Hey, I'm Rares Portan

I’ve switched my blog from Gatsby to Astro. It was not as easy as I dreamed. In fact, I had to wait for Astro v2 to be released to finally b…

In the first part of the Sudoku series, we built a Sudoku Solver. Next is the Sudoku generator: a program that can generate games of differe…

I became interested in the Sudoku game after a failed opportunity to build it for a client. I’ve never played Sudoku before (I’m a video gam…

SolidJS is a library for creating web apps. Like React, Vue, Angular, and many others. So you might think: “Oh no, not another one, we have …

Long gone are the days when we used to use only ‘px’ (pixels) in our CSS. Today there are a lot of options to choose from. What unit you cho…

It happens all the time. We try to optimize our code, optimize how images and CSS are loaded, do code splits, and all kinds of smart techniq…

Another important primitive data type is the String. Strings are composed of one or more characters and are used to keep words and texts. In…

The purpose of any program is to transform data. Any program needs data. In JavaScript, when we talk about the program’s data we talk about …

Previously on “Let’s Learn JavaScript”: How JavaScript compares to other programming languages and the mindset you need to learn JavaScript…

This is the third part of the “Let’s Learn JavaScript” tutorial. In the first part, we learned how JavaScript compares to other programming …

So I’m writing this blog post - all is good, I finish writing, checking it with Grammarly - and then I think: “OK, just three more minutes t…

This is the second part of the “Let’s Learn JavaScript” tutorial. In the first part, we learned how JavaScript compares to other programming…

I really love JavaScript. I’ve learned and used several programming languages, like C and Java, Ruby and Elixir, even Objective-C. All of th…

The company I work for, 3PillarGlobal, had a proposal for us: we can allocate a part of our time to work on open source. Each one can work s…

For a long time, Redux was the way to do state management in a React app. Bases on the Flux architecture, popularized by Facebook, it comple…

Welcome my son, welcome to the machine - Pink Floyd Everything that’s interactive needs some state. All apps have state, web pages with fo…

I decided to migrate this website to Gatsby 3 and write here how it went. The first question is of course “Why you did it?” The main reason …

Images are an important part of any website. So important that we tend to use a lot of them. And then our websites become too slow. Using th…

The playground has two parts: The code editor: Allows us to enter the React code we want to evaluate The code evaluation sandbox: Evaluates…

These days hands-on, in the browser, programming language tutorials are the standard. They all provide some kind of code editor. People lear…

There are always the questions of design: How much design is needed? What is important to design? How do we communicate the design to other…

“Let’s Learn Eleventy” series continues with something hard to find in the official documentation or various Eleventy tutorials: How to bund…

The <link> element is used to load an external resource in the HTML. Link elements are part of the page metadata and not inside the page’s v…

The future of coding is no coding at all.” - Chris Wanstrath, CEO at GitHub. Coding is my bread and butter, so what this means? Am I becom…

One quote that I hear a lot is this one: “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” I hate that quote because is used by people as an…

Looks to me that many web developers, especially “full-stack web developers,” are not sure what is the correct HTML for a webpage and use di…

While doing some research for an upcoming post, I’ve noticed several people added a strange metadata on their website. A metadata named mone…

There are times in every programmer’s life when they must implement things that are hard to explain, hard to put down on paper, things that …

In the first part, the second part, and the third part parts we have seen: What is Eleventy and how to install it How to use data inside a …

When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in January 2007, few understood its implications on the web future. A couple of years later, millions ha…

There are two types of programmers: those who like to write tests and those who hate it. The hardest thing for me is always to convince one …

Note: This post is about a motion intensive CSS animation. The examples will not work if prefers-reduced-motion is set to reduce. Cyberpun…

Recently I’ve run into a frustrating issue: I worked with another team and we were supposed to exchange some objects between us. The problem…

In the first part and the second part parts we have seen: What is Eleventy and how to install it How to use data inside a page Basic config…

Lots of excellent talks at Inclusive Design 24. Two of them, “Writing even more CSS with Accessibility in Mind” by Manuel Matuzovic and “Eme…

What is programming fundamentally about? Programming is about transforming data: is the act of creating a sequence of computer instructions …

This is the second part of Let’s Learn Eleventy series and will talk about collections. In the first part we have seen: What is Eleventy an…

Eleventy is a static site generator like Jekyll, Hugo ,or Gatsby. Like Gatsby, Eleventy is a node.js application. But unlike Gatsby, it isn’…

The vast majority of us, programmers, use an OOP language like Java, C++, or C#. Very few are using a functional programming language like H…

Let’s start with a short story. A girl asks his father: Daddy are there people in space right now? The father doesn’t know but he promises h…

For years, the default way to call APIs from a web page was XMLHttpRequest. But working with XMLHttpRequest was not easy, so on top of it we…

Here in Romania, every day, at 13:00, the latest COVID-19 data is communicated to the public. The data is presented as a series of cold numb…

We have many great programming languages, IDEs, methodologies, excellent hardware, best practices, and so on, but still, a lot of weak softw…

First, let’s see what 100 website performance score means. A tool, called Lighthouse, can be used to measure website performance. The measur…

At Apple’s WWDC this year, among the Safari improvements is a new feature that blocks the trackers on a website, and Google Analytics is one…

I’m building this blog with Gatsby, as I’ve already explained. The blog is still in progress, and I’m adding new features — like generating …

Lots of people have a rather vague or incorrect idea about what an API is. Some even think it is a kind of beer because it sounds like India…

There are things that make or break software, like good User Experience Design, marketing that should come up with the right features for th…

I’ve written some code that I thought might be useful to others, so I decided to share the code as NPM packages. I ended up creating two pac…

You work hard to create quality content. And you would like that content to stand out as it deserves. One thing that can help you with this …

Over the years, I’ve started a few blogs but I never got serious about it. They were soon abandonware. A few days ago I found Swyx’s How to …

Let’s assume you are a programmer with a few problems: Hard to implement change requests, buried under bugs, missed deadlines, overtime, str…

Turns out there is good side to this pandemic situation we all have to live with in 2020: I finally have time to start a blog. I’ll write ab…