All entries of my technical and business blog

I hate to admit it, but I do like Laravel’s Tinker package. Sometimes, just testing out your relationships on the command line before you go further is super helpful.

One of my projects involves Google AdWords. I was dealing with ad groups in AdWords and I realized I had made a few case mistakes with the filenames. I had files named Adgroup.php instead of AdGroup.php. I went and changed the file name, but, since my project is managed with git, I couldn’t commit the changes. My Mac drive was not case sensitive. Oops, forgot about that.

So, after reading some of my own entries on my blog, I realized that my last re-design made the font kind of hard to read. Plus, I was reading it on a 27" monitor, and it became hard to keep the long lines of text straight. So, I opted for a re-design… but not before I looked at my Google Analytics.

Normally, when I write unit tests, I don’t use Laravel’s facade and fakery methods. I do a lot of injection of services, but in one particular case, when working with the Queue system, I had to use the facade for faking the queue and asserting some jobs were pushed.

If you’re not using Swagger (or OpenAPI) yet to document your APIs, you should start. It’s pretty simple to get started - especially in PHP. I recommend using the swagger-php package - it’s pretty easy. Just use annotations, and then generate the Swagger definition when you’re done.

“The real reason we’re not successful or getting a bunch of sales, is because we’re missing feature X, Y and Z! Add them immediately!”

Have you ever submitted a debug log for a piece of desktop software? I’m always enthralled at the sheer amount of information that is included in some of these error reports. It reminds me that I don’t do enough logging. As a matter of fact, I think most PHP developers don’t do enough logging.

Today, while trying to think of a clever way to create a “hire Aaron” page (yup, resume is right here), I came up with an idea to animate a Google Street View page. My initial goal was to animate a rotation and some travel down a road, but I’ve been unable to find a more seamless way of doing the horizontal travel. It looks like there is just going to be jumps in their photography - which of course makes sense. I wasn’t expecting a perfect seamless set of photography, but the current version of it jumps too much and is just too unsettling to see animated.

I’m a huge fan of the service architecture paradigm - and that means that I use services in my controllers to handle persistence. I wanted to abstract the add and update methods from my services and put them into an abstract class. In addition, I didn’t want to have to specify the exact method - I just wanted to call save on the entity. Finally, I wanted to log it properly and verbosely.

I love namespaces in PHP as much as the next programmer - but there’s always been something about namespaces in my own applications that bothered me. And that’s when I have similar or identical named services, forms, entities or models.