Nowadays when we create our online projects we want them to look good on every device. Desktop, Mobile Phones, Tablets, you name it.

With HTML you can use two different approaches to accomplish this and I will teach you how do implement it and how can you make it cross-browser and make it work with older browsers.

Why Responsive Images?

With responsive images, you can deliver the image with the best fit for your user’s screen. Why deliver a 5MB image when you can deliver a 3kb image for your user that is accessing your website on his phone? Your user will see your content faster, will navigate through your content faster, and will use a lot less bandwidth which will save you a few bucks.

• Faster navigation.
• Bandwidth savings.
• Most of us don’t live in a world where we don’t have to care about 4G data consumption.

The <picture> element

The syntax like this:

See the Pen Responsive Images for Responsive Designs #1 by Igor Escobar (@igorescobar) on CodePen.

Notice in this example I’ve used ImageBoss to crop the smart crop the original image for desktop, tables, and mobile phones. I’ve used it because I not only want to deliver images with proper sizes but they are also compressed and delivered with Progressive Scans.

Notice that you open the code pen above and resize your window the image will change accordingly to your window size.

The <img> element with srcset and sizes attribute

If you don’t like the approach above you can also use the <img> tag with the srcset and sizes attribute.

See the Pen Responsive Images for Responsive Designs #2 by Igor Escobar (@igorescobar) on CodePen.

https://static.codepen.io/assets/embed/ei.js

Browser Support

Notice that both the <picture> and <img> approach are only implemented on modern browsers as you can see in the image below:

More Info: https://caniuse.com/#feat=picture

Cross-browser Responsive Images

If you are concerned about how this is going to work on an old browser you can use a very cool project called Picturefill. It will basically wrap the W3C specifications for img and picture with javascript to make it work.

How to generate multiple images for multiple screen sizes?

In this very post, I’ve used ImageBoss to generate the images for all the devices I wanted. I didn’t need to generate all of them by myself and also didn’t need to code anything specific for it. All I needed was to have my image stored somewhere and it did the heavy lifting.

Hope it helped!

It’s called ImageBoss. And my objective today with this post it’s to help you to understand why ImageBoss and how simple it is to do image resizing or image cropping with any kind of image.

First of all, if you have a website (or an app) with posts, news, galleries, or dealing with user-generated content, in general, it can be a huge waste of time if all you want to do is to focus on your business.

Usually, you have to create a new machine and optimize this web service to handle huge payloads, optimize its storage to fast access, increase timeouts to be able to fetch all the information, handle security, conversion, compression, and then you have to code a routine to generate thumbnails and resize your images in all kind of different formats you need (or may need) to be able to beautifully display those images on your app or website. After doing all that, you still need to sign up for a CDN so you can put your assets closer to your end-users to reduce latency and download speed.

It should be the dream, right? but we have to be honest… not all of us have the time, resources, and patience to go this further and do it all over again for each product or client you have.

That is why ImageBoss is here. It does it all for you. Image Resizing, image cropping, image filters, image conversion, and then caching it to one of the most popular CDNs in the world, Cloudflare.

Image Resizing

First of all, to be able to keep up you need to go to the ImageBoss website and set up your account: https://imageboss.me/. (~30secs)

After login in, on your dashboard, you will be able to see this screen:

All you need to do is to add all the sources/hosts that identify your traffic. (You can add as many sites as you want).

In this example I will use this image:

Its URL is: https://blog.igorescobar.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/5a0b7-2016-05-22-15.10.22-1.jpg

Imagine that you want to generate a custom version of that image to be able to show it on a mobile device with 745×200.

In that case, I will use an ImageBoss operation called “cover” with all the default settings. You can read further by following this link:
https://imageboss.me/docs/operations/cover

Basically, all you need to do is add a prefix to the original URL:

https://img.imageboss.me/igorescobar/cover/745x200/

And the final URL should be:

https://img.imageboss.me/igorescobar/cover/745x200/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/2016-05-22-15.10.22-1.jpg

The generated image would be:

Notice that ImageBoss has Smart Cropping by default.

