The more time you spend reading the Laravel docs, the more things you will find that will save you time and effort. I have been using Laravel for many years but this week I discovered I had been using the many to many relationship in a sub optimal way, and by that I mean I avoided it at all costs.

How long will something take to do? Who knows? Sometimes you just need to make just a tiny little quick change, but it doesn’t work out quite as expected and you have to go back and keep making small change after small change, then before you know it, it’s lunch time.

It seems it’s impossible to make a website these days without using some kind of package manager, whether its npm for your frontend dependencies or something like composer for your php dependencies. If you need to do something a bit tricky then, chances are, someone else had the same problem and created a package to solve that problem so you can just add it to your dependencies, install it and away you go. But does this mean web development is just copying and pasting other people’s work into your website?

Making a project, library or package sometimes seems like the hard part, but if you want someone else to use it you probably want to spend a decent amount of time on the documentation to help others get started using your package. People won’t know how to use a feature if you don’t even take the time to write about it as they won’t even know it is there.

I have made a theme for Jekyll which is based on the Bulma frontend framework. It might look familiar, because I am also using it for this site. If you like the look of this theme then I thought I would write a little blog post about how to use it for your own site and how you can use it with GitHub Pages.