we will go through the process of making Ajax requests.

(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.

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.

AbsurdJS became one of my favorite projects. I spent a good amount of time developing it and it's getting more and more interesting. I also received some positive feedback, so I think it is time to write a bit more about the module and explain how it actually works and what exactly is made for.

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.

While I worked on AbsurdJS I needed a function which accepts numerous objects and combines their properties. I.e. something like the _.extend method of UnderscoreJS. What I did is actually to use one more dependency just because of such method. John-David Dalton nicely pointed out my mistake and added a simple function which solved the problem. I change it a bit and now it acts as UnderscoreJS's version.

I just messed up my local repository. Thankfully there was an answer in StackOverflow.

I just answered on that question at StackOverflow. That's actually asked a lot last few months.

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 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.

I really like SASS and I use it a lot in my daily job. There are tons of useful features. However there are some things which I want to do, but I can't. There are limitation in the syntax and missing functionalities. Sharing what I found, I want to know if you meet those limitation and how you get around them.

The good old Internet Explorer. It's full with surprises. I just fixed a bug happening only in IE. Everything works just great in every other browser.

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.

I'm writing a lot of JavaScript these days. Sometimes it's really crazy what you can do with that language. I have bunch of tools in my arsenal and I wanted to document them somehow. Writing an article is a good option. By tools I mean patterns, piece of logic or just syntax shortcuts. However, this article is not exactly about design patterns, but it uses some of them. It's just about few ideas, which I came into during my daily scripting.

I'm working on a year old application written in node. There is twitter streaming API implemented and it worked before a couple of months. These days we moved the site on another server and I found that it is not working anymore.

Don't get me wrong, Jasmine is a wonderful framework. I'm using it for testing JavaScript in both places - front-end (in browser) and back-end (Nodejs). However, the client side has some disadvantages, which I just fixed. I hope that someday these changes will be moved to the official version (or at least I'll make a pull request very soon).

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.

I just found out that it is possible with pure javascript. It's supported in all the major browsers. Find more information here.

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.

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.

There should be some super cool RegEx, which I can use. However after short research I wasn't able to find it. So, I created a simple function which does the job.

Really simple GET request from a flex based application. However it fails if GET parameters are passed.

Ok, I should admit that mod_rewrite and regular expressions are not my strongest part. Today - as every other day I realize how little knowledge I have. Actually it's good to have such moments. I lost almost two hours fighting with a really really simple mod_rewrite rule in my .htaccess file.

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.

I'm a Windows user. I also have a virtual machine with Ubuntu installed and coding there from time to time. I use Git a lot and in general I prefer console mode over the GUI. Under Unix everything works just great, but Windows's command prompt requires more efforts from our side. However I found some helpful tips, which could make your life easier.

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.

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.

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.

AssetsPack is a NodeJS module which helps in organization, compilation and minification of assets. It's meant to be used in local environment during the development process. It was made generally for HTML/CSS/JavaScript based applications.

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.

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

Edge Conference is a different kind of conference, for developers with experience to share, who want to see and bring improvements to the web platform. Their emphasis is on creating a good environment for productive debate and discussion, rather than presenting the experiences of a single speaker. The videos from the conference are now available and you should definitely check them out.

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.

HTML slicing the site of VarnaLab using LESS and Twitter Bootstrap

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.

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

 tags clean for prettify. It simply removes the 
's and keeps the html tags.


    read more
  

I was planning to post this article a few weeks ago, but today I finally finished the examples and I can't wait to share it. We all know that the testing is a big part of our daily tasks and we should use every existing tool to make our lives easier. I really like test driven development and once I found the concept of the headless browsing I started to think that we can automate every single aspect of the testing. In this post I'll show you how to use Nodejs to test a simple php site.

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

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/.

