David Silva

I was reading Efytimes article this morning and I though I should talk about it.

I can't believe that people are still disabling right click on their websites, in my opinion it's very stupid to disallow people from copying your content, let's say they want to share your website with a bit of good content?

Well you just prevented them to do so, bad for you! But people more experienced, if they want to copy your content, all they have to do is disable JavaScript in their browser.

The next one is user browser detection, which in my opinion is interesting, but libraries like jQuery were built to help developers to basically code once and be compatible with the majority of browsers. Although whoever wrote that code probably didn't tested what he was writing and didn't even read jQuery documentation. It happens that if you read jQuery documentation it says that this feature is deprecated and it was removed in jQuery 1.9, which was release around January 2013, the article is from 3rd of February of 2014 - someone is a bit outdate here.

I created a gist with the code used in Efytimes article, you can check it here

I've been reading Efytimes for a while, and honestly it's not the first time they do mistakes or write bad articles. It looks like someone is in a rush of throwing content to the page but there is no time to write a good article. Quantity over Quality is not good in my opinion, but maybe it works for them.

Brick Lane, 8 of April 2013

I do love gratifies, although my contribution to it is just by watching them. And London has a well known graffiti artist (yes I'm talking about Banksy) which I've been trying to follow since 2003 back in Portugal when we barely had internet connection.

You can check where he still have is own art in the streets here: http://goo.gl/maps/SCwd5 

And if you want to know more about Banksy and Team Robbo just check their websites:

http://www.banksy.co.uk/

I started to use Vim for curiosity in 2009, in the beginning there was a lot of discovery and frustration, at the time I didn’t understood how people would prefer Vim over an IDE or something more graphical. I barely knew how to exit the editor and start writing in it was a big headache for me. I guess every developer that tried Vim went through the same. This editor is not something you can manage from day to night, no, this one needs time, love and dedication from you.

My lack of productivity with Vim made me not to choose it as my main editor while I was working, and once I got my macbook I just started using TextMate, although every time I could I was going back to Vim to improve my skills a little bit more.

In late 2010 I heard about Pathogen from Tim Pope (although he created it in late 2008), and I believe it made a revolution in how everyone uses vim nowadays. Thanks to Pathogen I learned a bit more, I discovered NERDTree and I wrote my first configuration lines in .vimrc.

Since I joined HouseTrip I decided that was time to use Vim as my main editor - and it has been since so! The fun of learning Vim was seeing other developers achieving so much so quickly, most of the times I just keep asking "how do you do that?" and they will teach me their own tricks, which helped me a lot in my learning curve, and I think it's always funnier to discover new things with experienced people.

So last week, after 6 months using janus plugin from Carl Huda I decided I wanted to have my own plugins and I wanted to be able to upgrade them automatically if necessary (or whenever I wanted to), after a bit of searching in github to see how other have decided how to have their own Vim setup I ended up with a Pedro Cunha’s solution, which I could understand and had everything I wanted, and was perfect because he is using Pathogen as well, before that I tried Vundle and it wasn’t for me that kind of setup.

So Pedro’s solution is all about you choose your own plugins, and you add them in the bundle folder as gitmodules, this way you can always update your plugins. Now I just need to worry about which new plugins I want and I don’t need to go one by one to see if they are up to date.

And above all is a solution I can understand how it works and one that I like. Thanks a lot for this :)

  I've been working in having a my own setup, as I don't want it to be large and full of plugins, I just want the solution for my needs.

  If you are interested you can take a look in my Github repository. I will be glad to hear your suggestions through issues/pull requests, or if you are interested in having it and adapt it just fork it.

Just for your curiosity this was one of my first configurations of Vim (don’t blame me) http://pastebin.com/aUfm236i

Coding for me is all about passion and creating things that will help people in their day to day job.

This year at  Codebits VI it was announced this new service called CloudPT the idea is not new, the concept isn't new (Sync your data with every device you want). Does this ring a bell at your brain?

Everyone knows Dropbox (right?) well they are in business for a long time, and CloudPT, a Portuguese Service (I'am proud to say this) , has the same business, you can sync your folder with their server and then you can sync with every device you want to sync.

