phpied.com

So it's been pretty quiet around here. I'm still alive and very much so. Just awfully busy.

Bulgaria

I took a long trip in Bulgaria. About 1 month and 20 days. Including the traditional around-Bulgaria let's-get-drunk-in-different-cities-every-day tour de force with the gang. With unusual amount of guitar playing this time.

Not all fun and roses, though, I had to work most of the time for a superimportant gamechanging ultrasecret project for Yahoo! Search. And work on the finishing touches for a book.

France, Italy, UK

While spending time in Bulgaria I did some quick jumps to other European countries - France, Italy, UK. Everything is so close in Europe, it's a shame not to wander around once you cross the big pond.

In Paris I had the pleasure to practice some French, but most importantly to meet with the local speed freaks at the Web Perf Meetup organized by Éric Daspet. Great experience to interrupt sightseeing and soufflé-eating just to be among fellow geeks in a small and cozy group.

photo: @tbassetto

Second tour leg

Back in California to the normal life and kids' school year start end of August. But a second European tour leg was just around the corner.

JSConfEU in Berlin was last week, this is hands-down the best conference. I cannot speak high enough about it, the organizers, the people, speakers, everyone, the parties (ouch, the parties). I met so many people I have been in contact with (or wanted to be) for quite a while, including the new book's tech reviewer Andrea aka @WebReflection. It's surprising, for the regular introvert geek I am, the pleasure of meeting and talking to people. Oh, the miracles of the little, or not so little, quantities of Berliner Pilsner.

Back from Berlin, a copy of the new book was waiting, how adorable! (I really need to put some marketing effort into it... at least put up a page what's it about, since people are asking). It's been rating very well in Amazon's "JavaScript" category. Saw it at #3 a few times, watch out "good parts"!

Next week it's Fronteers conference in Amsterdam. Really looking forward to this one. After all, the one and only PPK started it all. I'll be speaking about progressive downloads and progressive rendering. Progress is important, progress is critical! And I've never been to Amsterdam.

Then Moscow and highload++ conference. How cool that would be. I always wanted to see Moscow or any part of Russia really.

So... busy, busy, busy. And another book baby on the road. And one last conference but here in LA's "backyard" Las Vegas this time.

So I'll be publishing 5 books this year. Isn't that incredible? Is it even possible? And good quality books at that? It's a nice challenge (my last year's challenge failed, I didn't even bother to count how bad it failed). I think it's possible, especially if you bend a little bit the meaning of "5", "year", "publishing" and "me"

Book #1 - High-Performance JavaScript

Let's start bending - this is a book where I wrote just one chapter. It's a book by Nicholas Zakas with contributions from:

• Ross Harmes - Ajax
• Julien Lecomte - deployment
• Steven Levithan - regular expressions
• Matt Sweeney - tools
• me

And I wrote my chapter mainly the last year. My chapter is about the DOM. But the book became available just now, few days ago, so it's published this year (bending, bending...)

Book #2 - JavaScript Patterns

I am hard at work on this one currently (explains the low activity on this blog). I started last year but only finished two chapters in '09. The bending part here is that I've already given presentations on the topic and have been writing a "patterns" column for JSMag for a while, so I can recycle quite a bit of content.

You can see the tentative cover, I hope it stays tentative and we can replace the hen with a nice cute little zebra (a.k.a. donkey with patterns). Between you and me, I think there's a new designer in O'Reilly with a bird fetish.

I expect the first draft for this one to complete within weeks. And no, it's not about implementing the Gang of Four patterns in JavaScript (has been done already by Ross, see above), although there's one chapter on a selected few - Singleton, Factory, Observer, Proxy, Decorator...

Book #3 - Speed Matters

I've contracted with Peachpit Press to write a book about performance targeted mainly at designers. It will be about the business (why go fast), technology (how) and psychology (perception of speed) of web performance. I'm excited about this one for a number of reasons:

• there's a lot of misconceptions being spread around in designer blogs and books, especially sad when one of the books in question is a sort of a bible for web designers. I mean things like PNG vs. GIF, gzipping and others. I hope I can present a readable, concise and, above all, technically correct text for designers who may find Steve Souders' HPWS, a.k.a. "The Bible" a little too dry because it's from O'Reilly and has no colors
• the publisher is considering a sort of novel approach to writing the book, fingers crossed, because I believe it's the right way to write technical books.
• at the very least, the book will be available as early drafts while it's being written, which is new to me, but always wanted to do.
• the book will be full color - again, new experience to me

The bending here comes from the fact that I'll try to reuse from the perf advent calendar if I can. So some content may be pre-written.

