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?
How to motivate yourself
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.
Lessons learned designing the Showcase layout for Bulma Clean Theme
I was thinking about what features I could add to my Jekyll theme and it occured to me that I didn’t really promote my theme very well on my own website. As my website uses Bulma Clean Theme it gave me a good opportunity to create a new feature for my theme, that I could end up using to promote my theme. A bit of a win, win situation.
Development is like a jigsaw puzzle
Last week I decided to buy a jigsaw puzzle and as I was building it, I had a thought that puzzles share a lot of the aspects of development. After all, a jigsaw puzzle does require a lot of problem solving skills.
Latest Posts
Bulma Blade UI
I would like to introduce a new Laravel package I have been working on for a little while called Bulma Blade UI. It offers a set of reusable Blade components with the Bulma html structure and CSS classes, as well as basic authentication views for use with Laravel Fortify, ready to go with minimal setup.
Testing a Laravel Console Command
I recently discovered that you can test an artisan console command very easily in Laravel 8 and make assertions on the output. In this example we are going to make a console command to import some products into our database from a csv file and then test they are all added as expected.
Splitting a large Laravel Livewire Component
Sometimes, no matter what solution you use to build your system, there comes a point where everything tends to grow a bit big and edges towards being unmanageable. Luckily Livewire offers a solution to this problem.
