Effective Communication is clear and concise

Some people can compress a lot of information in a sentence. People who can clearly and concisely articulate themselves have better chance of getting and maintaining attention of others. It’s the art of increasing the signal vs noise ratio and increasing value density of every word used.

The positive sum game of delegation

Delegation takes time, effort, and patience. Although it may seem like a waste of time, it's a necessary investment for you to generate a time to take on the next big task. Provide a safety net for less experienced people to learn and fail in a controlled environment where consequences are moderate

Technical Interviews Are Not Completely Broken

Technical interviewing is all over the place. Some people claim the system is completely broken and it might be more efficient to pull a random name out of the pile. But the process has remained unchanged while the times have moved forward. The majority of the companies are still using a whiteboard to test candidates' knowledge, including both common and not-so-common algorithms, data structures and brain teasers.

How Project Management Will Make You A Better Tech Lead

Every company, startup, or business is a collection of projects. A project is a planned, logical unit of work with some expected outcome that contributes to an overall vision or strategy. It’s how we organize ideas, tasks, and even our personal lives.

The path to technical leadership - from developer to team leader

If software development feels like it is only part of your professional purpose, perhaps you should consider becoming a tech lead. A tech lead could mean different things: a team lead (with no direct reports), or a manager. For example, an engineering manager is a person who is responsible for the team and its projects. That means he/she is also responsible for peoples' careers, business growth, deliverables, deadlines, culture, code standards, technical debt, and more.

Web storage, different ways to persist the data

While building single page applicaitons (SPA) with JavaScript, there are times when you need to persist some of the data in the browser. It could be an authentication status, shopping cart selection, whether the user has visited your site before, or even more specific information like filter selection, clicks to personilze the user experience..

What web development language should I learn in 2017

If you just want to learn a new language I would recommend to decide what you’ll be doing and start by answering these questions

Hacking productivity for software developers

As developers, usually we actually have limited time for coding. As part of the process of building and architecting software, we have to attend meetings, interact with other team members, read and write documentation, reply to emails or slack messages. And, at the end of the day, we still have to ship the code.

Send emails with Ember.js + Amazon SES + Firebase

The challenge arises when you need to add a piece of server side logic, like sending emails, uploading files, authentication, or storing some data to the database. In most cases, it doesn’t make sense to add a full blown server, which requires to be maintained and setup.

Uploading files with React.js and Node.js

Uploading files is one of the most common tasks performed by web developers. It’s a pretty simple operation when using PHP or other server side frameworks. However, it is not so straightforward when using Node.js, unless you understand how to user Buffer API for reading streams of binary files (i.e. uploading file content as binary code). Luckily for us, the Node.js community came up with a few solutions.

WordPress workshop for beginners

I'm running a WordPress workshop in Stamford Innovation Center (Stamford, CT) next Wednesday, May 11th. This class is for beginners who want to learn how set up and customize a website (personal or for business).

Education for web developers

I’ve been a web developer for over 8 years, and got hooked on web development the very first time I wrote HTML. The process of creating something people can use out of nothing is very powerful. Before I began my career in web development, I was doing construction and then later help-desk work. To me, programming is similar to construction. You have a problem, and you need to figure out the solution, using your skills and the tools available.

Power of technical documentation

There are so many open source projects out there that it’s hard to sort through them all.  Some of them are successful, some of them not so much. If we take all popular projects (meaning over 2-3 thousands of stars on github) - they all have easy-to-follow detailed documentation. It doesn’t mean documentation makes these projects more successful; it means it removes the friction for developers to try and use the project.

Why web developers need side projects

A few years ago, when I was working at a startup (Ruby on Rails app) as a front end developer, from time to time I had to go in and make back end changes. It was terrifying because I didn’t know what I was doing. I decided to learn Rails and bought books and took online courses. However, it wasn’t as easy as I thought, because I only had front end background and some WordPress experience.

React.js route state name

React.js router is at version 2.0 as of now. It’s changing fast. So this may not work few months from now. I had the case where I wanted to create REST URLs but still re-use components where possible. That’s one of the selling points of React as a library. In my case I wanted to re-use form in the “new” and “update” pages

Learning React.js and Redux

I had a hard time learning React.js, because it requires complex boilerplate setup, tooling and special application architecture such as Flux or Redux. After watching many intro videos or tutorials I wasn’t making progress until I decided to develop simple open source project