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.
Introducing some new layouts to Bulma Clean Theme
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.
Using the unique validation rule in a Laravel Form Request
Sometimes you want to ensure that a field is unique in the database so that someone can’t add the same item twice, such as the title for a post. Laravel provides a couple of handy tools for this, including the Unique validation rule, but there is a bit more configuration required to other validation rules to make the most of its abilities.
Why build a package?
In my day to day job I make use of a lot of packages. This got me thinking it would be good to create a package of my own, so I have decided to build a Laravel package. It’s got a long way to go yet before it’s ready, but I thought I would write down my thoughts about the benefits of building a package while it is still fresh in my mind.
Getting your project seen
Developers love building things and sometimes we want to share these things with other developers to help make their life easier. Creating you project and putting it on GitHub can seem like the difficult part, but letting people know its there and getting them to use it can be even harder.
Rethinking your commute
Like many people, I work in a city, but I live outside the city, meaning I have to commute to work each day. My normal commute takes me over an hour to commute just over 20 miles. That’s pretty shocking when you think of it. My average speed is less than 20 miles per hour. I enjoy my job but, like most people, I really don’t enjoy the commute to and from work.
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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.
