I’ve always estimated development issues in hours or days but I recently created a new project in Jira and it only allowed me to use story points for estimates. I have always stayed away from story points as I have struggled to understand what they mean and why I should use them. But as the project only allowed me to use story points I thought I had better make a proper effort to learn what they mean.
What are Story Points?
How to motivate yourself
Sometimes life as a developer gets you down. No matter how hard you work it seems like there is a never ending list of new bugs and change requests that keep coming in from your users. It’s easy to get fed up and start losing motivation, every day seems the same and time starts to drag. So how can you keep your motivation levels up?
Keeping Tests Simple in Laravel
When developing a Laravel web application it can often start out quite simple, but can grow in complexity over time. This complexity can also end up being reflected in your tests. Sometimes to run an end to end test you can end up spending longer creating the scenario for the test than the actual test. How can we keep tests simple and quick to write?
Using Eloquent Query Scopes in Laravel
If you are writing eloquent queries in your Laravel project and find yourself writing the same logic in your queries over and over again then query scopes might be of use to you. Scopes offer you a way of extracting a part of a query from your controller and into your model to simplify your queries and keep them cleaner.
Creating my first npm package
I’ve been a web developer for over 12 years now and I use so many different npm packages every day throughout both my day job and my side projects, but I had never made my own npm package before. I decided that I wanted to see what it’s all about and how you go about creating your own package and deploying it to npm.
Latest Posts
Track HTTP Client requests in Laravel with the Laravel DebugBar
I started working with the Laravel HTTP client on a recent project and I had the debug bar package installed. I wondered if you could use the Laravel Debugbar to record how many api calls were being made and how long each was taking to run? I reached out to it’s creator, Barry vd. Heuvel, on twitter and the rest is history!
Using the HTTP Client and Data Transfer Objects in Laravel 7
Recently I have been working on a project retrieving some data from an API in a Laravel project. I was using Laravel to retrieve and display data from a Moodle installation and started using the HTTP Client in Laravel 7 and wondered if I could convert the retrieved data from an array into a more predictable object. I asked my colleagues and one of them recommended I take a look at the Spatie package called data transfer object.
How NOT to make a Website featured in net magazine
I have some exciting news to share! My book, ‘How NOT to make a Website’, was featured in the June 2020 edition of net magazine as the Side Project of the Month.
