How long will something take to do? Who knows? Sometimes you just need to make just a tiny little quick change, but it doesn’t work out quite as expected and you have to go back and keep making small change after small change, then before you know it, it’s lunch time.
Managing Expectations
Is web development just copying and pasting?
It seems it’s impossible to make a website these days without using some kind of package manager, whether its npm for your frontend dependencies or something like composer for your php dependencies. If you need to do something a bit tricky then, chances are, someone else had the same problem and created a package to solve that problem so you can just add it to your dependencies, install it and away you go. But does this mean web development is just copying and pasting other people’s work into your website?
Where is the best place to put your project documentation?
Making a project, library or package sometimes seems like the hard part, but if you want someone else to use it you probably want to spend a decent amount of time on the documentation to help others get started using your package. People won’t know how to use a feature if you don’t even take the time to write about it as they won’t even know it is there.
Getting started with Bulma Clean Theme for Jekyll
I have made a theme for Jekyll which is based on the Bulma frontend framework. It might look familiar, because I am also using it for this site. If you like the look of this theme then I thought I would write a little blog post about how to use it for your own site and how you can use it with GitHub Pages.
Why use a static site generator
There are many ways to make a website and many different CMS platforms you can use, such as WordPress and Joomla, as well as site builder tools that offer you drag and drop interfaces, but what about static site generators?
Why do I always use Laravel?
I often get asked why I use Laravel for a lot of projects. I get comments such as its too big for this project, its overkill, you can write something better yourself that’s simpler and easier to use.
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.