Book #4 - Object-Oriented JavaScript (2nd edition)

The bending here is obvious - it's just a second edition, not a completely new book from scratch. My goal here is:

• address errata
• address some excellent critiques (of this otherwise bestselling book!), such as this one by @kangax, which is the article that actually prompted me to pitch a second edition to the publisher. So many thanks to Yuri! Also thanks to Asen who's been sending me invaluable and detailed feedback on the first edition. And now thanks to Asen and Kangax (and also Dmitry) I'm spending some time lurking on comp.lang.javascript mailing list, which is full of great discussions.
• ECMAScript5 update
• some concepts such as hoisting, NFE, property attributes, etc
• one completely new chapter on testing and docs
• answers to the end-of-chapter exercises - an often-requested update

Hoping this title will not take a lot of time.

And since these 4 books should be finished by the end of August or thereabouts, this will give me whole 4 months (1/3 of an year) to dive into something I've been thinking about, two things actually - CSS and self-publishing.

Book #5 - CSS for web devs

CSS is widely misunderstood by many people, me including. I'm convinced we only use a portion of all that CSS is, and use it badly. I'm not saying it will be CSS: The Good Parts, but I plan to address what I consider bad habits in CSS (mis)use and write a book as a learning experience. This is the best way to learn IMO. It will be self-published and probably available online for free too. And by self-publish I don't mean lulu.com or some of the other resellers, but working with the printer and distributor directly.

Too ambitious? April Fool's?

Probably, but with all the pre-written stuff and other cheating, it may very well be doable. Then I guess I'll take a 5 year break

In the spirit of tooting one's own horn....

Top 3

This morning I noticed my OOJS book is #3 in Amazon's JavaScript category, wo-hoo! Then it dropped down but in the evening it's up again. Nice company - OOJS, Doug Crockford's book and David Flanagan's giant Rhino JS book.

Not that I'm obsessed with my Amazon ranking, of course not (yeah, right), but I'm happy when the book sells in the top 25 (first page in the JavaScript bestsellers list). In the good days it's around 10, in exceptionally bad days, drops out of first page. But top 3 - nice!

Nettus.com promo

You can enter to win one of the three free copies of the book over at nettuts.com. Very kind words in the nettuts article and over 500 comments so far! Nettuts is a very cool site, I'd love to be able to contribute an article or two at some point in the future.

Vote for me

My publisher, Packt Publishing, has established an "Author of the Year" award. So help me win that weapon baby and vote for me.

Hope you liked my iPhone web dev article that went live on sitepoint.com today!

Just a quick note that I actually have a blog about iPhone web development, called phonydev.com, you might find it interesting and browse it from your phone.

Other than that... nice to have you and hope you stick around!

• Follow me on twitter @stoyanstefanov
• Check out the slides from my various speaking engagements
• Subscribe to my blog's RSS feed
• Subscribe to my iPhone web dev blog
• ... and, yes, check out my Object-Oriented JavaScript book on Amazon

Counting how many countries I've been to in 2008:

1. USA
2. Canada
3. Bulgaria
4. Germany (not really, changing flights)
5. Italy
6. China
7. Mexico

US states

1. California
2. Massachusetts
3. New Hampshire
4. Arizona
5. Georgia

On top of that I did at least 10 LAX-SJC trips. So I traveled quite a bit this year (relatively, I guess, for someone not in sales or consulting), especially towards the end of year. The prognosis for 2009 is: "easy", spend more time with the family.

I might still apply to speak at a conference or two (I'm already a keynote speaker) but will try to make them local - no further than Silicon Valley/SF bay area. That is, if someone from Bulgaria doesn't invite me, I can't say no to BG, not really.

Instead of conferences I'll try to do some family trips in the neighborhood - California is pretty big, Nevada has a desert and Las Vegas, Hawaii (for obvious reasons), why not Mexico again.