But at CloudPT you start in BIG, they give you 16GB OF SPACE, can you imagine how much you are saving if you have a Dropbox account where you need more then 2GB of space. You don't need to call your friends to have 16GB for free like you need for Dropbox.

And if you have Dropbox with only 2GB and you don't have any friend to give you 500MB of extra free space? You need to pay 9,99$/month to have 100GB of space, and you even don't need that much.

I believe CloudPT had done a great job and give us all a good starting point, with 16GB you can put a lot of information, and I can even share a folder with the world or with a friend.

Better yet you can develop an application on top of this service, they provide you with the API Documentation - I believe that is still a work in process.

This service will be available for all at 10 December 2012, do your math, think about your life, does it worth spending more money when you don't need so much space?

Of course there are other services besides Dropbox, but it is the most known one.

And of course CloudPT was and is done by Portuguese people, in one of our most important Telecommunication service, PT - Portugal Telecom, by a great team at SAPO.

And what I want to mean with this is: Portuguese people don't put value in Portuguese products, the majority still prefers to use what is International, they don't love what is national, they love international products. And let's be honest we are extremely good in what we do, we have a lot of great ideas and we have amazing products and services that most of us don't know. 

And for you to get an Idea how great our system is, just tell me, what you can do in your ATM?

We in Portugal can do this and much more:

Withdraw money ( is the main reason we go to an ATM)

Bank Transfer

Pay our house bills ( water/gas/electricity etc... )

We can charge our mobile phone bill

We can charge our Underground/Bus/Train card

This is only one of the things we have that you don't and was developed by us, Portugueses!

The reason is simple, it's a matter of accommodation!

With a cloud platform I don't have to bother with stuff like:

Server Configuration

Database setup

In the middle of the configuration process something fails

Security

I will have more time to focus on what I should, that is Web Development, I will spend less money per month and I will have specialized people that can answer my issues and give me support if is the case.

The first and the one I use every day at work is Heroku, what I love in Heroku is the simplicity of their service, their support is very handy and awesome, people do want to help you even if you application is something without importance (You understand what I mean). They also "offer" you 750 hours per month, in case your application isn't being too much used (visited) you will not pay anything if you don't reach those 750 hours of processing.

With this I can prevent myself from loosing money without need, if nobody cares and nobody use my application, why should I pay? In a traditional service I have to pay something around 20$ a month, 240$ per year!

Nowadays you have more services like Heroku, like PHP Fog, or the recently service from Red Hat, Open Shift.

http://heroku.com

http://phpfog.com

https://openshift.redhat.com

See if any of them fit your needs, you may thing this is strange at the beginning, and that you will pay a lot when you probably will not, you application will not have so many users as you thought at the beginning and etc..

But thing for a moment that you will have peace of mind in what concerns to things others then your application, you will no longer need to waste hours understanding your server and see what is wrong with it, there are specialized people for that.

Time is money, and when you are not doing your main work you are loosing money.

Finally!!!

We did it at Think Orange, we launched our first web application for Shopify, this application is focused in one thing that Shopify don't cover, multilingual, so now everyone has the chance to have their webstores multilingual.

If you have a webstore in Shopify, and you want your users can see the information in other languages other than English you can try our application. Although is still in BETA we already have a fully working webstore with English and Portuguese ( Teresa Alecrim )

To see more about our application see this page.

Why to do documentation?

To help others understanding your code

To help you remember the code you done

Why I started to care about?

When you work with a lot of project, and sometimes in various at the same day you might be confused and lost, documentation is important to help you remember your actions and decisions over time.

You know the phrase "Eating your own dog food"?

When we "eat our own dog food" is good to know what you done weeks, or even months ago and why you did it in that way, and also the implications if you don't do in that way.

So, i've started looking for tools to help me, and a friend of mine told me about rocco.rb, I liked it a lot, and the best thing for me is that rocco supports Ruby and JavaScript (CoffeeScript)

As a Ruby on Rails developer I also have some tools to help generating the documentation. The one that comes by default is rake rdoc:app, another one very interesting is YARD.

