End of an era

(photo by Trevor Harris)

Today was my last official day at Pronovix. This will definitely end a huge and very important part in my life. 4 years ago (almost exactly) I joined to the team. Kristof, our team leader was asking in an email if I know any PHP devs in the area, and I offered my service.

SASS presentation on SzegedTech

I had the luck to present on SzegedTech again, this time about SASS and Compass. Tonight I only would like to summarize the impact of these CSS compilers on the development.

Drupal EntityFieldQuery with node access

Not long ago I've found this gorgeous tool in Drupal, called EntityFieldQuery. This handy facet class creates you queries on entities using various filters and conditions. It's an ultimate entity crawler, not more, not less.

Ugly hack series - Ep. #1

Development for me is an art. I like the structures and the whole design. One particular difference between 'normal-people' art and tech art is the limitations. To workaround those limits you apply hacks sometimes. Well, they say it's only the matter of time. And with that I agree. But time is the one scarce resource we don't have. So we hack.

Help, frustration, Python and OpenCV on OS-X

One of the most frustrating moments is when I'm almost sure I cannot do something. And in general I know I can solve anything, really. Just not now. I have to wait til I learn a certain material. Or I need to wait for help. Or I just need to realize what's the problem. Yeah, I often ask the wrong question.

Podcast mania

I'm an avid podcast listener. When I started my career I worked from home. Having no humanoids around the house I started listening to the radio. It was some random US news channel. I never got why they use that typical abbreviations all the time. It was quite nice that you could learn language and catch up with news while writing SQL queries.

Reputation and karma

Having no sign of brain existence I almost made a cartoon post. But the last second I realized I wanted to write about something for a long time, which is self marketing.

Reading is complex

I don't like to read. I'm a visual type. I used to page through encyclopedias, dictionaries and similar humongous books - just to see all the images. Multiple times. For some reason letters are like the most boring things after writing unit tests. So I needed some push to get back on reading. And it's not too bad nowadays. I thought I share my experience.

Damn simple 3D tutorial

One of my idol is my grandmother. She was a very great mathematics and chemistry teacher when she was active at the school. She taught to me the love of numbers. I remember we were solving geometric examples, equations or some fun math problems in our free time. And I miss it sometimes. So today I decided to write a little 3D engine.

Top 10 Drupal fail moments

Developers are human. That's not too easy to prove, better you trust me on that for now. And as a consequence they fail sometimes. I fail many times. Which I like actually. Not that I learn from my failures but it makes my day interesting. This time I decided to collect my top 10 Drupal fail moments :) Enjoy.

Flirting with a Drupal module

Many times I'm dealing with new Drupal modules. Usually the coders writing those modules are not always UX experts. But even if they are, trust me I can easily get lost when taking the first steps. So I'll share with you what I usually do when I check a new module I intend to use.

Some thoughts about RequireJS

Being keen to learn about the new JavaScript libs I was wondering how useful RequireJS is. The library is defined by the following:

Conquer the world

I was asked by the organizers of SzegedTech meetup to take a presentation about ... something. I'm always in trouble those times - I'm not the kind of presenter who can explain a topic from A to Z. But there was something. I wanted to present how great I feel about being a developer. Thinking a bit about it - as it's a bit selfish - I changed the topic to: What can a developer do? For those who missed the presentation let me summarize the talk.

One hour game initiative

It's Friday again and I'm like a plastic chicken. What can you do with a dead brain? Well actually quite some things. Back in high school when we drank our first beer with my best-friend we tried to measure how drank we were. Do you know how? We went through the basic calculus theories. And when you're dancing in a public fountain almost naked chanting math equations you realize there not too much correlation.

Tinkering about data and evolution

Data is a very interesting material. Do you remember of those times when you saved all your data to optical disks? I remember the first CD I had was Carmageddon, the first one. Only a few had a CD burner drive that time, so I took the CD of my friend to a local IT shop, payed them 10 USD and waited for 3 days.

My favorite 6 puzzle games

I think it's time for a little relax. I'm totally exhausted due to the deadlines in my work. So - games. I love playing games. Especially if makes me think and helps to improve my IQ and problem solving skills. There are many types of games that can do that - and it's good when you know what particular skill-set is required. I even go as far as calling Need For Speed a development game. How come? Plenty of reasons, trust me :)

Playing with NodeJS and MongoDB (Part 2)

In the part 1 we created the data storage for user data, the user crawler and the mini Node server. Today I'll show you the map that fetches the data, lookup and saves the location and finally show them on the map.

