Blog

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?