Use cover when you want an image with an exact width and height. By default, we’ll run our Smart Cropping algorithm to identify the main subject of the image, so in case we need to remove part of the image to deliver on the requested size, we will always try our best to keep the most important element in the frame.

In addition to all that it auto-rotates my image if necessary and it also converts my image to have progressive scans (progressive JPEG). Now my image is auto rotated, compressed, cached, progressive scans, and globally available to all my users.

I guess that our boring days generating thumbnails manually for every single project is over, right?

Let me know what you guys think!

The crazy story begins with an unexpected e-mail from a guy named Shu Uesugi – a San Francisco based Engineer currently working for EdSurge – asking for permission to mention my name and share with the world what he just discovered.

After reading his e-mail and his draft I was like:

The short story is that Donald Trump has a donate page which is using my open-source project jQuery Mask Plugin to guide his visitors on the tricky quest of filling up web forms – so far so good.

The shit hits the fan when the developer of his 2MM dollars website decides to include the minified version of jquery mask plugin file pointing directly to the demonstration page of my project (hosted in github.io). I have 100% control over this file and the developer simply injected the file on the page (instead of saving the file on his servers) and I could just replace or inject something nasty in it to make the most ambitious trolling attempt against the US presidential candidate.

Yet, in shock, I decided to share this with my personal friends on Facebook:

In only MY post I got 714 likes, 139 comments and an impressive 262 shares, hundreds of people randomly sending me friend requests, sending me messages on Twitter, Facebook and e-mails… giving me ideas and warning me about the window of opportunity that I got to do something about Trump. People really liked the possibilities of what Uesugi discovered . At the end of the post I asked for ideas of what each person would do if they were in my position – oh boy… that was fun!

@igorescobar SO. MUCH. POWER.

— Eduardo Shiota (@shiota) August 18, 2016

All of the sudden I became some sort of super-man with a power that could change the world. People were like… DO IT! DO IT! Say something! Make a beautiful rain of penises with wings upon his website! And I was like… Wow… People really want to say something to this guy…

They even opened a hilarious pull request on their own, pure team work, in attempt to do something and hoping I’d merge it (sadly it was deleted).

The discovery was discussed everywhere:

• Hacker News
• Reddit
• Trump’s campaign donation website used open-source code sloppily, risking ridicule and worse
• Donald Trump’s Donation Website Was Easily Hackable
  
• Facebook post

After watching all this, receiving all those tweets, messages and emails showing nothing but pure hate love towards Trump. Of course, the bad news spreads fast and in a matter of hours the code on Trump’s website was fixed. People were in tears. e.g:

Then I posted this on twitter:

Yep. At the bottom of your heart you agree with me that this would be wrong. jQuery Mask Plugin is a serious project which took years of hard work and commitment to the community to build its reputation. I can’t just throw it all away for the public’s amusement. To make people laugh. To make a statement against someone – even if this someone is a US presidential candidate like Donald Trump.

The true sad history behind this is that Donald Trump’s website cost 2MM dollars, they are using several open sourced projects like our jQuery Mask Plugin and they don’t even donated 1.00 freaking dollar in our donate page to support its development.

The AWS Resources

Here is a list of what you need to do before going ahead.

1. Create an ElasticBeanstalk Application (e.g Sendy).
2. Create an ElasticBeanstalk Environment (e.g sendy-production).
   1. You can deploy the Sample Application for now.
   2. Once your environment is created make a note of your Environment ID located on your environment dashboard right beside your DNS entry. (e.g Environment ID: e-xxxxxxxxxxx).
3. Create a EC2 Security Group to be used by your RDS MySQL Instance (e.g: rds-sendy-production).
   1. Inbound: Open this tab and make sure you allowed your ElasticBeanstalk Instances can reach your RDS. To do so you need to locate the name of the Security Group created by your ElasticBeanstalk Environment. Just go to your EC2 Security Groups Section. And locate the ID of the security group that possessed your ElasticBeanstalk Environment ID.
   2. It will look kind of like this:
      1. 
   3. You need to do that because your environment is elastic and every new created instance needs to inherit its permission to access the RDS instance.
4. Create your RDS MySQL instance and attach the EC2 Security Group created on the previous step. Further configurations is up to you.
5. Create a SSD or Magnetic Volume on the same Availability Zone of your Elastic Beanstalk Environment Instances. Attention to the availability zone or your deployment will fail because EC2 Instances can’t attach volumes outside of its availability zone. After doing that take a note on your Volume ID (e.g vol-XXXXXXXX).
6. Install the awsebcli.

