One of the most rewarding things I’ve done as a programmer was watch a real life in person focus group use my application. At first, I didn’t enjoy it. But like most lessons, looking back, it was extremely valuable. (more…)

Historically, I’ve always created virtual boxes with apache environments with vagrant like this or recently a combined docker image like that. But, as I do more front end work as well, I realized these were pretty heavy weight. (more…)

Laravel has a built in request helper called wantsJson() that determines if the request is requesting JSON with the Accept: application/json header. But, what if you want to only accept JSON responses? I set up a Laravel middleware that rejects anything that isn’t JSON. (more…)

First, to start out, I need to make one thing abundantly clear: This piece is just a bunch of assumptions, generalizations and feelings. I’ve gathered these together after all of my own experiences. That’s why I add the most important auxiliary verb may. (more…)

Despite the “catchy” title, this is one of my pet-peeves: when developers put a p tag inside of a table like they would use a <tr><td> combo. This is often done when there is a variable amount of values - including zero - listed in a table. (more…)

For some clients, I have to VPN before I can push to their git repositories. I’ve been using a few VPN clients, but I finally settled on one. I’m a huge fan of Shimo but one thing that bothered me was that I still had to click and remember to be on VPN when I wanted to push my changes. (more…)

I guess I should RTFM more often… but I didn’t remember (or know??) that MySQL truncate table causes an implicit commit. (more…)

In an earlier entry I detailed how I track things I do each day using an Alfred workflow. Basically, I wanted to track what I did from the Alfred launcher screen, one thing at a time. The end result was a txt file dated today. (more…)

When people suggest books to you, it’s common that they’ll send you a link to Amazon. If it’s a good book, I want to add it to my Goodreads list so I remember to read it later. This has been a pretty manual process, and that bothered me. I looked and found some Google Chrome extensions, but those didn’t seem to work for me anymore. So, I created my own bookmarklet. (more…)

Feedback from your boss or superior is incredibly important. How do you know if you’re getting all of the feedback they have for you, thought? Sometimes people are distracted - sometimes they don’t know if they’re pummeling you with too much information. (more…)