Beginners guide to testing your Laravel application
Last night I presented my talk on getting started with testing in Laravel at the Developer User Group in Cape Town. These are the slides for this talk.
View ArticleThings I’ve been working on lately – part 1
Managesite scripts Over the course of the past 4 years I’ve experimented with a bunch of different local development environments for my freelance client work. I started with Scotch Box, transitioned...
View ArticleAn experiment in dark vs light themes
It all started, effectively 2 years ago, with this tweet. I’m not sure when I started following Brent on Twitter, but he posts interesting stuff about Laravel and PHP, and I’ve learned a bunch from his...
View ArticleShow me your WFH set up
Since we’re all currently in the middle of probably the biggest global crisis since World War 2, many folks in my social timeline are posting/sharing their work from home (WFH) pictures. Whenever I...
View ArticleNobody likes you when you’re 43
When I met my wife in 2000, I had just turned 23. The previous year, Blink182 had released “What’s my age again?”, and she took great delight playing it for me. Today, I turn 43, meaning it has been 20...
View ArticleSubmitting a patch to WordPress core, using Git
I initially encountered version control in my 4th year of programming, when the lead developer of the company I worked at had implemented Subversion as a code backup solution on our local testing...
View ArticleASUS Zenbook 15 UX533FD review – an Ubuntu friendly developer laptop
I’ve always been a fan of Dell laptops. While often a little more pricey than their counterparts, their laptops are usually well built, typically run Ubuntu without any hassles, and Dell have great...
View ArticleTaking on new (old) challenges
Life is a funny old thing. When I left working for an employer back at the end of 2015, I never dreamed I would, in the short space of 5 years time, come back to being employed full time again. Back in...
View ArticleBuilding A New AMD Powered Workstation
If there’s one hobby that I have that I don’t get to spend much time on, it’s building/upgrading PCs. A few years ago I upgraded my 10-year-old workstation/gaming PC, to something a bit more modern. At...
View ArticleOBS Studio 26.1.0 for Linux – Now with Virtual Camera Support.
Some time ago I discovered OBS Studio as a solution for recording internal screencasts for tutorials and workshop videos. As a Linux user, I was pleased to find that it was both open-source, and...
View ArticleSetting Up a Matrix Server on Ubuntu 20.04 – Part 1
For about the past six months or so, I’ve been interested in the open, decentralized communications standard called Matrix. In May of this year, it was announced on TechCrunch that Automattic had...
View ArticleSetting Up a Matrix Server on Ubuntu 20.04 – Part 2
In part 1 of this tutorial, I dived into my reasons for setting up a Matrix Synapse homeserver, and how to set up the basics of the server and it’s required software. In part 2, I’m going to register...
View ArticleDisable the Touch pad on an Ubuntu Laptop When an External Mouse Is Connected.
Featured image by John Petalcurin from Pexels One of my pet peeves when working on a laptop is the position of the touch pad, relevant to my right hand position. Probably due to my large hands, and the...
View ArticlePersonal Goals for 2021
I’ve never really been the type of person who writes “year in review” posts. Mostly this is because I don’t have any ventures that would be interesting to report yearly results on. What I have done in...
View ArticleProfessional Goals for 2021
Yesterday I posted my personal goals for 2021. During the course of drafting that post, I realised I had some goals that were very specifically relevant to my career as a software developer, and...
View ArticleKicking 2021 into High Gear with an Electronic Standing Desk
I’ve been interested in using a standing desk for about 3 years now. Soon after I moved into my own office space, one of the first things I did was purchase a decent ergonomic chair, and then a...
View ArticleZero-configuration debugging PHP with Xdebug in PHPStorm on Ubuntu
As with many of my blog posts, this one also started with a Tweet I’ve been using Xdebug on Ubuntu in PHPStorm for going on 4 years now, and as I’ve been actively blogging about my development set up,...
View ArticleWhy I (still) love PHPMyAdmin
Sometime in 2019, I was sitting at a conference, when we could still do such things, listening to the first speaker of the day, while getting some Castos support work wrapped up. Someone behind me...
View ArticleMy freeCodeCamp Article on PHP Error Reporting
Earlier this year I shared my professional goals for 2021. One of those goals was that I wanted to seek out more writing opportunities for other online publications. While the crux of that goal was to...
View ArticleHow Taking the 16 Personalities Test Helped Me Understand Myself Better
For the past three years, I have been having some serious thoughts about my future as a software developer. Since I turned 40 in 2017, I’ve been wondering if the path I was on was the right one for me....
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