Alberto Varela

Programming with AI, Without the Hype

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Is This Vibe Coding?

Let’s start with the name.

These days, every few months a new term appears to describe what is essentially the same thing: people using AI tools to write code.

First it was Vibe Coding (which even became “word of the year” according to Collins). Then we got Agentic Coding, Augmented Coding, and I’ve even seen people start calling coding without an AI agent “Trad Coding”. At this point, there are already academic papers discussing the naming itself.

How a Time Zone Change Could Break Your Apps

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Most people think of time zones as “offsets from UTC”, but we know they’re more than that: they also include rules, like when to switch to summer time, and the historical rules and offsets.

If Europe removes the DST switch, Europe/Madrid would, for example, transition from a two-rule timezone (UTC+1 in winter, UTC+2 in summer) to a single offset. That means new data in the IANA tz database (tzdata), and a quiet cascade of changes across our stacks. OSes, runtimes, databases, browsers… everything that depends on it needs to catch up.

Why You Should Have Your Own Website (and How I Built Mine)

Tue, 26 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Twitter and I aren’t a thing anymore, I’m a Bluesky user now, and I noticed a trend: people are buying custom domains to use as their handles, like @yourname.dev. It’s elegant, personal, and professional. But, if you’ve already invested in a custom domain, why not use it for more than just a handle?

Simple Alternatives

If you’re using a domain as your handle, chances are that someone will open it in a browser at some point. So it’s a good idea to have something there, even if it’s just a basic page. You can easily redirect your domain to a service that showcases your information. All domain providers allow you to do this.

Building Timeless JavaScript Projects: Ensuring Consistency in Dependencies and Versions

Mon, 04 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Not for the first time, but I recently came across a tweet that confidently asserted the fragility of JavaScript projects:

Typescript solved JavaScript like Heroin solved Cocaine.

If you leave a medium sized node or front end project aside and come back to it 6 month later, chances are it will never work again.

Spent 2-3 hours bringing up a docs site last night, lots of breakage, libraries breaking, incompatible interfaces, what a living hell that is.

Stop using Google Fonts, stop fueling the flames

Thu, 17 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I remember when most websites used only web-safe fonts: Arial, Courier, Impact, Times New Roman, Verdana…, or the so-loved Comic Sans. Sad days for designers, great days for bandwidth. I also remember how the “new browsers” started supporting new features like @font-face to get a piece of the cake, at that time in the hands of Internet Explorer. A short while later, Typekit was created and it revolutionized the way typography was used on the web (Typekit was formerly acquired by Adobe and converted into Adobe fonts).

How to implement light and dark modes with a toggle switch on your website

Tue, 12 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Nowadays, the ability to switch between a light or a dark theme has become extremely popular on the internet. It has been a while since we began to see it on desktop applications, but now, we can also see it every day on most websites we use: Github, Stackoverflow, Twitter, etc. There are multiple ways to implement it, I’ll show you mine.

Writing the themes

It’s 2022, we survived the Coronavirus, and Internet Explorer is finally dead. I think it’s a good time to start using CSS custom properties if you haven’t already (you can read this fantastic post from Chris Coyier if you are not familiar with them or if you don’t know what I’m talking about).

Reinventing the wheel: DIOD (a new Typescript dependency injection library)

Thu, 03 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The post’s title is a confession; I know that there are other libraries for dependency injection with Typescript; even more, I’ve used them a lot, and I’ve learned a lot from them. Inversify, tsyringe …, it’s thanks to all of them that I’ve been able to write this, but obviously, there is a motivation behind creating my own, and I’ll try my best to explain it.

⚡️ You may end up here just looking for a dependency injection library and not on the willingness to read my explanations. Do not worry; stop reading here and try DIOD.

Decoupling SPAs from the framework, a practical example

Tue, 28 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The aim of this post is to encourage you to avoid coupling your application to the framework you choose. By doing it you will be able to switch your framework quite easy, which is probably not a common task, but it will help you update it to a new version with very low effort also. Apart from that, a huge advantage will be that it will let you test your application logic without depending on the view.

(Spanish) La empresa para la que trabajo ha quebrado, y ahora... ¿Qué hago?

Fri, 29 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Muchas veces se habla de lo que arriesgan los emprendedores cuando se embarcan en una nueva aventura, pero en este caso yo voy a hablar de algunos riesgos que corremos los trabajadores por cuenta ajena cuando decidimos unirnos a ellos en una de esas aventuras. En una de esas, que además, necesita mucha gasolina para arrancar y otra tanta para empezar a cubrir costes. Hay quien no es del todo consciente de esos riesgos y hay otros que simplemente los asumen como algo normal, pero lo que es innegable es que existen, y en este caso además de correrlos los sufrimos.

