Recently I have been working on a project retrieving some data from an API in a Laravel project. I was using Laravel to retrieve and display data from a Moodle installation and started using the HTTP Client in Laravel 7 and wondered if I could convert the retrieved data from an array into a more predictable object. I asked my colleagues and one of them recommended I take a look at the Spatie package called data transfer object.
Using the HTTP Client and Data Transfer Objects in Laravel 7
How NOT to make a Website featured in net magazine
I have some exciting news to share! My book, ‘How NOT to make a Website’, was featured in the June 2020 edition of net magazine as the Side Project of the Month.
Creating a docs site with Bulma Clean Theme
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.
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?
Latest Posts
Mocking window.location in Jest
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.
Considerations for Incremental Static Regeneration in Next.js
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.
Mocking axios in Jest tests with Typescript
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.