The Deploy Setup

Assuming that you’re already inside your Sendy’s folder you need to create a few files.

Dockerfile

[bash]
FROM php:7.0.8-apache

RUN a2enmod rewrite &amp;&amp; \
docker-php-ext-install mysqli gettext

ENV APP_HOME /var/www/html

WORKDIR $APP_HOME
COPY . $APP_HOME

EXPOSE 80
[/bash]

Notice that I’m using the official php + apache2 docker image. I need to create my own Dockerfile because of Sendy’s dependencies like mysqli and gettext.

.elasticbeanstalk/config.yml

[ruby]
branch-defaults:
default:
environment: sendy-production
global:
application_name: sendy
default_ec2_keyname: YOUR-EC2-KEYNAME
default_platform: Docker 1.11.1
default_region: us-east-1
profile: null
sc: null
[/ruby]

This file is important when your are about to deploy your application to ElasticBeanstalk.

Dockerrun.aws.json

[ruby]
{
"AWSEBDockerrunVersion": "1",
"Ports": [
{
"ContainerPort": "80"
}
],
"Volumes": [
{
"HostDirectory": "/uploads",
"ContainerDirectory": "/var/www/html/uploads"
},
{
"HostDirectory": "/session",
"ContainerDirectory": "/var/www/html/session"
}
],
"Logging": "/var/log/apache2/"
}

[/ruby]

Ports: By default apache is running on port 80, no big deal here.
Volumes: The most important thing to notice on the code above is those “Volumes”. Sendy uses the the uploads/ directory to save everything you upload to its system so it’s very important for you to have those volumes mapped from the Docker Host into your containers to make sure that in case you need to restart your containers you don’t lose your persisted data (docker containers are stateless!).

The /session:/var/www/html/session is because it is where php is saving logged user sessions. Its better to save sessions outside of the application container. It make sure that every new deployment you don’t need to clean your cookies and login again (it sucks, I know!).

.ebextensions/container_commands.config

[ruby]
container_commands:
01mount:
command: "aws ec2 attach-volume –region us-east-1 –volume-id YOUR_VOLUME_ID_HERE –instance-id $(curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/instance-id) –device /dev/xvdf"
ignoreErrors: true
02wait:
command: "sleep 20"
03mkdir:
command: "mkdir /uploads"
test: "[ ! -d /uploads ]"
04trymount:
command: mount /dev/xvdf /uploads
ignoreErrors: true
05format-if-not-already:
command: if find /uploads -maxdepth 0 -empty | read v; then mkfs -t ext4 /dev/xvdf; fi
06mount:
command: "mount /dev/xvdf /uploads"
ignoreErrors: true
07fix_public_dirs:
command: "chmod -R 777 /session &amp;&amp; chmod -R 777 /uploads"
ignoreErrors: true
[/ruby]

01mount: Replace the YOUR_VOLUME_ID_HERE by your Volume ID created before. Also make sure that –region us-east-1 is correct. This file will make sure that we will be using the Volume created earlier exclusive to our uploads and your data will never be lost in case you explode your machine somehow.
02wait: The commend aws ec2 attach-volume is async so we need this otherwise further commands would fail.
03mkdir: Create the /uploads dir in case it doesn’t exists.
04trymount and 05: When you first create a EC2 Volume you need to make sure that it has a file system in it so this is what it does.
06mount: Uses the Volume we created for the /uploads folder.

