Blogs

There is no denying that 2014 was quite the year! Great things happened in the world, like Malala Yousafzai winning the Nobel price award, we landed on an asteroid, Germany won the world cup, we raised awareness for ALS with the Ice bucket challenge and it’s the year that the USA and Cuba start thinking of being friends again (or not enemies at the very least). At the same time though it’s the year that Ebola became a big problem, ISIS spreading terror through the middle east, Maya Angelou, Robin Williams and other died, two Malaysian Airlines airplanes got lost and Ukraine, Russia and the EU made steps back in terms of peace and friendship....

With performance.fail i wanted to create a playground for developer to be able to go and experiment with web improvement techniques. The website is intentionally slow and scores a very low score on google pagespeed. You can find the source code on GitHub. Feel free to clone, send a pull request to make it slower or any other suggestion. Also feel free to let me know how you improved it and what tools and techniques you used....

Web Components is a new specification that is a set of four other specifications: Templates Shadow DOM Custom Elements and Packaging. Here we’ll be talking for Shadow DOM as it’s one of the most intriguing concepts, and it’s also something that you can use even today in your projects. To understand what web components are and how useful they are, you have to think about C or Java. In C, for example, if you go ahead and write your entire code inside the main function the result will be an awful mess of spaghetti code that none will be able to read....

About a week ago i had a small exchange of messages with Jeff Atwood regarding his new start-up Discourse and the forum of my favourite website The Daily WTF. But let me start the story from the beginning. The daily WTF is a very popular site that posts crazy stories from the corporate life of different people, mostly in technology. Many of us relate with them, and as a natural consequence it has thousands of readers....

Morning commute is boring and in London it tends to be crazy too. In order to spend that time more productively and make it enjoyable I listen to tech podcasts. That way i get to catch up with tech news, and learn a ton of things from people that have spend years in the industry. In order to like a podcast I’m usually looking for the same things. First, people that speak clear, not fast and make sense....

I always thought that in order to learn something you have to always have an end game, a target. So, in order to learn more about socket.io and expressJS i made that simple chat service. The idea came as i was talking to my mother and we wanted a simple way, without any kind of registration or anything to chat. So one click of the button and you can start typing immediately....

For the past year i’ve been reading a lot about Object.observe and all the magic it will add in our apps. Very recently though i’ve read that Chrome will be shipping Object.observe soon. I have no idea how soon though since they need to test the performance more, but it’s already available in Chrome Canary and you can start playing right now. ##The Basics The simplest example ever is observing an object for changes in its variables and in its general state....

Last week i went to a Meetup and watched a great talk by Razvan Caliman, who works for adobe, named The Expressive Web where he talked about several upcoming CSS features. Some of them are already partially supported by modern browsers (no IE8, you are not modern) and some of them are not but are still cool features. Browsers like Chrome Canary or Webkit Nightly support most of these features, so you can play with them there....

I’ve been reading some articles lately regarding people leaving big corporations. Specifically Jordan Price left Apple and also several people were claiming that you leave managers, not companies. I tend to disagree. People do leave companies “because of bad managers”, but a bad manager exists because the company let him/her exist. Companies usually want people that are authoritative, get things done (no matter what the cost) and deliver (i hate the word deliver)....

I remember the very first years of social media, older people went crazy about them. I was constantly listening to things like “this isn’t socializing”, “you are missing the point of human interaction” and most commonly “go out and meet your friends instead of talking to them through a computer”. That last one is the one that was the biggest fail. What if you can’t go out and meet your friends?...