All entries of my technical and business blog

I’m a huge fan of using the Laravel HTTP Client for requests to third-party APIs. It’s clean and easy, nice for unit testing, and exposes methods for the most common functionality we need when consuming APIs. But one thing has bothered me - how do I log both my request and the API’s response, no matter what, with no special calls. Well, we’re in luck - using some global middleware on the client, we can do just that.

Sometimes you just want to generate a custom meme image but you don’t want any attribution or to share it publicly like sites like Imgflip do. You can do this easily with an iOS shortcut (likely works on MacOS too). Let’s find out how.

Sometimes when I get called in to help a dev manager straighten up their team, I face a lot of resistance. But there’s hope. I have a solution!

I can’t say how much I love Github actions. It really felt like a game-changer for me. But I always had some concerns about security. How do we stop 3rd party actions from accessing stealing our code?

I already have Prettier and ESLint set up and they handle all of my Javascript code perfectly. But what about when you’re working on just a plain HTML file in VSCode? How do you get it to stop randomly breaking your lines?

I’m a huge fan of the live-server package for running local HTML servers to test my HTML and Javascript code. What about if you want to run a local PHP server quickly to test something? That’s easy. But I tend to forget the exact command - so I came up with a ZSH-based solution.

Whenever I can use plain CSS instead of Javascript to solve a user interface or experience problem, a thousand angels rejoice. Well that, and usually the result is a lot less bytes sent for a faster page load. With this in mind, I had a problem a while ago that I solved using CSS only: showing a form only when a link was clicked to display it. Let’s see how.

A couple years ago I was working with a group of great hearted well meaning people who just didn’t know anything about tech. So I decided to create a website where I explained terms to them - but in my typical manner. That was explain.wtf.

What if you could trade your job with someone else - who wanted your job - and you wanted theirs? Would this be that hard to do? Here’s my idea.

If you’re going to use an Action pattern for your application, be careful what you expect coming in as input. In fact, input should be loose and output should be tightly coupled. Let me explain…