Cheers! We finally met.
My name is Rafael. I started my career in 2005 as a graphic designer and became a programmer in 2013. Ever since, I've found joy in creating products and blogging my learnings.
Favorite projects
Veedgee
Latest launchVeedgee scans several ticket sites and lists the best events happening in southern Brazil.
Glorious Demo
Award-winningA JavaScript library that simulates an editor and a terminal to demo some code in action. It snagged "Product of the Day" on Product Hunt, and 3k+ stars on Github.
Latest blogs
Customizing checkboxes and radio buttons without hacks
It's really hard to find someone who's happy with the native appearance of checkboxes and radio buttons. While a bunch of other elements have evolved and now let us fully customize their styles, checkboxes and radio buttons seem stuck in the programming dark ages. Or have they actually evolved and we just didn't notice?
Strategies for naming your side project
Picking a name for a project is a magical moment, but some people can get stuck staring at a blank canvas that stubbornly refuses to accept any name. In this post, I share three strategies that’ll help shake up your mind until, like magic, the perfect name pops into it.
Pushing side projects forward with almost no free time
I once heard a programmer call GitHub a graveyard for side projects. Felt kinda unfair to all the folks out there grinding away, making progress day in and day out. But I get it. Getting a project off the ground takes the ability to push forward with something that never seems to fit into your free time. In this post, I share the strategy I have been using to push my side projects forward.
How to easily convert HTML to image in NodeJS or in the browser
Whether you're exporting a chart or generating images with dynamic text, converting HTML into an image can be super useful in many situations. This post explains how to do it both on the server (NodeJS) and directly in the browser.
Conditioning Vercel deployments on successful CircleCI workflows
After connecting a GitHub repo to Vercel, every commit to the main branch automatically triggers a production deployment. While this makes setup super easy, it bypasses continuous integration, meaning broken tests won't prevent a new version from going live. Learn how to take back control and make sure your production deploys only happen when your CI checks pass.
Validating React forms easily without third-party libraries
Over the past few years, I've tried out a bunch of libraries that claimed to make React form validation easier. My takeaway? They're annoyingly intrusive and make the code way more complex than it needs to be. In this post, I'm sharing a library-free approach that is stupidly simple and has worked like a charm for my form validations.