Recent content on Alberto Varela
Is This Vibe Coding? Let’s start with the name. These days, every few months a new term appears to describe what is essentially the same thing: people using AI tools to write code. First it was Vibe Coding (which even became “word of the year” according to Collins ). Then we got Agentic Coding, Augmented Coding, and I’ve even seen people start calling coding without an AI…
Most people think of time zones as “offsets from UTC”, but we know they’re more than that: they also include rules, like when to switch to summer time, and the historical rules and offsets. If Europe removes the DST switch, Europe/Madrid would, for example, transition from a two-rule timezone (UTC+1 in winter, UTC+2 in summer) to a single offset. That means new data in the IANA…
Twitter and I aren’t a thing anymore, I’m a Bluesky user now, and I noticed a trend: people are buying custom domains to use as their handles, like @yourname.dev . It’s elegant, personal, and professional. But, if you’ve already invested in a custom domain, why not use it for more than just a handle? Simple Alternatives If you’re using a domain as your handle, chances…
Not for the first time, but I recently came across a tweet that confidently asserted the fragility of JavaScript projects: Typescript solved JavaScript like Heroin solved Cocaine. If you leave a medium sized node or front end project aside and come back to it 6 month later, chances are it will never work again. Spent 2-3 hours bringing up a docs site last night, lots of breakage, libraries…
I remember when most websites used only web-safe fonts: Arial, Courier, Impact, Times New Roman, Verdana…, or the so-loved Comic Sans. Sad days for designers, great days for bandwidth. I also remember how the “new browsers” started supporting new features like @font-face to get a piece of the cake, at that time in the hands of Internet Explorer. A short while later, Typekit was…
Nowadays, the ability to switch between a light or a dark theme has become extremely popular on the internet. It has been a while since we began to see it on desktop applications, but now, we can also see it every day on most websites we use: Github, Stackoverflow, Twitter, etc. There are multiple ways to implement it, I’ll show you mine. Writing the themes It’s 2022, we survived the…
The post’s title is a confession; I know that there are other libraries for dependency injection with Typescript; even more, I’ve used them a lot, and I’ve learned a lot from them. Inversify , tsyringe …, it’s thanks to all of them that I’ve been able to write this, but obviously, there is a motivation behind creating my own, and I’ll try my best to…
The aim of this post is to encourage you to avoid coupling your application to the framework you choose. By doing it you will be able to switch your framework quite easy, which is probably not a common task, but it will help you update it to a new version with very low effort also. Apart from that, a huge advantage will be that it will let you test your application logic without depending on the…
Muchas veces se habla de lo que arriesgan los emprendedores cuando se embarcan en una nueva aventura, pero en este caso yo voy a hablar de algunos riesgos que corremos los trabajadores por cuenta ajena cuando decidimos unirnos a ellos en una de esas aventuras. En una de esas, que además, necesita mucha gasolina para arrancar y otra tanta para empezar a cubrir costes. Hay quien no es del todo…
I have been a hater. Since I started in web development I have been a Linux user, a FOSS consumer and, to a lesser degree, a free software contributor. Somehow, this made me despise Microsoft and, at some point, I was even not able to see any of their products on an objective basis, I just flat out rejected everything coming from them. This is not happening anymore, I am now a more mature…
The use of ambient videos as background is not something new, Smashing Magazine was already talking about it more than five years ago, but at that time it was still quite tricky to make it work in every browser. I’d say that in 2013-2014 it started becoming a trend, and nowadays we can say that it’s just another common resource to make our website look fancy. HTML Markup and styles…
This is the first post of the The Perfect Continous Delivery Pipeline For PHP series. Composer is the de facto dependency manager for PHP and Packagist is its official package repository. The release of this project in 2012 has revolutionized the PHP world, and nowadays, the dependencies of most of the projects are being managed with it. The usage of Composer and a Version Control System is the…
If you are a Javascript developer, specially if you work with Node.js, you have probably read something about Yarn in the last days. Engineers from Facebook Exponent, Google, and Tilde have been working together to build an alternative for the well known NPM , the built-in package manager of Node.js. During the last years, developers around the world have complained a lot about how slow NPM is.…
The last year I closed my blog after 8 years, 174 posts and more than 2400 comments. I did it because I stayed more than one year without writting anything on it. Now, just a year later I’ve decided to re-open it, this time in English. I like to write about what I’ve learnt. At least sometimes. So, even I will probably not write posts usually, I want to have my own space to write about…
I work at Ve’s Development Center in Bilbao. It’s a little city in the north of Spain where the people are usually infected by the special Basque shyness and this is why I’m not absolutely sure whether this post will be useful for everyone or just something that is totally obvious, but I hope that you can at least find parts of it enlightening or mildly entertaining. I’ll…
There’s a lot of great information online about how to write a good Puppet module. In this post I’m going to focus on the techniques we’ve used to have our modules officially ‘ approved ’ by PuppetLabs. I’m assuming you’ve either built an entirely new module, or substantially improved one on the Forge , and that you’d like to prove this is a good…
Coding has been considered to be something for geeks for a long time, but this approach makes no sense anymore. We live in a world where we can find technology and programs everywhere on our daily lives (laptops, cellphones, tablets, but also now on the TV, washing machines, medical tools, cash machines, transport,…). As we teach our kids about how nature works, it is now the time to teach…
I’m Alberto Varela , a 42 years old full-stack developer based in Bilbao with more than 20 years of experience. I’m passionate about everything related to web development, and I’m currently working as a Product Engineer at Paired . The easiest way to get in touch is via email: hello@albertovarela.net . I like to work in agile teams where I can participate and help at every stage…
You will be able to create multiple sidrs on both sides of your web to make responsives menus (or not, it works perfectly on desktop too). It uses CSS3 transitions (and fallbacks to $.animate with older browsers) and it supports multiple source types. Get started Like any other plugin, you must include it after the jQuery script. For a better performance load them at the bottom of your page or in…