Category: Programming

A big part of my work has to do with code. I’ve worked as system administrator – installing, patching, and configuring someone else’s code. I’ve worked as independent programmer, writing code on my own. I also programmed as part of the team. And on top of that, I worked as Team Leader and Project Manager, where I had to interact a lot with programmers. Programming world on its own is as huge as the universe. There is always something to learn. When I find something worthy or something that I understand enough to write about, I share it in this category.

List.js – Search, sort, filters, flexibility to tables, list and more

Tiny, invisible and simple, yet powerful and incredibly fast vanilla Javascript that adds search, sort, filters and flexibility to plain HTML lists, tables, or anything.

Source code on GitHub.

Global .gitignore

gitignore is a very handy tool for ignoring unnecessary files in the project. Most large projects have .gitignore file included. Most small projects would benefit from one too. However, working as a developer on a variety of projects, it’s often difficult to add your own rules to all .gitignore files around. And that’s exactly what I wanted.

I’m using Vim editor for all my coding needs, and I wanted to add Vim swap file and backup file to all .gitignore files. That sounded like annoying, so instead I looked around for a global gitignore solution. As always, StackOverflow has an answer for everything. There is a way to disable extra files in Vim, but there is an even better way to have your own global .gitignore. Here is how to do it:

Edit .gitconfig file in your home folder, and add excludesfile=~/.gitignore line to the core section.
Create .gitignore file in your home folder with whatever rules you desire.

Once that is done, all your projects will ignore the files matching the rules. If you are not sure which rules to start with, borrow one of the gitignore files from this GitHub project.

Echo – lazy-loading HTML5 images with data-* attributes via JavaScript

Echo is quite handy for web developers. On those pages that feature a lot of images, things can get slow and the server might get too much of an abuse (with more traffic thrown at it). One way to work around this is to only load those images that are in the visible part of the screen. Here is a demo of how it works. Just keep scrolling down and notice how by default you have a blank.gif image shown, with a standard loading indicator and a split second later you see the actual image which was supposed to be in there.

Simple, easy, elegant – and that’s how I like it.

John Carmack talks about the physics of light and rendering

For a while now I am thinking that you don’t really know something until you can easily explain it or talk about it, in simple words and with people who might not even know one thing about the subject. John Carmack is well known and respected in the field of computer graphics and gaming, and watch him talk about light and rendering! I now nothing of it, and I watch this whole talk, glued to the screen, catching every word.

Apart from the physics of light, this provokes thought on other subjects too. The complexity of simple things comes to mind. Something that we all observe every day and seldom think about – turns out to be so complex. The importance of computer games is another subject. I’m a big fan of Quake in particular, and I’ve heard a billion times people asking questions on why is this important at all and how this makes the world better. Well, I guess, that question is easy to answer now. Some game makers push the technology, push the science, and they do make the world better. But they need us – gamers, once in a while, to pay for that and to provide feedback on what works and what doesn’t.

An Introduction To Full-Stack JavaScript

There is more JavaScript discussion and references in this article than I can handle in go. Reading it parts is recommended, if you are not too experienced with the recent explosion in all kinds of JavaScript tools and frameworks.