just keep tryin' ta get a little better

Callback parameter should always be last

Jan Hančič — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 13:05:29 +0000

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. What I want to talk about is the order of parameters in functions that [...]

hnHiringFilter – filter jobs on Hacker News

Jan Hančič — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 19:33:44 +0000

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 [...]

Load JavaScript and CSS with one request

Jan Hančič — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 16:39:36 +0000

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 [...]

Client side validation on mobile

Jan Hančič — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 08:11:30 +0000

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 [...]

Nobody cares you use Bootstrap

Jan Hančič — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 15:58:16 +0000

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. Seriously, every time there is a story posted about some project/startup/hack, [...]

SDSzombi – a weekend hack

Jan Hančič — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 12:17:10 +0000

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, [...]

Facebook messages UX

Jan Hančič — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 14:18:22 +0000

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, [...]

Missed opportunity for Instagram

Jan Hančič — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 09:59:52 +0000

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 [...]

After mentoring Rails Girls

Jan Hančič — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 13:28:58 +0000

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 [...]

Pick a style, any style

Jan Hančič — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 13:24:00 +0000

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. If you are writing [...]

How to be cool in Google search

Jan Hančič — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 15:30:17 +0000

You may have noticed, in recent months, that some search results on Google have extra stuff displayed next to the regular title and small text that we are used to. Some even have images displayed! So, what’s this all about? There are actually two different things going on. One thing are schemas (more on them later) [...]

HN Favourite Users

Jan Hančič — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 17:50:47 +0000

Let’s face it, Hacker News could do with a make over and some new features, but I don’t think that that’s going to happen anytime soon. So I’ve decided to scratch one of my own itches with it and made a new extension for Chrome: HN Favourite Users. What it does is highlights your favourite [...]

Mentoring Rails Girls

Jan Hančič — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 14:14:17 +0000

There’s a lovely new event coming up here in Ljubljana, aimed at women who’d like to learn programming. Apparently this has already been done across the globe and it’s been quite a success. Rails Girls is a two-day workshop for women who don’t have any experience with programming, and the aim is to introduce this subject to [...]

New design

Jan Hančič — Sat, 03 Nov 2012 09:25:46 +0000

You are looking at a new design for this page. The old one was really, well … old. And it gave me a perfect opportunity to play around with Twitter Bootstrap. I must say that I like this bootstrap thing a whole lot. It’s really amazing when you see what you can come up with in ridiculous small amounts [...]

How to serve JS&CSS files properly (part 2)

Jan Hančič — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 17:16:07 +0000

Thh

OSX leave my USB key alone

Jan Hančič — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 10:38:08 +0000

I’ve been using OSX for almost a year now which, naturally, makes me an expert on all things OSX and gives me the right to rant about it. It’s been a mostly pleasant year, but there are some issues with this god-sent operating system. The single most annoying thing about OSX is how it’s handling USB keys [...]

How to serve JS&CSS files properly (part 1)

Jan Hančič — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 13:35:16 +0000

In the world of front end optimization you will want to start with how you serve CSS and JavaScript files. Same rules can be applied to both types of files: - minify - combine - compress - cache - serve from cookie-less domain In this first part I’ll explain the first two items from the list: Minify .js and .css files Minifying your [...]

Google analytics and cookies

Jan Hančič — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 16:00:06 +0000

If you are using Google Analytics you’ve probably noticed that it sets a bunch of cookies on your computer. They have to set those cookies to be able to track users activity on your page. But unfortunately this has a rather annoying side affect of always sending those cookies as part of the request when user navigates [...]

Optimize JPG/JPEG images automatically with JpegTran

Jan Hančič — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 10:55:55 +0000

Optimizing front end performance of your web page is both a hard and really rewarding job. Hard because there are so many things you have to take care of. And rewarding because you will gain a lot more out of it than optimizing your back end (most of the time spent rendering a web page [...]

Run SQL queries in the background with PHP

Jan Hančič — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 11:59:19 +0000

As any developer working with SQL will tell you, sometimes some queries are just slow and there isn’t much you can do about it. MySQL’s InnoDB can be painfully slow at inserts for instance. I was recently dealing with this exact problem and after some thinking I’ve came up with a really nice solution that offloads [...]