Thoughts by Jan Hančič

Node.js is famous for being asynchronous. That means you’ll have a lot of callbacks or anonymous functions in your code. This can quickly lead to somewhat hard to follow code (hello callback pyramids). But that’s not what I want to talk about today.

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I’m currently looking for a full time web-dev  job in London. And a few days ago I remembered the monthly “Ask HN: Who is hiring?” threads on Hacker News. I also remembered what a pain it is to browse that thread. Especially if you’re not from the Bay area, for where most of the jobs are.

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When it comes to web pages I’m a bit of a speed freak. I’m constantly on the lookout for new techniques to make my pages faster. So it’s a great pleasure that I can now say that I came up with a new* technique to speed up page rendering.

The idea came to me while I was analysing one of my pages and trying to figure out how to reduce the number of requests. I asked myself: “would it be possible to, somehow, combine CSS and JavaScript into one file?”. And the answer, it turns out, is yes!
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We all know that client side form validation leads to a better user experience, but why are so many pages out there without it?

JavaScript validation can save your users a lot of time and frustration by informing them that they did something wrong as early as possible. And this is especially important on mobile. Everything takes at least twice as long (and I’m being generous here) on mobile than on desktop. Be it request time, render time or, most importantly, input type.

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Reading Hacker News threads, related to Twitter Bootstrap, is lately kinda like going on a walk with a child, that just learned the word “car” and is now pointing and shouting “car, car, car!” all the time. Yes, it’s a car now, please, shut up.

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Last weekend I came up with an idea for a mini web page: SDSzombi.com. The idea came to me after the friday protests in our capital city. I won’t explain the issues in Slovenia at the moment, but suffice to know that our government (or rather the leading party) has labeled all protesters as zombies. They’ve done that on Twitter, where they also regularly block anyone who expresses disagreement with them. So the idea was born: create a page where users can check if the ruling political party has blocked them. There’s just a counter of the number of blocked users and a simple list of blocked users. That’s it.
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I was reading this article on how Facebook is experimenting with taking payments to deliver your message to some person’s inbox and not the “other” folder.

That reminded me that I should check that infamous “other” folder, just to check if somebody was trying to get in touch. Luckily there wasn’t since people still use email, not this half-assed messages thing from Facebook.
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Today the internet is filled with news about Instagram changing their Terms of Use. The meat of this changes, for me at least, is this:

You agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you,

This basically means that Instagram/Facebook will be able to take your beautiful photo (and in case you are famous, your name) and sell it to some other company to use in their advertisements. Without, off course, you getting a penny.
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The first Rails Girls event in Ljubljana was great fun and a huge success. I volunteered to be a mentor and I’m really glad that I did. The whole day went by in the blink of an eye, and I’ll be more than happy to do it again someday.

Me coaching @ManjaUZ and @AndrejaCokl (© Katarina Jazbec & Rails Girls Ljubljana)
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I’m sorry, but if you sometimes put spaces around parentheses and sometimes you don’t, I just can’t be your friend any more.

I’m talking about source code writing style of course, or rather lack of it. Whenever I open some file that looks something like this …

… I get a sudden urge to punch however wrote that in the face.
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