Agile or Agile Development – we hear these words more often these days. But do we really know what it is all about? How can it help us become more effective, while having lots of fun developing software? How can we use it to communicate with business people and make this communication easy and constructive for both sides?http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/general/the-principles-of-agile-development/

There’s a lot of bad information on the Web (I’m looking at you, W3Schools) that leads new PHP users astray, propagating bad practices and bad code. This must stop. PHP: The Right Way is an easy-to-read, quick reference for PHP best practices, accepted coding standards, and links to authoritative tutorials around the Web.http://www.phptherightway.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.

Maybe one of the best explanations of the prototype in the context of JavaScript language.http://javascriptweblog.wordpress.com/2010/06/07/understanding-javascript-prototypes/

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

The PEAR Coding Standards apply to code that is part of the official PEAR distribution. Coding standards often abbreviated as CS among developers and they aim to keep code consistent to be easily readable and maintainable by most of PEAR folks.http://pear.php.net/manual/en/standards.php

I'm not exactly a performance perfectionist, but currently I'm working on a tool which will be used in a large system. It will deliver texts to a multi-language environment and there will be several sites/apps which will performe big amount of request to it. It is the right moment for me to choose how to speed up my code and the work of the tool overall.

The Dependency Inversion Principle relates to the stability and reusability of higher-level components within an application. The principle states:_A. High-level modules should not depend on low-level modules. Both should depend on abstractions.B. Abstractions should not depend upon details. Details should depend upon abstractions._Read more here.

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.

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.

Inspired by the article of Dru Kepple I decided to share my experience in Debugging processes in flash/flex enviroment.

I'm a big fen of the MVC pattern. I like the idea to store my data in one place and be able to get it fast. In most of my projects I used a class called Storage for similar purpose. It supports a multi-language data saving, so I decided to share it with you.

When we are talking about maps, Google is an absolute leader. Their GoogleMaps tool is free, well documented and works really good. What I didn't find directly in the documentation is how to get the exact location based on plain text. I.e. to convert an address to google.maps.LatLng object. That's why I wrote a simple function that did this job.

We all know that the usage of InternetExplorer brings a lot of problems for us (the developers). Did you know that there is a JavaScript method createStyleSheet that you can call only 31 times.

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.

[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.

FlashDevelop is one of the most preferred editors for the flash development. I've been also using it last few years. I found it helpful for writing JavaScript, HTML, CSS and PHP code as well. I just took a big project with over 1000 php files and it is a little bit difficult to open the right file, even by using the Project panel. That's why I decided to invest time in solving this task and found that I can write my own C# script and run it.

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.

Because of the huge interest in AS3: Using Custom Metadata in Flex (part 1) I decided to dig a little bit deeper in this topic. You already know how to get information about your custom metadata, so in this article I'll show you how to use it.

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.

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.

Currently I'm working on a big JavaScript project. It has a lot of files that have to be compressed. I wrote a simple php class that merges all the files into one. It has also a useful simple obfuscator method.

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 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.

Currently I'm working on an application that gets data from Twitter. The tweet's string contains links that have to be transformed into html link tags. Here is a simple PHP function that helped me.

Sometimes you don't need any formatting. That's just a nice way to remove all the html tags.

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.

Papervision3D is a perfect tool for the purpose. As you will see such a task needs only few lines of code. To make the example a little bit more interesting we will add additional code to control the rotation of the globe by the mouse.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There are some things that I'm doing in almost every project. Loading of data in Flash is actually one of them. In this article I'll show you how to load information from MySQL database. We will use PHP as a junction between the Flash and the database. You need an Apache server like XAMPP or EasyPHP installed or just a hosting account that supports php.

A couple of months ago I integrated a nice WYSIWYG editor written in Flex in my CMS. It worked fine, till yesterday I needed to add more features like text formatting and font color changing. As you know the Flex RichTextEditor component adds some additional tags that I definitely don't want to send to the database. So I wrote a simple function to remove these tags.

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.

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

Finally I finished some bugs of my own project management system and I think it's ready for use. SVET is one of my biggest projects and it's a web based project management system, that helps you to organize your work. Basically it's an online notebook which you can use to store the information for your projects. It enables you to track your working time and communicate with your team and clients. You can also make detailed reports of what you've done for a specific period of time. Please check out here.

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 !

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