.ebextensions/files.config

[ruby]
files:
"/opt/elasticbeanstalk/hooks/appdeploy/pre/files.sh":
mode: "000755"
owner: root
group: root
content: |
#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -x
docker run -v /uploads:/var/www/html/uploads –rm aws_beanstalk/staging-app chown -R www-data: /var/www/html/uploads
"/opt/elasticbeanstalk/hooks/appdeploy/enact/rewrite_nginx_config.py":
group: root
owner: root
mode: "000755"
content: |-
#! /usr/bin/python

"""
Modifies nginx configuration file on AWS Elastic Beanstalk to support WebSocket connections.
"""

import os
import re

VERSION="v1.0.4"
NGINX_CONF_FILE = ‘/etc/nginx/sites-available/elasticbeanstalk-nginx-docker-proxy.conf’
NGINX_CONFIG = """
# nginx.conf
# v1.0.4

map $http_upgrade $connection_upgrade {
default "upgrade";
"" "";
}

server {
listen 80;

gzip on;
gzip_comp_level 4;
gzip_types text/html text/plain text/css application/json application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;
client_max_body_size 100M;

location ~ "^/assets/" {
root /var/app/current/public;
gzip_static on;
expires max;
add_header Cache-Control public;
add_header ETag "";
}

location / {
proxy_pass http://docker;
proxy_http_version 1.1;

proxy_set_header Connection $connection_upgrade;
proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $http_x_real_ip;
proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $http_x_forwarded_for;
}
}
"""

def has_same_nginx_file_version():
f = open(NGINX_CONF_FILE, "r")
conf = f.read()
ret = re.search(VERSION, conf)
f.close()

return ret != None

def write_nginx_conf_file():
f = open(NGINX_CONF_FILE, "w")
f.write(NGINX_CONFIG)
f.close()

def restart_nginx():
print("– service nginx restart")
os.system("service nginx restart")

def main():
if has_same_nginx_file_version():
print("– already configured, do nothing.")
else :
write_nginx_conf_file()
restart_nginx()

if __name__ == "__main__":
main()

[/ruby]

The file above is necessary because apache runs your application with www-data user and this user doesn’t exists on your Docker Host. And the second file is for overwriting nginx’s beanstalk configuration for accepting upload of bigger files.

includes/config.php

[php]
/* MySQL database connection credentials (please place values between the apostrophes) */
$dbHost = $_ENV[‘MYSQL_DATABASE_HOST’]; //MySQL Hostname
$dbUser = $_ENV[‘MYSQL_DATABASE_USER’]; //MySQL Username
$dbPass = $_ENV[‘MYSQL_DATABASE_PASSWORD’]; //MySQL Password
$dbName = $_ENV[‘MYSQL_DATABASE_NAME’]; //MySQL Database Name
[/php]

.htaccess
Add these to your .htaccess file:

[php]

# for enabling upload of bigger CSV files
LimitRequestBody 104857600
php_value max_execution_time 0
php_value post_max_size 60M
php_value upload_max_filesize 50M

# to avoid session problems originally saved to /tmp.
php_value session.save_path ‘/var/www/html/session’
[/php]

Make sure that you are using environment variables on that file so we can inject them into your ElasticBeanstalk Environment.

Set your database configuration as Environment Variables

eb setenv MYSQL_DATABASE_HOST="XXXX" MYSQL_DATABASE_USER="XXXX" MYSQL_DATABASE_PASSWORD="XXXX" MYSQL_DATABASE_NAME="XXX" -e sendy-production

Deploy it

Commit your changes and then:

eb deploy sendy-production

Boom! Now make sure that you follow Sendy’s Guide Lines in order to setup your app correctly.

Let me know if you have any questions on the comments section bellow. Maybe some detail is missing and I could add it to the post. Remember! Sharing is caring! ;-D

Life in Lisbon/Portugal

Instead of going through all the aspects of living in Portugal I rather talk about a few things that most impressed me on a daily basis.

