Aurelio De Rosa blog

The State of the Web Notifications API

Today I was reviewing my HTML5 API demos repository to keep its information updated and relevant. In the last two weeks Google has released Chrome 38, Opera has released Opera 25, and Mozilla has released Firefox 33. Every time a new version of a browser is available, it may introduce support for new APIs or change an already supported API to accommodate changes in the specifications. For these reasons, a general check was much needed.

In this article I’ll discuss what’s the current state of the Web Notifications API, what browsers support it, and what versions of the specifications. I’ll use this post also to summarize some inconsistencies I’ve found along the way.

Resources for Beginner Front-end Developers

Few weeks ago I received an email from a developer asking me for suggestions on how to delve into the front-end world. After having replied to this email, I thought that it’d have been nice to share the same suggestions on my blog. That’s exactly what you’ll find in this post.

My Experience at 4Developers 2014

In March I announced via Twitter my participation as a speaker at 4Developers 2014. 4Developers 2014 was a single-day, multi-track and multi-language conference held in the lovely Warsaw on the 7th of April 2014 at the Gromada Airport Hotel. The tracks for the edition of this year were: Java, .Net, PHP, Python, Front-end (HTML5, JS, CSS), UX, Games Development, Mobile Systems & Apps, Mobile Games, Cloud Technologies, Application Architecture, Soft Skills & Business Relations, IT Project Management, and IT Security. At the conference I gave my talk Modern front-end with the eyes of a PHP developer in the PHP track.

The aim of this post is to describe my experience as a speaker and as an attendee.

Learn how to Write an Email. Seriously.

As a freelancer I receive a lot of emails every day. In addition to the usual ones (newsletters, friends, and so on), I receive emails from recruiters that want to find me a job, from people that want to hire me for a project, from people that want me to solve their programming issues, and finally from people that have read some articles of mine and what to ask something on that topic. I think this might sound familiar to most of you.

Believe it or not, what I’ve discovered over the time is that 80% of people (at least those who write me) don’t have a clue about how to write an email in a proper way. In this article, I’ll highlight some common mistakes in the hope that things will change.

Why People Think PHP Sucks!

A long time has been passed since the first release of PHP. Over the years the language has been improved a lot, in terms of performance and features, thanks to the work of many contributors. At the same time, also its adoption among developers is grown dramatically. Looking at the latest statistics, PHP is used on the 81.7% of all websites; an outstanding result. Nonetheless, several top companies and developers have always looked at PHP as a kind of bad, silly, and for snotty kids language.

In this highly opinionated article, I’ll try to explain some of the reasons behind these judges. I’ve collected them over the time, talking with other developers and reading some articles spread on the web.

Enhancing the abbr Element on Mobile

Today’s world runs fast, really fast. When writing, a lot of people use abbreviations and acronyms to save time that we can find spread all over the web. They are so used that an HTML tag, <abbr>, was created to identify them and help the semantic of web pages.

In this article, I’ll show you a small CSS snippet that can enhance how the <abbr> tag is shown on mobile devices.

My Experience at Codemotion Madrid 2013

As I announced in September, on the 19th October 2013 I spoke at Codemotion Madrid 2013 presenting a talk titled People don’t give a f**k of JavaScript, where I showed some new HTML5 APIs. This article is a wrap up of my experience at the event, both as a speaker and as an attendee, where I highlight what I liked and what not.

Codemotion Madrid 2013 Giveaway: Win a Free Copy of Instant jQuery Selectors

As some of you may be already aware, on Saturday October 19th 2013 I’ll speak at Codemotion Madrid with a talk titled People don’t give a f**k of JavaScript. If you didn’t know it, it’s because you don’t follow me on Twitter and you’re a bad guy or girl. Anyway, to celebrate this event, Packt Publishing and I decided to offer some free copies of my first book Instant jQuery Selectors.

15 Tips to Improve Your jQuery Selectors

Who don’t know what jQuery is and how it can help in developing a web project. Based on the latest statistics, jQuery is used on ~60% of the Quantcast Top 100k websites. We use it constantly and sometimes we tend to think it’s almost magic, that jQuery is capable to understand what we want to achieve and optimize all for us. There is no need to say this is wrong. You need to be aware of what jQuery does and does not for you and optimize as much as you can to improve your website’s performance.

In this article, extracted from my book Instant jQuery Selectors, you’ll learn some useful tips and tricks to improve the performance of your website by simply selecting elements in the right way.

How to Create Custom Filters in jQuery

In some cases you may need a shortcut to collect elements for which jQuery doesn’t provide a specific filter. This is exactly where custom filters come into play.

In this article, extracted from my book Instant jQuery Selectors, you’ll learn how to build a custom filter in jQuery. Please note that, to be a complete post, it has some minor adjustment compared to the original recipe titled Custom filters (Become an expert).