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 been. Professionally The biggest…
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…
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 Valet which is…
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 a…
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…
On the 23rd March 2016 at 10:31pm my life changed. I had spent months pre-empting what it would be like to become a father. What would the experience of labour be like? How would we handle looking after a child 24/7? How would I feel when I first saw my child? As anyone who is already a parent…
As Xdebug has been removed from the default Homestead box you now need to install it manually to be able to use it. Once you have vagrant ssh-ed to your Homestead VM the first thing you need to do it download the latest compatible version of Xdebug (2.4.0RC3 at the time of writing) and build it: cd…
For pretty much five years running now I’ve taken time at the end of the year to reflect on the year that’s been, and look ahead to the year that’s to come. Last year I wanted to continue to work smarter, not harder and strike a better balance of “busyness” in my life. While I’m not…