Today was officially my first day at my new job at in Yahoo! Search. In the spirit of less-is-more I'm stepping out of the position of improving the performance of all Yahoo's sites worldwide to improving the performance of just one Yahoo! Search - in the US first, then maybe helping globally. I'm excited by the new opportunity and I'm not just saying it. Having in mind how smart I am (muhaha) and how committed YSearch is to performance, can't help but give a friendly warning to all the dear readers of my blog: if you own GOOG stock, now is the time to consider a second look at your portfolio

Anyway, I felt like doing something silly and here's what I came up - my first online video (videos of my kids don't count). I decided to play a rendition of "Start Wearing Purple" by Gogol Bordello on my acoustic and video tape it. This song (here's a vid of the original) is something of a hymn for Y!

So here's the video, enjoy!

Chapter 8 of the Object-Oriented JavaScript is available at the YUIblog.com. Enjoy!

Chapter 2 is also available at the publisher's site.

Probably thanks to YUIBlog, the book was #7#6 in the JavaScript category on Amazon today, not bad. It's the highest I've seen it, not that I'm obsessed with checking sales rank. It's the journey, not the destination

Other than that.. pretty busy lately. Off to Boston for Ajax Experience next week, where I'll be giving 3 (three!) talks. Will have some good stuff to share after that - ppts and a new tool!

I'll be speaking at the php|works and pyWorks conferences in Atlanta, Georgia in November, they'll be held together and there is a central track that has topics of interest to both phpiers and pythonistas, this is where I come in.

The conference(s) schedule is here and this is me: "Image optimization for the web"

Stuart Colville has put up a proposal for the South By Southwest Interactive 2009 conference, or SXSWi 2009 for short. This is a panel with me and Nicole from Yahoo!'s performance team and Stuart and Ed (ex-UK-Yahoo!s, currently in GCAP Media). In Stuart's own words:

... a panel on practical performance techniques featuring Stoyan Stefanov and Nicole Sullivan of Yahoo!’s Exceptional performance team alongside Ed Eliot and myself. In this panel we'd like to talk about all aspects of the practical things that can be applied to any site to improve the front-end performance.

To vote for this panel please visit "Practical Website Performance"

The way SXSWi works is the community votes for the proposals they consider worthy. And the selected proposals get to go to the conference.

This was the long version.

Short version: vote for me!

I got a nice email from Amazon last week Unfortunately the book is still missing things like cover image and description, but it's a progress!

--

Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated books by Stoyan Stefanov have also purchased Object-Oriented JavaScript by Stoyan Stefanov. For this reason, you might like to know that Object-Oriented JavaScript is now available. 
You can order yours for just $39.99 by following the link below.

I'm under the impression that these days we're used to getting everything for free on the web, and especially so when it comes to things such as WordPress templates, phpBB themes or any other templates and themes. Are people willing to pay for extra high quality templates?

Marco, a blogger and friend, has released a theme called Dark Matter Pro for the Pixelpost photo blogging software. This is a paid version of his free theme, where the free one is apparently good enough that is marked as "featured" on the pixelpost site itself.

I certainly wish him good luck and hope that he succeeds. Having worked hard on it this theme for a while, Marco is obviously pretty serious about it, he has even setup a whole new domain dedicated to the theme as well as an affiliate program.

This is a sort of a catch-up post for listing what I've been up to lately.

• YUI Blog just published my first article, I'm so proud. It's about loading JavaScript in non-blocking fashion, because JavaScripts, they, you know, like, block downloads. Luckily, there's an easy fix - DOM includes, which I've previously discussed, discussed and discussed.
• SitePoint published an update to my older article that introduces AJAX, ok, Ajax, by creating a command-line-like interface with PHP on the server side. The updated article features improved code, jQuery example, YUI example, JSON discussion and example. Check it out, bookmark and recommend to your friends that keep asking you "What's this AJAX (they are new, don't know it's now spelled "Ajax") thing? Do you know of a good article?"
• YDN (developer.yahoo.com) published a video presentation of me and my lovely teammate Nicole Sullivan where we talk about some new and cool front-end performance techniques. So if you wandered how I look and are eager to hear my fabulous Balkan peninsula accent, give it a shot. The talk is called "After YSlow 'A'" and is targeted at those of you who have reached performance nirvana, but are still hungry for more. We talk about preloading components, post-loading, javascript, images, using flush() in PHP to send first byte early on and other fun stuff.
• Last, not least, I decided to try and find some time to update my JavaScript patterns site. Unfortunately I got sidetracked (yep, I'm easily distracted by shiny objects) and played with a not-so-javascript pattern. The post I published (includes a pretty lame screencast! and) demonstrates how you can use animated background position to indicate loading progress.

