All entries of my technical and business blog

For a project I’m working on, I had to become very familiar with the print CSS styles for headers and footers. The goal is two fold: 1) to have a nice printable version and 2) to use a chrome-pdf tool to download as PDF.

Regardless of the two consuming sources, I just wanted to solve this all as one html/css file. So, it was necessary to explore all of the different options we have now, in 2025, on Chrome.

In this blog entry, see print (pdf) versions of the different header/footer functionality in CSS including built-in page margin and header/footer tools as well as fixed/forced hacks.

There are many ways to handle cascading functionality in Laravel. You can do this with observers, events, manually dispatched jobs - even in MySQL with cascading deletes.

I prefer to keep my cascading logic in the application code by using Eloquent Model Events. This is super easy when it’s just a single level of model. But what about relationships?

A common security pattern is to add environment-specific configuration and secrets into a local, unversioned file. You’re probably already doing this with a tool called DotEnv. Let’s see how we can reuse that between PHP and the shell.

Docker provides the HEALTHCHECK instruction for Dockerfiles and Docker Compose files.

While not absolutely required, configuring these can make your IDE and environment more robust and verbose.

Here’s what I use with some common containers in Laravel projects.

Issuing events with Livewire is a useful way to communicate between components. But, there are some caveats to be aware of - especially if you’re coming from something like React or Vue. The majority of this comes from the fact that Livewire treats every component as an island.

This had stumped me a few times in the past. Because of this, I wanted to give a quick example of how you can use Livewire events in a way that you might be more familiar with: with reactivity.

sprintf is an amazing function that doesn’t get enough love. Because of this, I had put together a little tool to explore it in the browser.

In Laravel 11+, it’s quite easy to tell the exception handler to render all (or a select portion of them) as JSON regardless of the request/response type. But what about earlier versions?

Most things we want to validate in Laravel are simple. But, what should we do when we want to add more validation outside of the standard patterns that are provided? In this example, I’ll show how I do just that.

I’ve written about Custom PHP Exceptions before - as well as using PHP Interfaces for code readability. There’s one coding pattern that I use pretty consistently that encompasses these concepts - a custom exception for code or functionality that is not yet written.

In most of my applications, time is reflected in the UTC timezone. This is great for logic and math, but not so great when showing the date to the regular user.

Now, it’s pretty easy to show the UTC dates in the user’s timezone, without even asking them what it is.

Let’s see how to do this with a little bit of HTML and Javascript.