Blog

My first task for new projects is to create a git repository. Whether it is a new app, or conference slides, or even an article, I prefer to keep everything in Git. It is an excellent tool, and, personally, I enjoy its command line interface. However, there is always room for improvement. Recently I found an idea how to make my git visualize the changes that I've done to the images in a repository. I can run git diff over each of the modified images to see the following: For every picture displayed, I can see a previous version (on the left side), a current version (on the right side) and…

My recent huge project was developing a library of CSS and JavaScript components for sharing this code across a lot of web services and mobile apps. In most cases such work brings up question about how to avoid blocking the processes. The library has its own flow, and obviously the new things can only appear in new versions. Although I made my best to provide fast releases, and so the library has them 2-3 times a week, it is still understandable that the library customers sometimes cannot wait even an hour. I belive that one of the must-haves of UI library is the freedom which it should give…

Last week I faced a need to make a fake tag cloud, where the words need to be of different size. This was needed for a presentation slide, and as my slides are always in HTML/CSS, must be implemented with these technologies. It is always possible to inject some JavaScript and code anything. But what about pure CSS, do we get random sizes there? The tag cloud you see above is what I get. You may notice it's not real random; after refreshing you will always get the same result. But still looks like a tag cloud of different sizes and works perfectly as an example. This is a list, it's easy to…

I never thought that I would write a post about diversity. But as the unicorn law says that being a woman in tech you will be eventually speaking about women in tech, I do so now. However I'm doing this not because it is a strong will of mine. Something happened which makes me to respond. I was recently speaking at a conference (a very good conference, I must say this) and during the asking session after the talk I got this question: — How to solve the diversity problem and get more women in our industry? I was absolutely not ready to this question. No wonder, being at stage and giving a…

I've been presenting SC5 Style Guide several times during this year sharing my experience of using it for one of the SC5's clients, Elisa. Assuming that Elisa is a huge mobile operator with a lot of websites and a need to keep those websites visually consistent, there is no wonder that the SC5 Style Guide as a tool provides benefits there. But what about smaller websites? Would it be useful there? I did not know the answer to this question and wanted to experiment. The experiment was conducted on my blog codebase. This is how the Living Style Guide looks like: varya.me/styleguide . You can…

This article at SmashingMagazine was published on 5th March 2015. It explained the motivation and benefits of style-guide-driven development and component-based approach in frontend.