Today I was wondering how many projects that I took part in the 9 months that are live now. The list isn't too big, but quantity is not quality, and this list has a great quality!

http://sami-arquitectos.com - It was my first project in Think Orange to see the light of day, is a website for a company of architects.

http://findmobs.com - This one was a personal project, with the intention of sharing which will be the next flashmob.

http://pistachioapp.com - Pistachio is a minimalistic Sketching app for iPhone and iPad, use it to create and share drafts, mockups and sketches with your friends or team mates.

http://everysquare.com - Everysquare is a place where where everybody, anywhere, anytime, can call a virtual demonstration for or against literally anything, from civil rights to politics, from environmental to social issues, or simply about collective life in one’s company, town or school.

  This article is not about tangerines at all!

Tangerine is a jQuery plugin, built from scratch to autocomplete the users inputs.

By the time I wrote it I wanted it to be small, and easy to use, and I needed it was JSON compatible.

Although this script is stable, I would be glad if more people join me to improve it in some many ways.

I also pretend this script to be free and open source.

Here is all the code i've done: https://github.com/Davidslv/tangerine

Why the name Tangerine?

During the Codebits event we had the idea to help people trade their shirts ( the ones offered at the beggining of the event).

So, we built Teebits to help everyone trading their shirts with almost 800 attendees!!! It could be a fun excuse to break the ice with unknown people.

At first we thought that everyone was interested in it, but the time told us we were wrong.

What we did:

We built the plataform (the website)

We announced it in early stage (only with the functional part, and ugly) through Twitter. 

One person got the idea and posted his shirt.

We got excited and started doing improvements, meanwhile we continue with the publicity.

We asked Bauke to help us by drawing something eye-catchy to show everyone the project.

We made more improvements and done some photocopies of Bauke draw.

Alex helped us by distribute our "flyers"

We got 260 visits to our project (Google Analytics information)

We only had 2 shirts for trade

What we can learn with this?

The first thought is that the majority of the attendees liked their shirt this year, (kudos to codebits design team for that).

The second thought was because we had the email field, and so nobody wanted to insert it, although we don't want the email for nothing more then send 1 email with the url to the owner update their own shirt information.

The third thought, the majority was already using the shirt, so they thought it wasn't nice to trade a used and sweaty shirt with someone.

Although this was a great experience, thanks Codebits we will be there next year (or sooner, since "PT board member Abílio Martins" said he wanted codebits to happen more then once a year :D)

I've recently notice a hype around grid systems, it seems every month there is a new one, it is the "new thing", but every time I experiment another grid I think the same thing!

Grid systems are cool, but does it mean I need to write more to support HTML5?

It seems they were designed with XHTML or HTML 4.01 in mind only.

After some search I've found a framework that supports HTML5 and CSS3, 52 Framework, by the name I thought it was an article with 52 frameworks, then I reallize it was the name of the framework.

I thought this would be the answer, but then I saw a lot of files, and for me that is not good, too many files for me is the recipe for disaster.

So I opted to use the 1140 CSS Grid System because of it simplicity and easy of use, I also liked bootstrap, but it lacks when you want a fluid layout.

http://cssgrid.net/

http://960.gs/

http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/

http://joapp.com/

http://fluidbaselinegrid.com/

References: 

http://designshack.net/articles/css/52-framework-the-first-ever-html5-and-css3-framework

Some days ago I had a project where it was needed to automatically post some information in Facebook.

As always, I tried to find my answer in a gem, I really don't like to "redo the wheel", but for this time and particular situation I had nothing to help me.

So I gather some pieces of information, read some facebook documentation ( and I must say it wasn't easy to reach this ).

You need to create a facebook application

You need to generate the application access token ( change to your APP_ID and APP_SECRET )

You need the gem 'rest-client' to help you do a POST request to facebook

RestClient.post "https://graph.facebook.com/#{fb_app_id}/feed", { 

    :access_token => access_token, 

    :message      => 'Your awesome message in here',

    :link         => 'http://thinkorange.pt',

    :name         => 'Think Orange',

}