blog.stoyanstefanov.comStoyan Stefanov's Personal Blog

Personal blog Home/Blog About Social Free icons March 13th, 2018 Handy when you design sites, apps, etc. All three offer SVGs so they scale up nicely in modern screens with ridiculous resolutions. https://thenounproject.com/ - you need to give credit to the author https://www.zondicons.com/ - couldn’t find terms of use, says Creative Commons at the bottom, but not sure which. I’m sure giving credit would be nice. https://fontawesome.com/ - Creative Commons 4.0 license which means "You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made." Posted in blogging | No Comments » This laptop for life February 24th, 2018 It just occurred to me that if I’m stranded on a desert island with my laptop computer, I’ll be set for life. Provided, of course, that somehow miraculously I never run out of power and the hard drive never fails. I’ll have entertainment, I’ll be able to express and create and improve and enjoy... forever. I can read. Finally finish all the random books that lay about unread. I can look at family photos and videos and music that is laying about unorganized and poorly backed up. (As you can guess, I have terrible organizational habits when it comes to files and things. But that only proves my point. Even in this state I’ll be set for life. Someone more organized and archiving type of person will have even better time) I can write. Books, poems, stories. I can shoot and edit photos. There’s a camera. There’s some primitive photo editing software (Preview). I can record and edit and produce music. There’s a microphone. There are virtual instruments. There’s Garage Band, free. And, in my case, also Reaper which is even better. I can shoot, edit and produce video. Movies even. Thanks, iMovie. And I can write code. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, Python come included. I can learn the languages I don’t know. And I can write all the code I want. Say, iMovie is not good enough for what I want to produce in my Desert Island 3 movie. I can just write the code to do what I want. Now, a video editing software better than iMovie may be a bit of a stretch for a single coder but hey, I have all the time in the world. I may even be able to hack/reverse the wifi antennae or whatever to send an SOS signal. I have all the time in the world. Isn’t this liberating? I don’t ever have to go online anymore. No Hacker News, no Reddit, no Twitter. It doesn’t matter if I never ever download a single byte of information anymore. I can disconnect today. I can be creative and be able to accomplish things forever. Now, if I want to make a living with my creations (be it software, music, writing) in a non-desert island situation, it’s probably a good idea to go online and see what’s out there. You know, commercial research. But if it’s creation for its own sake, or for the hope of people/aliens discovering and appreciating the fruits of my creativity 2000 years from now, it doesn’t matter what’s going on out there. Posted in Pensées | No Comments » Free photos January 17th, 2017 Sometimes you need photos to add to a blog post or design or presentation... Navigating the licenses has always been hard. But thanks to " Creative Commons 0 " license, it really isn’t anymore. This license means: do whatever, commercial or non-commercial purpose, no credit needed (though appreciated). Below are a few sites I found recently. All their photos are CC0-licensed. You’ll rarely find humans in these photos because that’s even more complicated, but hopefully there are enough beautiful images for most purposes. And most of these photos are stunning indeed! https://unsplash.com/ https://www.pexels.com/ https://pixabay.com/ Posted in blogging | No Comments » O’Reilly sales data summing January 4th, 2017 Hello fellow O’Reilly author, and congrats on finishing your book, I know it wasn’t easy! ? (If the above means nothing to you, my dear reader, move on, shut down the computer and maybe go outside) Believe it or not, the O’Reilly site has a page that shows your sales data . Pretty graphs too. What it doesn’t have is the total of how many books you’ve sold in all of the time. Worry not my sisters and my brothers. Pop up the console, type data and see what happens - the data that powers the graphics is there. As many titles you have, as many data!@#$% variables pop up from your browser console’s autocomplete. In my case - 4 books, 4 data s. Exploring the data... As you see - two arrays: digital and print data. X is timestamp, Y is number of books sold. All you do is sum up all Y values. Except there are duplicates in the data. So making sure that only one Y is counted for each X timestamp does the trick. And here’s a little something I came up with, feel free to improve: var map = {}; // to de-dup data57350[0] // digital sales for React: Up and Running .values // it’s all there .filter(v = v.x in map ? false : map[v.x] = 1) // rm dupes .reduce((prev, next) = prev + next.y, 0) // totals One liner so you can paste.... var map = {}; data57350[0].values.filter(v = v.x in map ? false : map[v.x] = 1).reduce((prev, next) = prev + next.y, 0) Now change [0] to [1] for the print data. When change the data*XYZ* . Not the whole story Keep in mind: What it says right there on the site: "Please Note: This data is from major retailers including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and oreilly.com. Royalties are not calculated on the basis of these sales." Also the data goes only 2 years back (see the graphs) Better way/whole picture? There must be a better way. I just don’t know it. Oh wait, I can ask somebody at O’Reilly ? Take care now, bye-bye then! (Now go back to working on your next title, you slacker, you!) Posted in books | No Comments » Dear technical copyeditors, September 8th, 2013 We need to talk. Background I’m a technical author. I write books about programming. I don’t speak or write proper English. Not my area of expertise. I need your help. But, please, don’t overdo it. Here are some Do’s and Don’ts that will make our life together easier. DON’T use Word Stop it. I know it’s not your fault but try to change this within your organization. Technical people are lucky to have discovered the beauty of source control. You know, Git, SVN, that sort of thing. Technical books should be written like programs, using plain text (asciidoc, markdown). From there you can generate epub, mobi, pdf, html whatever (lookup "pandoc"). If you’re not familiar, source control is like "track changes ON" in Word, only infinitely better. DO track your changes Giving me a word doc changed beyond recognition with no way to quickly see your changes and no way to quickly undo what you messed up is criminal. DO help me make my prose shorter Delete, delete, delete! (with track changes ON, of course) DON’T add verbiage to my prose See above. When I see changes like these, I want to chew my leg off and run away from the project: ME: A number of events reshaped the web development landscape in a positive way: [list of stuff] YOU: A number of events reshaped the web development landscape in a positive way. Some of them are given as follows : [list of stuff] "As follows"? Search and delete all your "as follows". We can all see it follows. ME: The cat has certain characteristics (color, name, weight) and can perform some actions (meow, sleep, hide, escape). YOU: The cat has certain characteristics (color, name, weight , and so on ) and can perform some actions (meow, sleep, hide, escape , and so on ). The golden rule: remove, do not add to the text. DON’T remove my emphases I use italics when I try to emphasize. This is because I can’t make sense of your multiple custom formatting styles (italics, emphasis, bold, keyword, term) in your custom .dot templates. But you know your custom styles. Use the right one. Don’t just remove my formatting and de-emphasize the text. It dies a boring death! ME: A regular expression consists of: A pattern you use to match text Zero or more...