GitHub offers a dependabot service that can let you know of any potential security issues with your dependencies and automatically create a Pull Request for you. This works great without any configuration if you have a repo that contains npm, composer or gem dependencies, but you may need additional configuration if your lock files aren’t in the root directory, or in separate directories in the case of a monorepo.
Using GitHub Dependabot with a Monorepo
What should I test?
You might often hear developers say that you should write tests. Great, let’s go! But what should you test and where do you start? I don’t know all the answers, but here are some tips for getting started.
Creating multi-worksheet Excel files with Simple Excel
Recently I had to create a large data export for a project. I like using Spatie’s Simple Excel package to do this as it is very simple to use and works well when exporting large amounts of data to a CSV or Excel file with the ability to stream a download to the browser. This particular project had an additional requirement though, exporting multiple worksheet’s of data at once. Luckily, this package allows you to do this too.
The PHP foreach loop
An alternative to the for loop, the foreach loop is used to iterate or loop over an array. The foreach loop allows you to loop through the items in the array without setting a limit for it to stop like you do in a for loop.
The PHP for loop
If you have something you want to repeat then consider using a PHP for loop, saving you from copying and pasting the same code multiple times. Adding the code into a loop means you only have to write it once, and you also only have to maintain the code in one place in future.
Refactoring to Laravel 8 Class Model Factories
Laravel 8 introduced new class based model factories and if you have an existing project you can use the legacy factories package to keep using the old factories. I have tended to keep the factories as they were and continue development, but after working on a fresh Laravel 8 project and using the new class based syntax I decided to go back and update the factories in the older Laravel apps. This article explains how I went about refactoring the factories to classes.
Latest Posts
Using prettier to format your Jekyll theme
I have been using prettier for a few years to automatically format code, especially JavaScript and TypeScript projects, as it helps standardise the output on a shared code project. I have maintained a few different Jekyll themes over the years and wanted to use the power of prettier to automatically format code consistently.
First impressions of React Native as a Web Developer
I decided to try out React Native to build a native app and see how it works. I’m an experienced web developer but have limited knowledge of apps. I helped build an app using Apache Cordova and PhoneGap many (many) years ago and also worked on another app using the ionic framework a few years later. If I’m honest I can’t really remember how they worked as it was so long ago, so it was kind of like starting fresh for me.
Querying Laravel Eloquent's Many to Many relationships
A while ago I wrote about how to use a many to many relationship in Laravel, (all the way back in April 2019). Now I want to build on this example and show how you can query many to many relationships, but also how you can add additional constraints to the query to further filter your results.
