Alvaro Montoro's personal website and blog
Developers love classes. They pile on custom classes everywhere, but HTML already counts with many attributes that do a better job. So why not use them? This article goes through some of the most common native attributes that can be used instead of a class.
The AI Boom won't end in extremes, but even the middle ground brings challenges governments and tech companies aren't ready for. Society needs to demand guardrails before a crisis happens.
Spain overcame decades of anxiety, rebuilt its identity, and redefined what winning as a team means. That transformation can teach organizations about leadership and team culture.
Over a decade ago, my employer announced layoffs that would happen in waves. Every few months another round arrived. Nobody knew the criteria, who would be affected next, or when. The uncertainty was exhausting and took a toll on everyone. This week, Xbox announced a similar plan, and it brought those memories back.
Planning a family trip to New Zealand sounded simple enough: seven days, two kids (ages 9 and 11), one rental car, and a long list of places my wife had dreamed about for years. What I didn't expect was how quickly "a perfect loop around the North Island" would turn into "a beautiful, chaotic zig zag full of glowworms, geysers, and last minute changes". And still, everything worked better than…
A quiet final morning in Hamilton, a relaxed drive to Auckland, and a flight home filled with reflections on a week of geothermal wonders, Māori culture, glowworms, and family adventures. Day 7 was our gentle farewell to an unforgettable North Island road trip.
A calm and colorful final day in New Zealand: Māori rock carvings on Lake Taupō, the power of Huka Falls, the geothermal landscapes of Craters of the Moon, and a quiet evening in Hamilton as we prepared to say goodbye to our North Island road trip.
A day packed with surprises. From Māori culture and kiwi birds at Te Puia to the surreal colors of Wai-O-Tapu, a winter swim in Taupō, and even a small earthquake. Day 5 blended nature, culture, and unexpected moments that made our North Island road trip unforgettable.
A full day of family-friendly adventure in Rotorua: from luge runs and chairlifts to an immersive visit to a living Māori village and a magical night walk among towering redwoods and glowworms. Day 4 blended adrenaline, culture, and nature in a way that made our North Island road trip unforgettable.
Our third day took us deep underground into Ruakuri and Waitomo's glowworm caves before ending with a Māori cultural experience in Rotorua. A full day of learning, exploring, driving, and new experiences.
A full day of Middle-Earth magic and nighttime adventure: from an immersive Behind the Scenes tour at Hobbiton (complete with hobbit holes, feasts, and film-set secrets) to a moonlit walk through Ruakuri Reserve where we spotted our first glowworms in the wild.
A smooth arrival in Auckland, a quick pass through New Zealand's biosecurity process, and my first attempt at driving on the left set the tone for our trip. A straightforward travel day on paper, but an important start to our journey from the airport to Matamata and the Hobbiton adventure that awaited us on our North Island road trip.
CSS treats @supports as context-blind, and that leads to surprising (and misleading) behavior in real browsers. This article showcases examples when @supports doesn't work as expected and explores the reasons.
If you enjoy web development, puzzles, crosswords, and games like NYT's Connections, this one's for you. Play at the article or online at comiCSS.art
A city built with CSS. No SVG. No images. No HTML. Just gradients... and a bit of patience.
The CSS Working Group has published the Values and Units Module Level 5, which introduces native mechanisms for generating random content using only CSS. This is the tl;dr of a longer article exploring randomness in CSS.
A collection of 50+ optical illusions coded with CSS and HTML.
New year, new collection of web development puns and short jokes! They are all equally terrible and funny... ok, more terrible than funny, but who's counting? 20 new jokes for you to suffer enjoy!
After the boxing match between Joshua and Blake, I put together a small meme generator demo inspired by one of the match's most iconic images. In this article I explain how it's done.
A collection of single-liners, clever puns, and unapologetic dad jokes where HTML and CSS take center stage. Enjoy it!
We've reached the fifth installment of these short web development dad jokes. Who could have guessed? Not me! Be warned, they are exactly what they claim to be: bad dad jokes.
A long time ago, I wrote an article about drawing triangles in CSS, and explained why the common border-based approach was far from ideal and should generally be avoided. In this article, I revisit a scenario where using borders might actually be convenient.
I haven't shared any terrible dad jokes in a while... did you think the nightmare was over? Think again! This time, I'm back with a whole batch of Halloween-themed Web Developer Dad Jokes.
This Saturday, I found some time to sit down and draw with code. I ended up creating this kawaii-style bee using just one HTML element and some CSS. With a video of the coding process. It was really fun to get back to some creative coding and CSS drawing after a while. I love how much you can achieve with gradients, pseudo-elements, and a little creativity... even using just a single HTML element!
