You don’t need to install another app with more bloated requirements to track your weight daily in the Apple health app. You can do this with iOS Shortcuts. Here’s how: (more…)

I love PHPStorm, but it can only do so much. Even with plugins like Laravel Idea, you may still have some missing features. One that I wish I had was autocomplete of models from collections or paginators in blade files. Well, turns out there’s an easy enough way to add this functionality for yourself. (more…)

I have a long history of sharing ideas on this blog for services/sites/utilities. Here’s the newest one: a very cheap service to proxy API requests that don’t have open CORS requests / require an API key. (more…)

I love Laravel request classes for validation. You should be using these whenever you can! But sometimes, writing the rules seems redundant between store and update. There’s a quick fix, though. (more…)

The prepareForValidation() method is really useful in Laravel requests: it helps modify the incoming data so that validation might be easier. But you need to be careful that you implement it correctly and don’t mess up your data. Let me explain. (more…)

You’ve got a great idea, there’s a free API, and you’ve got free hosting on Netlify. You’re ready to begin. You request your first bit of data and you hit that infamous CORS error: Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://some-url-here. Ahh! So now, you have to build a complex backend to deal with this. Or do you? If it’s just something simple, you can use Netlify’s functions... (more…)

I was watching Bar Rescue (please don’t tell anyone) and a bartender said exactly the same thing about his job as a programmer I was just talking to… turns out they had a surprising thing in common. (more…)

“Do you even lift, bro?!” What a way to ask if you work out while simultaneously insulting you. Well, maybe I shouldn’t have named this “do you even sprintf” but it really surprises me how many PHP devs forget about (or don’t even know about) this useful tool - and instead do some pretty icky looking string concatenation. Let’s take a look at what sprintf() can do for us. (more…)

I love using Policies in Laravel. A particularly useful feature is the interception of checks. But what if only some of our policies need that? That’s where we can judiciously use traits. (more…)

What’s the difference between unit test, integration test, and a feature test? Which should you use for what type of test? Is it just preference or does performance factor in when using Laravel? Let me give you my take from over a decade of unit testing experience. (more…)