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.
What are Story Points?
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.
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.
Latest Posts
Building a VS Code Extension for Gutenberg blocks
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.
Using Pest to test Laravel Livewire validation rules
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.
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.
