A few weeks ago I was reading an article about how everyone should write a blog. Writing can help you demonstrate your knowledge, but also help out others that are trying to learn the same thing. I write a blog on my own website, which was built with Bulma Clean Theme (a Jekyll website theme built with Bulma), but it’s a bit much if you just wanted to create a blog. So I decided to get my notepad out and start sketching some blog theme ideas.

I’ve always been interested in making a package for Laravel so I thought I would make a simple example package and share what I had learnt from the process. The package is very simple and just contains some extra collection methods, so I decided to call it extra-collect.

I’ve been meaning to write about some of the new features I have been rolling out to my Jekyll theme, Bulma Clean Theme, for a while but I have only just managed to push the update for the landing page layout last weekend. This article provides some of the thinking behind the updates, as well as a brief introduction to how to get started.

If you want to start writing some tests for your Laravel project then chances are you will need to write some factories at some point. When I first heard the term factory I had no idea what it meant and what it did, let alone the benefits they can bring to your tests.

Sometimes you want to ensure that a field is unique in the database so that someone can’t add the same item twice, such as the title for a post. Laravel provides a couple of handy tools for this, including the Unique validation rule, but there is a bit more configuration required to other validation rules to make the most of its abilities.