Playing with NodeJS and MongoDB (Part 1)

As I tell all the time I love JavaScript for being dynamic and accessible. Today's story about a bit strage but technologically an interesting co-mutation project :) Why I call it like that? It really is. Nowadays almost anything has JS binding and with Node connecting them together is so easy. Caveat: to make it nice is so hard on the other side, though. That I call art.

Drupal module challenge

During the holidays I've stumbled upon this website: moduleoff.com. It offers regular module development quests for various prices. For the first one it was Nexus 7 tablet, so I applied :) Now I'd like to explain my solution.

Collective mind or community boost

In Szeged, Hungary we have a very new IT (and childcare, yeah ...) complex - called Agora - near to our office. Basically it's going to be a hub for professionals. We really needed this. It hosts events such as SzegedTech, the monthly web development meetup, Szeged Startup Meetup or Szeged UX / Design meetups. I think the local Drupal user group will be there soon too.

Where is the perfect writing tool?

If you don't know, the very first day this year I promised myself I'll write a blogpost every day. It's the twelfth day and I already hate the editorial experience.

AngularJS and recursive template

I love JavaScript. It's like Lego, you can build anything really fast. And one of the reason I like it also a disadvantage: it's super flexible. The proliferation of new JS libraries are all using this behavior of the language. This time I wanted to try what AngularJS is about.

Features in Drupal

We do large Drupal websites. Usually you want to make it modular. So you can turn on and off certain coherent parts of it. A messaging system. A content type. A functionality. Or maybe reuse those components on other platforms. You also want it to be in code, so you have all the benefits of version tracking, quality assurance, testing and whatnot. Sounds like a dream :) I'm not trying to be a whiny kid showing my suffer - I'm rather interested what am I doing wrong here. So please don't hold your critique back.

HTML5 Canvas Bezier Curve

I'm braindead. So I decided no to go into philosophical discussion - rather checked the Canvas API the first time. Yeah, I know it's already too old. Anyways. Canvas is so simple anybody can learn the basics in 5 minutes. To make a little sense I decided to make a silly screensaver like animation - a curve that bouncing on the screen and leaves a frame.

Oh My ZSH

Sometimes (=always) I get really frustrated when I know how little I know about things. Shell scripting is one of them. But apart from that shell is an essential tool for me. I couldn't live without it. So I tell you some nice things about my favorite shell: ZSH.

Drupal and Symfony with XDebug and XHProf

After a long week I have hardly any manna to do magic. So I decided to have another run with code analytics tools on Drupal and Symfony. Whenever you need code performance check or want to see what is happening and what are the numbers, times and memory consumptions - you need XDebug or XHProf.

XHProf on OS-X with PHP 5.4.4

Almost got nervous breakdown - I hate when system dependencies take forever to configure. I literally spent half a year several times fixing system dependencies. If there is Satan - I'm quite sure he is giving bad people library and plugin dependencies. Jesus.

Looking for influence

I often have the problem when I feel my sources are repeating themselves. RSS feeds, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIN. I'm getting yet another 'Top 10 PHP snippets' and 'How to make a JavaScript singleton class' articles. Doh. Sometimes I feel the same commercial sense when a popular service forgets to provide relevant information anymore. So I decided to tell some practices I've found when looking for new sources.

Information flow

When I was a kid we had this book about electricity. There was a tutorial how to create a small engine using paperclips and battery. I couldn't do it but I was fascinated how can you create a more complex thing from something basic. (I know it's not entirely true.) For many years I thought making complex things what really motivates me. Then I realized it's information that is amazing.

Getting to know Symfony

During Christmas holidays I've decided to dive into Symfony. If you don't know anything about it - it's very nice modular web development framework. Not so long ago Drupal got some low level components from Symfony: http://symfony.com/blog/symfony2-meets-drupal-8. It was a very interesting merge of the two systems. I was a bit surprised, like when your little sister puts her Barbie into your Ferrari toy car. But as expected it's a well thought though decision: easier maintenance, benefits of small domain components (such as http kernel) and a versatile management system (Drupal, ofc.), merging communities, etc.

Day 1 - the re-beginning

Yeah, yet another new year resolution - I do one blog post a day. I missed a full year without a single entry. Why I didn't write anything?