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?
How to motivate yourself
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.
Creating my first npm package
I’ve been a web developer for over 12 years now and I use so many different npm packages every day throughout both my day job and my side projects, but I had never made my own npm package before. I decided that I wanted to see what it’s all about and how you go about creating your own package and deploying it to npm.
Lessons learned designing the Showcase layout for Bulma Clean Theme
I was thinking about what features I could add to my Jekyll theme and it occured to me that I didn’t really promote my theme very well on my own website. As my website uses Bulma Clean Theme it gave me a good opportunity to create a new feature for my theme, that I could end up using to promote my theme. A bit of a win, win situation.
Development is like a jigsaw puzzle
Last week I decided to buy a jigsaw puzzle and as I was building it, I had a thought that puzzles share a lot of the aspects of development. After all, a jigsaw puzzle does require a lot of problem solving skills.
Latest Posts
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.