Safety

When I moved to Lisbon I discovered that I’m a guy who likes to walk around. Day and night. This is impossible in Brasil if you don’t live in a private condo with security cameras, high walls or electrified fences. Lisbon proved to be a very nice place to walk around and discover the city. It felt really safe and you can walk around anytime, day or night, and still get home safe with all pieces in place. Also, if you value living in a nice house close to the ocean or with green areas everywhere, Portugal fits you well and you don’t have to sell one of your kidneys for it or drive for a hundred hours to get to work.

Beauty and people

Lisbon is beautiful and it surprises me every time I go for a walk, day or night. The portuguese are known for being quite surly, but all I can say is that in Lisbon I was always well attended, so I didn’t feel any of that so called rudeness. Of course, you can relate that to the fact that Lisbon is a big city and full of tourists and that influences how portuguese treat visitors.

Pictures above were all taken by me. Most of those places you can visit by just walking around. These are just a few places that I’ve been for this very short period living here. It’s amazing(!).

food

If you think you’re coming to Lisbon and you’re not putting on some extra pounds, you’re wrong. The variety of restaurants here is impressive. And to make it better you eat very well and pay fair prices for it. I guarantee that eating well won’t be an issue for you. This made things easier for me, considering that brazilian food is really good and that my first four months I was living by myself.

weather

For me, this is a huge positive point. Lisbon is cold in the winter but not FREAKING ICE AGE like in other countries and it’s very nice in the summer. The only thing you need to be aware is the pacific freaking cold ocean incluencing the Tejo River.

Public Transportation

In my opinion it works perfectly. We got buses, trams, funiculars, subway, trains and boats. I could go anywhere I wanted using them for very affordable rates.

And these were the aspects that impacted me the most in this time frame.

Life and Work at Hole19

Since the first moment I decided to join Hole19 they started to be like a family to me. They took care of every aspect of my moving to Portugal like documentation, plain tickets, costs, temporary place to stay, everything! They even picked me up at the airport, by the way.

And it’s been like a family ever since. We work and we work hard to connect the world of golf! Together we were able to accomplish amazing things! Even more that I could ever imagine. Our team is incredibly passionate and talented. We are so focused on our mission that you can’t even think about doing poor work – its like everybody is watching and this is amazing!

It really feels like we are all part of a huge mission (it really has been). If you don’t like to work on a world class product used by 1M people, across 154 countries and 14 languages, to create highly performant applications, solve scale issues, work on recommendation/search algorithms, social connections with Graph databases, to process several thousands of requests per second, to deal with payments, (No)SQL/in memory databases, streaming data processing/transformation/aggregation, distributed architectures, math problems, to create technology for mobile/wearable devices, to use the right programming language to solve the problem, to use containers, continuous integration and deployment and to create APIs… this is definitely NOT the place for you.

It has been an exciting ride for me. I’ve always been a guy that thinks that with the right people, hard work and a huge load of passion you can accomplish anything. So I think we’re on the right track.

This post is also available on Medium.

I’ve been working on a very cool project project here at Vale Presente which was able to provide a smooth interface to our call center attendees increasing their productivity and quality of our costumer service. The project was built with HTML5, CSS3, Javascript and Node.js as our backend engine (only cool stuff!). But the main challenge was finding the right tool to get the job done in a fast and consistent manner. I’m not going to talk about how I built the client. My focus here is talk about the tool I used to create a fast and consistent connection between the attendees and Asterisk. That was tough. There are a lot of libraries available over the Internet but most of them aren’t production ready.

Production ready

During my quest I had the pleasure to meet asterisk-manager. A Asterisk Manager Interface created by Philipp Dunkel which is a node.js module for interacting with the Asterisk Manager API. Nowdays I’m helping him as a maintainer of the project, improving, fixing bugs and helping to increase the project’s visibility. Not just because I’m a maintainer but because it works!