Whew, c'est tout pout ce moment, expect a lot more now that the JavaScript book is out of the way. Ah, yep, if you feel like it, join me on Facebook, I created a JS book page.

After adding adsense ads to this blog about three weeks ago, I took them off today. The reason is simple: the earnings were beyond disappointing. I guess adsense T&C do not allow me to reveal my stats, but let's say that the money this blog could make from adsense will be enough to buy me a pack of cigarettes every month

I spent the 10 hours flight LA-Munich mainly standing up, walking or sitting on the armrest while the two kids occupied three chairs sleeping, which was totally fine, who wants to sit for 10 hours with cranky underslept kids. Then spent two hours with the noisiest kids on the Munich airport and two more on the Munich-Sofia plane. The little one said "Daddy, we going into the plane's belly" and yeah, that's exactly how I felt at the end of the journey: as something that has been into someone's belly and then followed its natural way back to the light of day.

The important thing is that we're here now and the joy of getting together grandparents and grandchildren: priceless. Other than that Bulgaria is cool, unseasonably.

Time goes by. Feels like yesterday, but it's actually been a whole year since I moved to LA together with the family. Guess the wonderful present we received a month ago from our landlord - $500 rent increase. W00t! Needless to say, we've been apartment hunting ever since.

The Yahoo! office is at a great location, Santa Monica, 23 blocks from the beach. And since I wanted to be close to the office, so that I spend more time with the family and less time stuck in the world-famous LA traffic, we wanted to find a place nearby.

It just occurred to me that (for the things that matter to us) the formula for apartment hunting in West LA is:

"Price, school, washer/dryer in unit: pick any two"

It's crazy how expensive housing is here. It's crazy how few apartments have washer in the unit (the idea of washing your baby's clothes together with some dude's smelly nikes is insane, but apparently totally acceptable here). And it's crazy how the school regions are divided - our street is in the region of a perfect school (rating 10 of 10), but two blocks from here, it's totally different (rating 4 of 10). And you're not allowed to pick the school, you just have to enroll in the school for your region.

I checked Burbank (another Y! office) and Sunnyvale (Y!'s HQ): nowhere, I mean nowhere, the situation is that tragic as here. For the same money and often much less you can get excellent apartments (or houses) with great schools. California is expensive, but LA and especially the beach areas are just beyond expensive.

Anyway, I can go on, but ranting isn't my style and it only makes me more miserable On the bright side you live close to Hollywood, Beverly Hills and celebrities (like I care), you can "make it" as an actor (which I'm not), you can hit nice clubs where some of your favorite bands played (never done it, kids and all) or strip clubs (not me, hello, I'm a father of two girls).

On the really bright side we can hang out with Cinderella in Disneyland (hello, I'm a father of two girls) and hit the beach. Which we do. We have to, I mean, to make up for the insane rent

... even as a joke consider putting your domain name on your license "vanity plate"

Not bad. Especially having in mind that this is the second time around. I uploaded an updated version of the presentation, that didn't work too well, so I had to delete the old one and reupload. As a result the stats and faves of the previous version were lost Some sites, like Ajaxian, are still embedding the older version so the stats are really not accurate.

Slideshare is a great service nevertheless, just like on youtube, you can spend hours browsing people's presentation slides.

What's new today? Let me see.

[x] Wrote the first sentence of chapter 6 of the new book. Goes like this "After encapsulation, inheritance is probably the most important feature of the object-oriented programming". Promising, but not exactly progress. Good news is I already wrote all the code for the chapter.
[x] My teammate Nicole posted an interesting entry on developer.yahoo.com blog. Especially interesting if you happen to care about web page performance and you're also a US voter. I haven't voted in yeeeaars. Wasn't allowed to vote in Canada initially and just when I became Canadian I moved to US where I'm also not allowed to vote. Oh, well. Don't like any candidate anyway.
[x] Christian Heilmann posted on Ajaxian about the canvas Pie I published last night

... and ...

[x] I recorded again!!

