Alvaro Montoro

Published in Level Up Coding

·Pinned

How to Have Fun (and Win) in a Hackathon

A guide with tips and tricks to enjoy and make the most out of development events — A hackathon is an event where developers get together for a limited time (it can go from a few hours to a few days) to collaborate on a project. There are many types of hackathons: internal to a corporation or open to the public, independent or as part of a…

Hackathons

13 min read

How to Have Fun (and Win) in a Hackathon

Published in Counter Arts

·Pinned

100 Days of CSS Illustrations

A collection of daily drawings created with HTML and CSS — As a personal fun project, I challenged myself to do 100 CSS drawings in 100 days. I published a series of 10 posts with 10 images each. This article has all images in a single post, as well as links to videos on how they were drawn. Some of the…

CSS

20 min read

6 hours ago

The Pomodorito Technique

You’ve heard about the Pomodoro technique; make way now for the Pomodorito technique 😋 — You may have heard about the Pomodoro Technique, a time management method that consists of repeating work and break intervals to help keep focus while getting some needed rest. It is pretty popular in the US among tech employees. The origin of the name is funny: the method’s creator used…

Careers

2 min read

Sep 20

Launching an Images Website… Without Any Images

In preparation for Divtober, I published a website with a collection of single-element CSS drawings. — Divtober is a coding challenge that happens in October. The goal is to create CSS art with a simple (but critical) condition: only use one <div> element (or any other HTML element as long as it is only one). Hence the name: Div + October = Divtober. Lynn Fisher organizes…

CSS

4 min read

Launching an Images Website… Without Any Images

Sep 3

My Wordle Strategy

How I play the popular game Wordle and the method that helped improve my results considerably — Wordle is a viral word game recently acquired by the New York Times. The game’s goal is to guess a 5-letter word in less than six steps. …

Wordle

9 min read

Aug 26

Thirteen Years

A little retrospect (or introspect) on the last thirteen years and some big decisions that changed my life. — Today, Facebook showed me one of those “on this day” post flashbacks. It was from 13 years ago and read: “ Rejected the internship in Saudi Arabia, so…. I’m definitely going to NYC.” But there was more to that story than just that. Thirteen years ago, I was at an…

Personal

4 min read

Aug 13

Is CSS an Object-Oriented Programming Language?

A tongue-in-cheek view of CSS and how it stands as a programming language — For the past six months, I have been running comiCSS, an “experiment” in which I draw web-related cartoons and comics using HTML and CSS. I published a version of the Angry NPC Wojak meme a couple of weeks ago. It went mostly unnoticed, but it didn’t matter because it was…

CSS

2 min read

Is CSS an Object-Oriented Programming Language?

Published in Level Up Coding

·Jul 19

CSS Interview Exercise

A set of questions for HTML+CSS interviews… and why I stopped asking them. — One of the tasks in my previous position was to interview candidates for Web Development positions. In particular, I focused on HTML, CSS, and Web Accessibility, as I knew that a different interviewer specialized in JavaScript and algorithms. Our project focused on styling (and accessibility), and CSS was an essential…

CSS

4 min read

Published in Level Up Coding

·Jun 28

The Importance of Being a Maintainer

Thoughts about developers skipping the maintenance phase and how this impacts their growth and the projects they work on. — Today, I read an article that listed the main phases of development as: Development Testing Code Reviewing Deployment Without getting into Testing and Code Reviewing being the same thing, this list (just like the coffee mug that decorates this article) missed the most important phases in the Software Development Life…

Careers

4 min read

Jun 15

The Death of IE (webcomic)

A special comic for Internet Explorer’s end-of-life — I have been publishing a webcomic for four months: a comic about CSS (and web development) without images, all coded in CSS and HTML. And I’ve had a blast while building it. An interesting experiment overall (that I have written about and will continue writing about in the future.) Today…

CSS

3 min read