My own journal on anything that's not relevant.
I started writing this article with a bitter sentiment. I thought lashing out words of disapproval and philosophising on life choices would have brought closure. After about a thousand words, I got nothing back and wasn’t even driving a point about it. I decided instead to make this a self-reflection post, where I can look back and see how I gained better tools to move forward over the different…
After more than twenty years working in software engineering, the words "Technical Debt" started to lose their meaning, at least in practical terms. Read all.
While I worked for Klarna until the company decided to part ways with the 10% of its workforce , I led several key teams within the - so-called Klarna Card, the credit card product offering. What I picked up was in a not so pretty state for reasons I'm not going to discuss here. But, in essence, the teams displayed some clear dysfunctional signs, where the major red flag was the team being…
It could have been anyone. But for some reason, it was her. Read all.
I started writing this article a good while ago (two years ago now), and I was about to publish it at the beginning of 2019. But as it was nearing completion, life happened, and only now I'm picking it up again and finally publishing it. Read all.
Another website, another time to take a look at the journey to build one. In this article, I'll recount the whole journey we, a dedicated team of professionals within the Buildit group of Wipro Digital, decided to tackle. Read all.
In this second instalment of articles about PatternLab, I am going to cover some basics around installation and configuration that can hopefully clear out some confusion that some people have expressed to me recently. Read all.
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I do consider PatternLab a mature tool, but its complexity might be overwhelming to many, both developers and designers, and if you have not investigated the topic of pattern libraries enough, it can cause more problems than those it solves. This article is going to be the first of a series on PatternLab [PL], starting from the very basics and digging into much more detailed aspects of it. Read…
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In my previous article, “ CSS architectures for UI developers ” I've tried to express how complicated is the situation surrounding the ideation, creation, and management of design systems for the web. I worked with Atomic Design and the PatternLab tool on at least 3 major projects, most notably during my period at Sainsbury’s in introducing and creating from scratch the style guide for the now…
Writing good CSS (or whichever sub-flavour) requires a good level of experience. In this moment of time, we are still trying to figure out the best way to scale CSS allowing maintainability and readability without sacrificing performance and ease of use. Some good practices first, then methodologies and systems have been created. Learning, if not mastering them will allow you to approach any CSS…
Or so I thought. What my website plan looked like - © NASA Archives: blueprint for the Personal Life Support System. I’ve just released my new portfolio at https://peach.smartart.it : this redesign started two years ago, with more or less 3 months non-stop of work during any spare time I had. I’ve tried to put into it as many good practices and methodologies I could, only those that were fit…
It's been a while since I've started learning and integrating UX and RWD into our products. I come from a graphic background, and my first passion when I stepped into the web development was what was then called web design. From there I’ve also been a lot into engineering and I’m currently employed as a position where front-end development has started to be deeply intertwined with visual design.…
Next Friday 26th June 2015 at 6 p.m. , my first solo exhibition kicks off here in London with aperitifs and free chicchetti, or bites, Venetian-style. Read all.
This article is an excursus on few technologies I've been using in these recent years that had improved the way we develop and ship our code. If you're a solo developer, freelancer or just the I-do-everything wo/man this might be useful to you as well, but you'll notice that a greater benefit will be for a team. Read all.
I've spent some sleepless nights and stressful days trying to understand why the latest versions of PHPUnit won't work anymore on any of our dev boxes. It almost drove me mad. It was like chasing a ghost: you fix one thing, you think everything should now work, you try again, then: SBAM! Another error is bitch-slapping you some truth in your face. Iterate over a dozen times and you'll know how I…
Since I've started working in my current company, I've been researching, learning and mentoring about proper project management, while trying to find the best solution that could work within a digital agency environment. I come from a purely Agile environment, such as SCRUM and XP, and my first steps when our team started to grow have been in that direction. In this article I'll try to expose what…
During the last few years I've started to attend the London Yii Meetup and as we are using Yii quite extensibly at work, we're also trying to do as much TDD as possible. I'm presenting here the slides that accompanied the talk I've given in June 2013. I will also try to dig into some of the fears that some developers have while approaching Unit Testing and TDD. Read all.
In this post I'm going to outline the effort, and see what are the pros and cons of using the Clown Car Technique to solve one of the biggest problems of the RWI , i.e. serve, with only one tag, more than one image depending on the media breakpoint. Read all.
In this article I'd like to share some technical insights of a very useful aspect of Yii models: virtual attributes, how to use them correctly and avoid possible problems and headaches. Although the actual content of the article is definitely targeted towards Yii developers, I'll try to link as much as possible to additional resources for anyone can actually explore the content a little bit more.…
It's finally over. Tibetan Daemon It took me over two years to finish it, and, I'm still not entirely satisfied about it. But that's how it goes, isn't it? I could probably be never enough satisfied about it. Read all.
First post for this website completely in English. I have a bunch of on going projects and things I'd like to talk about, but time is not on my side (as usual), but this I think it's worth talking about. This is a very stupid guide on how to setup a simple script I wrote on how to detect the external monitor and use it automatically. The basic setup and use I will cover are: configure basic…