Blog

It’s really tough being a famous person.

Or that’s what I’ve heard.

Do you need a non-famous friend? Someone to help you escape from this crazy world who doesn’t care about your circumstances?

Maybe I can help…

I love using Docker’s Compose functionality for our local development. But, even though Docker nicely isolates most of the app code and functionality from my host, there are still some things that bridge this gap.

The plan always sounds good until someone who has been there before speaks up.

That’s what I do. You don’t need more agreement, you need someone who challenges the consensus and group-think.

You need… One Last Check.

I thought it would be funny to joke about a nickname I have had before “Angry Aaron” - so I made a website. It was AngryAaron.com. Basically, you tapped the angry emoji and it was my voice saying ‘no’ or ‘grrr’ increasingly louder and more angry, repeatedly.

That’s it.

But, on my phone, the first tap never started the yelling. It was always the second one (even though the web seemed to work fine). I hated this because it felt like the site was broken.

Now, there probably are better ways to fix this - but I went with a unique way that solves the problem and gives me a UX bonus.

I found this when writing tests for a project, sitting right in the routes/web.php file:

I just released an updated, brand new 1.0 release of my Typesetter library. It’s a library with some helpful wrappers for creating PDFs from markdown. It comes with a CLI and is a Laravel app.

I started to question the work, though. Was this still my hobby? A useful project? Did I understand what I was ‘writing’ anymore? Did I need to do this?

In 2022, I was rebelling against the really clever CTO sites and personal branding.

You don’t want your CTO to be so fancy - you just want the facts. So I created a quick landing page “resume” if you will.

Let’s say we’re adding a Slack notification channel, and we go to update the method that labels each channel:

Back in 2020, I built a free online tool that would convert your React component into a .NET component. No install required.

Now with AI, I don’t think we really need it. You’ll find it here for posterity.

When I first started using Laravel, I really didn’t like the global middleware that trimmed strings. But after a while, it became an irreplaceable part of my tool belt, and I am a convert.

I became so used to this that the first time a user used my Filament input and I saw a space after some text, I was really confused. Why did this happen?

Let me tell you how to fix this on the form itself, how to do it globally, and what that might cause a problem with.