Blog

I have been tasked with building a new website using WordPress. The last time I used WordPress was a few years ago and involved using Advanced Custom Fields to build custom pages and layouts. Things have changed a lot over the years and now there is the built in Gutenberg editor, which uses blocks to create a custom layout and add content. The trouble was, there didn’t seem to be great support in Visual Studio Code for the blocks, as they use HTML comments.

Last year I wrote a post about testing Laravel Livewire validation rules with PHP Unit. This post uses the same techniques as that post, but shows how to transfer it to Pest instead of PHP Unit.

Recently I had to write some tests for a piece of JavaScript code that used window.location. This left me trying to figure out how to mock the window.location so that I could pass in dummy data and ensure that the data I got back was what was expected. Here was how I managed to solve the issue.

Next.js offers a feature called Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR) that allows you to generate a static page when the page is first visited, rather than generating a static copy at build time. This is a really handy feature as it allows you to reduce your build time, but still benefit from having a cache of a page generated so future visitors will have a faster response time.

Recently I wanted to write a test for a React component that uses axios to retrieve information from an API. To do this I had to mock jest, but I ran into some issues with the types as I was using typescript. This article explains how I managed to get it to work.

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.