All entries of my technical and business blog

Hourly Billing Gives You the Worst Results

Jun 12, 2023 business

I don’t do hourly billing (if I can help it) - but most businesses and partners still ask about my hourly rate. Hourly billing is bad. There are so many reasons. But in this article I will just focus on one: you get the worst results with hourly billing. Let’s find out why.

Is a Laravel Blade Component for a Form a Good Idea?

Jun 5, 2023 laravel

The other day I was troubleshooting some code for a form in Laravel that was using a PUT method. Turns out the previous developer had not understood - and I had missed - that the @method override was missing. So I got to thinking - what if we made a form component that handles this for us? Is this a good idea?

Siri Shortcut to Todo List Easier Than Existing Systems

May 30, 2023 ios iot macos

I use Things for my todo list. I like it, but I don’t like the voice control. You have to say “Add I want to buy candy to my things 3” - sometimes you can leave off 3. This works sometimes - but for longer things it’s not great. What’s an alternative? I got one - and it’s way better.

An Argument for Keeping Your Project Simple

May 22, 2023 business programming

Awesome. You used interfaces so you can abstract out the dependencies and swap services. Your database queries are all built with an ORM that is database agnostic. You don’t rely on anything special with your servers/cloud. You did it! You now have a project that retains the business logic while allowing all the technical aspects to be loosely coupled! But should you have done it?!

Get Laravel Auth User in 404 Blade

May 6, 2023 laravel

It’s nice that you can customize the 4xx/5xx error blade files if they’re published in Laravel - I like that. But what if you want to access the current user - or even use your standard layout - for the not found / 404 error? It’s actually quite easy. Let’s check it out.

Use DPI Media Query for Crisp Text and Images with High Density

May 4, 2023 css

What do you do when your website looks great to you - but others say the text is hard to read and the image is grainy? Well, because of this specific reason, I use two monitors always - one with a higher resolution and one with less. So, as it turns out, there’s a way to make both resolutions - and people - happy. Let’s see how.

Sort Nova Users on Spatie Role

Apr 9, 2023 laravel

The specific challenge is to sort users in a Laravel Nova application by their role. For this specific example, though, we have a number of assumptions. Although this article solves this very specific problem, you can probably extend it to apply to other custom data challenges in Nova. Let’s check it out.

Google Geo-location Zip Only Not Found Fix

Apr 6, 2023 misc-web

When running a geo-location query out to Google, we found a zip code that wasn’t found. The city/state was found in Google maps, but if you searched just the zip code, no results turned up. This is the fix I came up with.