It's a piece loosely based on a Paco De Lucia song I tried to figure out for myself long ago. For this recording I used a microphone specially designed for acoustic guitars (gift from my best-men) but the problem is I plugged it into the microphone jack on the laptop, so there is some nasty amplification. I tried to de-amplify in Audacity.

Here goes: Paco. Hope ya like it!

So close to being finished with 5 chapters and 1 appendix of the new book (hey, that's 50%+) and just after the n-th edit of chapter 3, I thought I might share this picture I have on my desk. It's an self-portrait of my 4yrs old daughter Zlatina, in front of a window. Once this book is out of the way, she's so getting her own blog

Look what Santa brought this year:

A Starcaster by Fender! (Not to be confused with Stratocaster.) Packed with an amp and everything.

Looking forward to posting some recordings in 2008!

David Barnes, who works for my publisher Packt Publishing, has started a blog: "How to write computer books". Great stuff in there. If you write or intend to write a book, a blog or anything technical, it's a great addition to your RSS reader.

Inspired by this quote from Mark Twain, yesterday I went through the draft of chapter 3 of my new book and searched for all instances of the word "very". Then deleted most of them. Probably should've deleted 'em all, but I couldn't help myself. It's tough. Very.

Anyway, especially since "creating passionate users" is no longer updated, David's new blog is good news.

On a similar note, here are the slides from a presentation called "Writing engaging tutorials" by my fellow Yahoo, Christian Heilmann.

Take the time to watch this.
http://www.storyofstuff.com/ (via Phil)

Consumption and energy and recycling and generally destroying our planet are all topics that are increasingly interesting to me.

Currently reading "Why we buy" to better understand the enemy within

Your favourite blogger (yeps, that would be me) - patched!

It's been 48 hours since my hernia surgery. Don't worry about me, "everything's cool, everything's smooth". I can hardly walk and can't lift anything over 10 lbs (4.5 kg), but it's all fine. This morning had a great idea for a song, I can almost hear it in my head, it's a country song: "Pancakes and painkillers".

In case you wonder, the hernia surgery is basically putting a patch at a place where the stomach wall is thinner, hence the title of this post.

Just updated my blogroll (long overdue). It was very easy - Google reader exports subscriptions in OPML, WordPress imports. Then using my OPML-to-HTML tool I was able to quickly produce the following list in HTML.

So here's what I read, enjoy, recently I've added quite a few of the smart fellow Yahoo!s:

Stoyan subscriptions in Google Reader

• [RSS] The Net is Dead - Life Beyond the Buzz
• [RSS] A List Apart
• [RSS] Ajaxian
• [RSS] AlternateIdea - Home
• [RSS] Brendan's Roadmap Updates
• [RSS] Creating Passionate Users
• [RSS] dean.edwards.name/weblog/
• [RSS] devOpera Articles
• [RSS] Ed Eliot - Latest Blog Entries
• [RSS] erik's weblog
• [RSS] Fleegix.org
• [RSS] Foo Hack
• [RSS] Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report
• [RSS] Julien Lecomte's Blog
• [RSS] Looks Good Works Well
• [RSS] Muffin Research Labs
• [RSS] Nate Koechley's Blog
• [RSS] Paul Graham: Unofficial RSS Feed
• [RSS] PhilRenaud.com
• [RSS] PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor
• [RSS] PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor
• [RSS] Poo-tee-weet
• [RSS] QuirksBlog
• [RSS] Sam Brown
• [RSS] Sam Stephenson
• [RSS] SAP Developer Network SAP Weblogs: PHP
• [RSS] Simon Willison's Weblog
• [RSS] SitePen Blog
• [RSS] SitePoint.com
• [RSS] SitePoint Blogs
• [RSS] Stubbornella
• [RSS] Stylegala | news
• [RSS] Stylegala | public news
• [RSS] Vitamin
• [RSS] Vitamin News
• [RSS] Web Standards with Imagination
• [RSS] Webmaster Central Blog
• [RSS] Yahoo! 360° - Douglas Crockford's The Department of Style
• [RSS] Yahoo! Developer Network blog
• [RSS] Yahoo! User Interface Blog
• [RSS] zed23

Any other interesting web-dev feeds anyone can recommend? Please post in the comments section.

Here are some reviews of the places I visited during my Maui trip, (the markup is in hReview microformat, using the hReview creator)

Part 2?

Enough with the good reviews, I'll continue with the bad ones in an additional post