Blog

I love using Laravel Database Factories for setting up test data. But, what about when we want to do more complex domain object creation besides just data values or relationships created outside of the factory? Let’s try using the afterCreated() hook and states.

To whom it may concern… and that person probably is me… here is a list of the 50 US states in array form, nice and easy to copy+paste into your PHP code.

There are a number of tools and packages that help you manage your users and their associated password reset flows available. The Laravel docs also describe a way that you can reset your password in your own controller. Depending on the use case of the application, I end up having to use code like this in some applications when other packages won’t work as drop-ins. But, can we make this example a little better, more secure, easier to read or a better UX? I think so. Let’s go.

Elevator pitches for startups and products are hard. What if there was an online tool where you could go to practice just that?

I love the idea of web components for using more native and vanilla javascript instead of heavy client libraries. But if you’re not already on this train, it can be difficult to get started. But, I think I found a nice way to bridge the gap - using web components as decorators. Let me show you how.

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?