Hello, dear reader and web performance enthusiast! It’s time to sit down and write an article for the performance calendar. Here are some more details. Or if you’re not feeling like writing, look around you and recruit the person you think should share their knowledge with the world. What can you write about? Just share […]

Yesterday was my last day at Facebook. After 9 1/2 years it was high time for a change. I dropped the news on twitter/fb and thought now it would be nice to answer the question of “what’s next?” that friends are wondering. The trajectory I myself have wondered sometimes what the life after Facebook could […]

I’m not the one who philosophizes often in public, but indulge me this thought on the types of work we do as programmers and feel free to add your own dimensions. I’ve thought about how sometimes I like to work on user-facing products and sometimes on developer-facing ones. Real products that my mom can see […]

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, […]

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”, […]

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 […]

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 […]

Counting how many countries I’ve been to in 2008: USA Canada Bulgaria Germany (not really, changing flights) Italy China Mexico US states California Massachusetts New Hampshire Arizona 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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

… 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 😉