Currently the asterisk-manager module/package for node.js is handling incredibly well more than 500,000 asterisk events and ~5,000 voice calls a day. All of those events are being transmitted to our clients through Socket.io. This is a production ready and tested solution.

How to use it

Pretty simple. First you have to install it directly:

[javascript]
npm install asterisk-manager
[/javascript]

Or put it inside of your package.json:

[javascript]
{
"dependencies": {
"asterisk-manager": "0.1.x"
}
}
[/javascript]

Now you have to create a connection instance with your asterisk server:

[javascript]
var AsteriskManager = require(‘asterisk-manager’)
, ami = new AsteriskManager(config.asterisk.port, config.asterisk.host, config.asterisk.user, config.asterisk.password, true)
;
[/javascript]

And that’s it! It works! Now you have to take a closer look inside of the available events and actions and have fun!

Events

The list of all available events which is supported by Asterisk Manager API can be found here: https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Asterisk+11+AMI+Events How do I listen for any/all AMI events?

[javascript]
ami.on(‘managerevent’, function(evt) {});
[/javascript]

How do I listen for specific AMI events?

[javascript]
ami.on(‘hangup’, function(evt) {});
ami.on(‘confbridgejoin’, function(evt) {});
[/javascript]

What if my connection dropped? You can listen to the connection events like:

[javascript]
ami.on(‘close’, function(e) {});
ami.on(‘disconnect’, function(e) {});
ami.on(‘connect’, function(e) {});
[/javascript]

And make your own decision on what do to next.

Actions

The list of all available actions supported by Asterisk Manager API can be found here: https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Asterisk+11+AMI+Actions How do I call an action?

[javascript]
ami.action({
‘action’:’originate’,
‘channel’: "SIP/1234",
‘exten’: ‘1143224321’,
‘context’: ‘from-internal’,
‘priority’: ‘1’
}, function(err, res) {});
[/javascript]

And that’s it! Have fun!

Github: https://github.com/pipobscure/NodeJS-AsteriskManager NPM Repository: https://www.npmjs.org/package/asterisk-manager Bug Reports: https://github.com/pipobscure/NodeJS-AsteriskManager/issues

What is Zepto.js

Basically, you can switch from jQuery to Zepto.js if it’s too heavy or if it’s too much for your current needs. If you need something more lightweight that allows you to keep your code compatible with your old jQuery’s code, Zepto.js is a match for you.

Zepto is a minimalist JavaScript library for modern browsers with a largely jQuery-compatible API. If you use jQuery, you already know how to use Zepto. While 100% jQuery coverage is not a design goal, the APIs provided match their jQuery counterparts. The goal is to have a ~5-10k modular library that downloads and executes fast with a familiar and versatile API, so you can concentrate on getting stuff done.
– Zepto.js Official Web Site

(\___/)
( ͡ ͡° ͜ ʖ ͡ ͡°)
\╭☞ \╭☞ Follow me on Twitter!

How to

Recently, Igor Lima made a pretty cool contribution to jQuery Mask Plugin making a few tweaks on jQuery Mask Plugin’s code to make it run smoothly with Zepto.js, making things even easier for you.

Since version 0.9.0 all you have to do is:

1 – Load zepto.js between your head TAG (or where ever you want to put it if you know what you’re doing):

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://zeptojs.com/zepto.min.js"></script>

Load the Zepto.js data plugin right after Zepto.js:
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://raw.github.com/madrobby/zepto/master/src/data.js"></script>

Zepto’s basic implementation of data() only stores strings. To store arbitrary objects the optional “data” module from custom build of Zepto was included.
And then load jQuery Mask Plugin:
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://raw.github.com/igorescobar/jQuery-Mask-Plugin/master/dist/jquery.mask.min.js"></script>

All you need to do now is take a look into jQuery Mask Plugin Documentation to learn a little about jQuery Mask Plugin’s API and you’re ready to go!
Did it help you? Support jQuery Mask Plugin!
http://igorescobar.github.io/jQuery-Mask-Plugin/
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			Running jQuery Mask Plugin with Zepto.js