All entries of my technical and business blog

I don’t want this to turn into a rant, but…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.