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…)

One of the lesser known pieces of functionality from Composer is the ability to create a project from skeleton/scaffolding. This ability allows you to create a project structure, directory, files and requirements based on the suggested setup from the project maintainer. A common installation mechanism of Laravel uses this functionality. (Even I use it to save time and set up my own custom configuration for new project skeletons.) (more…)

Let’s start out with the basic request or statement: (more…)

By now, you’ve probably written many database migrations in Laravel. But, then something else happens. Perhaps your business model changed, your data attributes changed or you’re just refactoring to a stronger architecture. Doesn’t matter which, you’re going to need to convert and migrate some data. (more…)

Whether you’ve made the class yourself or you’re using a pre-made SDK, there are times when the construction of an object might be expensive. Expense, in this case, pertains to memory, time, CPU cycles, basically anything that is above baseline. (more…)

I kind of hate that phrase, that buzzword-worthy label “corporate gig,” but I don’t know what else to call it. Office job? Large company employment? Anyway, I thought I’d take a bit to reflect on my last one and share a few things I learned. (more…)

Having many meetings, one after another, is not only tiring, it’s a recipe for memory disaster. You don’t have enough time between meetings to finish notes, gather your thoughts or even use the bathroom. Because of this, I’ve started doing something different: (more…)

When you’re creating cookies on your server side application, it’s good security practice to flag the cookie as HTTP Only. This way, it instructs the browser that it should sandbox this cookie from the client side scripts. It still will send it between client and server on each subsequent request, but javascript can’t access it directly. (more…)

I started noticing a disturbing trend on one of my projects: developers were doing too much logic in the setup and data provider methods of their PHPUnit tests. However, before we could address this, a “limitation” popped up which helped them kick this habit. (more…)