Microsoft, you need to take it one step further

Mon, 06 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I have been a hater. Since I started in web development I have been a Linux user, a FOSS consumer and, to a lesser degree, a free software contributor. Somehow, this made me despise Microsoft and, at some point, I was even not able to see any of their products on an objective basis, I just flat out rejected everything coming from them.

This is not happening anymore, I am now a more mature developer (or just an older one), and I know that taking professional technical decisions based on sentiments is just not an option. The last years that I have been working in a company with plenty of Microsoft-friendly mates and also the last movements of Microsoft have opened my mind even more and, now, I can agree with David Heinemeier Hansson when he says: “Microsoft, I forgive you!”.

Creating Background Ambient Videos In HTML5 using FFMPEG

Mon, 14 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The use of ambient videos as background is not something new, Smashing Magazine was already talking about it more than five years ago, but at that time it was still quite tricky to make it work in every browser. I’d say that in 2013-2014 it started becoming a trend, and nowadays we can say that it’s just another common resource to make our website look fancy.

HTML Markup and styles

Thanks to HTML5, CSS3 and the new JavaScript API, Flash is “no longer neccesary” as Steve Jobs already stated in 2010, so, we’ll just take a look to the specification to see how can we use HTML videos (as you probably know, CSS do not support them).

Managing PHP Dependencies Properly

Fri, 28 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This is the first post of the The Perfect Continous Delivery Pipeline For PHP series.

Composer is the de facto dependency manager for PHP and Packagist is its official package repository. The release of this project in 2012 has revolutionized the PHP world, and nowadays, the dependencies of most of the projects are being managed with it.

The usage of Composer and a Version Control System is the first step to build a CD pipeline for PHP- I will use git as VCS in the rest of the article, but the same ideas could be applied if you are using other systems like Mercurial or Subversion.

NPM vs Yarn benchmark

Sat, 15 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

If you are a Javascript developer, specially if you work with Node.js, you have probably read something about Yarn in the last days. Engineers from Facebook Exponent, Google, and Tilde have been working together to build an alternative for the well known NPM, the built-in package manager of Node.js.

During the last years, developers around the world have complained a lot about how slow NPM is. Having a dependency system able to avoid inconsistences between environments has been the other big request around NPM. So, if we take a look to the claim of Yarn, it seems that this is what we have been expecting all this time: ‘Fast, Reliable, and Secure Dependency Management’.

It's Alive

Fri, 30 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The last year I closed my blog after 8 years, 174 posts and more than 2400 comments. I did it because I stayed more than one year without writting anything on it. Now, just a year later I’ve decided to re-open it, this time in English.

I like to write about what I’ve learnt. At least sometimes. So, even I will probably not write posts usually, I want to have my own space to write about what I want. When I want.

My Point Of View About Personal Branding For Developers

Wed, 07 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I work at Ve’s Development Center in Bilbao. It’s a little city in the north of Spain where the people are usually infected by the special Basque shyness and this is why I’m not absolutely sure whether this post will be useful for everyone or just something that is totally obvious, but I hope that you can at least find parts of it enlightening or mildly entertaining. I’ll write about my personal experience because, even though I’m quite far from being a superstar and you’ve probably never heard about me before, I have been employed since I finished my studies and I’m quite happy about how my career has grown.

Publishing a Puppet Module

Tue, 15 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a lot of great information online about how to write a good Puppet module. In this post I’m going to focus on the techniques we’ve used to have our modules officially ‘approved’ by PuppetLabs.

I’m assuming you’ve either built an entirely new module, or substantially improved one on the Forge, and that you’d like to prove this is a good quality module, so that it could gain approval by PuppetLabs.

Quality Score

Once you’ve published your module to the Forge, you’ve got a Quality Score to start with, and you can aim to improve it. This score comprises the code quality, the Puppet compatibility and the metadata quality.

Code and Kids

Thu, 10 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Coding has been considered to be something for geeks for a long time, but this approach makes no sense anymore. We live in a world where we can find technology and programs everywhere on our daily lives (laptops, cellphones, tablets, but also now on the TV, washing machines, medical tools, cash machines, transport,…).

As we teach our kids about how nature works, it is now the time to teach them about how technology works, we can not let them think of technology as magic, we must allow them to learn the How.

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