Five real interview and hiring process stories I personally went through in my (still going) career. From bizarre brainteaser questions to lightning-fast rejections or unexpected "manager" duties, each stranger than the last.
Styling headings in CSS is about to get much easier. With the new :heading pseudo-class and :heading() function, you can target headings in a cleaner and more flexible way. A tutorial with live demos and links to examples and additional sources!
Chrome supports the type notation for attr(). This allows to specify the type of an attribute once it is read... and opens a world of possibilities.
How to draw a kawaii kitten with HTML and CSS, and animate it to make the cartoon cuter. With a video to show the process!
I spent some time this weekend doing some CSS Art. This time: (Baby) Yoda in a kawaii-ish style. This article includes a video with the coding process.
Rickrolling on social media can be easy, fast, and free... with a little help from GitHub Pages and SEO tags. In this tutorial, I show how to do it.
This past week I drew a cute(-ish) koala with HTML and CSS. And I shared a video that I recorded of myself live coding the drawing.
With the decline of X/Twitter and the rise of other social media platforms, many developers are building social widgets for blogs and websites. While this trend is exciting, many of the components I've found overlook a key privacy issue: how they handle and display the user avatars.
Technologies and trends that were going to destroy my job... or so they said...
LinkedIn settings change from time to time, so it's a good idea to keep an eye on them. This article reviews some hidden options that will deliver a better experience both on and off LinkedIn. This article includes descriptions to 10 LinkedIn settings and how to take advantage of them to the fullest.
Technical interviews have transformed and evolved over the past few decades. From testing a candidates's knowledge to some esoteric behavioral questions, this is how interviews have changed through my professional career.
A humorous review of how some developers see EU tech regulations before and after it actually impacts them. ...and small opinions and thoughts about it.
Heydon Pickering recently shared some "Principles of Web Accessibility," a set of twelve high-level guidelines on how to approach web accessibility. I highly recommend reading the whole thing -it's a short text-, but here's a summary of them if you want a quick "too long; didn't read" version:
Lighthouse Success Story: The best kept secret in Web Development Testing.
Learn how to create a customizable star-rating component using just HTML and CSS, with a minimal amount of inline JavaScript. This article covers practical tips, code examples, and trade-offs for building flexible, visually appealing rating systems.
A recurring thought when preparing articles online: Is it worth continuing to write in a digital publishing world flooded with machine-generated content? An opinion piece (a bit of a rant) about how "AI writers" are cracking publishing sites.
CSS art has been a thing since the creation of CSS itself. It is a great way of practicing and learning and it makes for an interesting coding challenge. But it has a big problem: CSS art is inherently not accessible. In this post, we will not see how to create CSS drawings and illustrations (there are plenty of those posts). Instead, we will focus on some tips and best practices to make that CSS…
Drawing a flag can be a great styling exercise. It combines many CSS features that can be later used in "real-life" projects: gradients, pseudo-elements, positioning, clip paths... In this article, I explain how to draw Togo's flag with two simple gradients and a pseudo-element.
An introduction to CSS gradients drawing different country flags. Start from the basics, move to some advanced concepts, and practice while having fun with flags and CSS.
The site DEV.to has a Meme Monday thread where I normally publish the weekly comiCSS cartoon and look for inspiration. Last week, there was a cartoon that caught my attention. I found it funny and decided to create my own version with HTML and CSS using masks.
This will be the third installment of this series... more terrible CSS-Dad jokes. Don't say you weren't warned. Enjoy!
After the terrible reception great success of my first post with Bad CSS-Dad Jokes, I am here to torture entertain you with more terrible amazing CSS jokes. Enjoy!
The CSS Working Group released the first Public Working Draft for the CSS Values and Units Module Level 5. It describes the common values and units that CSS properties accept and the syntax used for them, and it comes with some interesting new features. A review of some new functions and values that you will see in CSS (hopefully soon)
Even the best AI can only take you so far without a solid foundation in development fundamentals. Developers need to adapt and evolve with AI, using it as the powerful tool that it is, but without over-relying on it. Some thoughts, opinions, and ideas.
As a dad who works with CSS, it was only a matter of time before I started cracking bad dad jokes about web development and CSS (isn't that what I've been doing all along?)A collection of terrible CSS-dad jokes.
One challenge content creators often face is monetizing their content online. I created a Chrome extension that allows content creators to take donations in a slim and non-invasive way. This post explains the project and a summary of how it was coded and where it is headed.