One of the scariest things as a developer is pushing new code live, hoping it all works as expected and remembering to do all the deployment steps and in the correct order too! But luckily there are some steps you can take to make it easier, which will probably have an unexpected side effect of allowing you to push your code more often.
Streamlining your code deployment
Creating a simple report in Laravel
Recently I was tasked with creating a report in a Laravel project and I thought I would share some of the things I learned along the way. I’m going to use a shop as an example with an orders table that contains the orders, but these principles should apply to pretty much any report. Firstly I want to get the number of orders for the previous week and then I want to get a count of orders by week and year so I can put this data into a report.
Introducing Mere Blog Theme
A few weeks ago I was reading an article about how everyone should write a blog. Writing can help you demonstrate your knowledge, but also help out others that are trying to learn the same thing. I write a blog on my own website, which was built with Bulma Clean Theme (a Jekyll website theme built with Bulma), but it’s a bit much if you just wanted to create a blog. So I decided to get my notepad out and start sketching some blog theme ideas.
Creating your first Laravel package
I’ve always been interested in making a package for Laravel so I thought I would make a simple example package and share what I had learnt from the process. The package is very simple and just contains some extra collection methods, so I decided to call it extra-collect.
Introducing some new layouts to Bulma Clean Theme
I’ve been meaning to write about some of the new features I have been rolling out to my Jekyll theme, Bulma Clean Theme, for a while but I have only just managed to push the update for the landing page layout last weekend. This article provides some of the thinking behind the updates, as well as a brief introduction to how to get started.
Getting started with Laravel factories
If you want to start writing some tests for your Laravel project then chances are you will need to write some factories at some point. When I first heard the term factory I had no idea what it meant and what it did, let alone the benefits they can bring to your tests.
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.
