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If you’ve not already read it yet, you should read Adam Wathan’s article on how he reached the conclusion that using utility classes was the best way to build consistent components in CSS. As I read the article I followed his conclusions and agreed with his justifications. It sounded like a very reasonable solution. However,…

This one caught me out yesterday. If you use a variable in a PHP closure and try and modify it inside the closure, you will find that the variable outside the closure is not modified. You must pass the variable by reference for it to work. Turns out that when ‘importing’ variables to a closure’s…

Yesterday I announced the release of my Christmas side project Splashify. At Christmas time I like to build a side project that helps me to learn something new and push me to do something out of my comfort zone. A few years ago I built an iOS game and released it on the app store.…

As has been my tradition for the last six years now, I like to spend a bit of time on the last day of the year to reflect, consider the year that has been and the year that is to come, and note down some of these reflections for posterity. What a year 2016 has…

Last week I sold my first business. It’s not the first project I’ve sold, but it’s by far the biggest and was my main source of business income for five years. Disclaimer: Yes I sold an internet business and no I am not a millionaire (not even close). It’s amazing to think just how far…

Recently when customizing the invoice email template for Laravel Spark I noticed that it didn’t have any styles applied (raw HTML emails are a bit 1999). Given how good the new Mail Notifications look in Laravel 5.3 I figured it would make sense to convert the existing invoice email template to the new Mail Notifications.…

Recently I came across the situation where I needed to run the PHPUnit tests for the project I was working on in PHP 5.6 as they were failing in Travis. The project was a Laravel project and so was running in a Homestead box using PHP 7. For development of other sites I use Laravel…

Laravel Homestead is an awesome tool for building Laravel sites. However, sometimes it would be nice if when you did a vagrant destory you wouldn’t lose all of the information in your databases. Or in my case, if you database crashes and you can’t get it back up, it would be great if you had…

Here is a quick tip: Have you ever been debugging code in a loop and only wanted to trigger a breakpoint if a specific condition is met? In PhpStorm it’s actually very simple. Right click on the breakpoint and add a “Condition”.

Back in May this year I launched a new side project called Web Uptime. Web Uptime provides multi-location website uptime monitoring for your sites. I’m not going to talk so much about what Web Uptime does here, you can see the marketing site to find out more, rather I’m going to talk about how and…