I created Bulma Clean Theme as a theme for my own website and decided to open source it so others could use it as well. One of the key things I wanted to do was to create a theme that worked with GitHub Pages, which also means that you can also use it as a docs site for your project.
Creating a docs site with Bulma Clean Theme
Testing Laravel Validation Responses
Last week I was working on a project that used the requiredIf validation rule. No matter how many times I write tests, I always end up referring to the Laravel testing docs to make sure I use the correct assertion methods and pass in the correct arguments. This post will go through a couple of the validation testing methods I use to test validation rules and how they can be improved to help me debug issues.
What are Story Points?
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.
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.
Latest Posts
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.
The PHP array
Arrays are a useful toolt to store multiple values. You can access a specific value in an array using a key. By default, if you don’t specify keys, they will be numeric and start at zero (not one);
Run Laravel artisan commands in PHP Storm
PHP Storm has a built in terminal window which you can use to run Laravel artisan commands, but there is a quick configuration change that you can do to make it even easier to run artisan commands.
