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.
Lessons learned designing the Showcase layout for Bulma Clean Theme
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.
Streamlining your code deployment
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.
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.
Latest Posts
Using prettier to format your Jekyll theme
I have been using prettier for a few years to automatically format code, especially JavaScript and TypeScript projects, as it helps standardise the output on a shared code project. I have maintained a few different Jekyll themes over the years and wanted to use the power of prettier to automatically format code consistently.
First impressions of React Native as a Web Developer
I decided to try out React Native to build a native app and see how it works. I’m an experienced web developer but have limited knowledge of apps. I helped build an app using Apache Cordova and PhoneGap many (many) years ago and also worked on another app using the ionic framework a few years later. If I’m honest I can’t really remember how they worked as it was so long ago, so it was kind of like starting fresh for me.
Querying Laravel Eloquent's Many to Many relationships
A while ago I wrote about how to use a many to many relationship in Laravel, (all the way back in April 2019). Now I want to build on this example and show how you can query many to many relationships, but also how you can add additional constraints to the query to further filter your results.
