I started building an app in public: Bowsley, an app to add reseller hosting features to Laravel Forge. The idea is simple. Collect hosting fees from clients without you having to chase them. In the spirit of openness, this is the first part in a series of posts that explains the process. Coming up with… Continue reading Bowsley – building a Laravel application in public
Early stage DevOps strategy for launching your Laravel application
At the early stages of a tech startup, the amount of DevOps work required is very limited. This makes it unfeasible to get an expert to handle your server and application setup. A more likely scenario is that you, as tech lead, will need to handle this yourself. Here’s the strategy I’ve used for many… Continue reading Early stage DevOps strategy for launching your Laravel application
Why dummy data matters – and how to generate it
Part of creating a successful Staging and Test environment for your application is generating dummy data as part of your deployment process. This dummy data is used during development, the QA process and even for feature demos. Making it easy for application states to be achieved with minimal “setup” (that tends to be tedious, data-entry… Continue reading Why dummy data matters – and how to generate it
Blockchain Island and the future of Malta’s budding Blockchain industry
As of 3rd July 2018, Malta has become the first country to provide a legal framework for businesses working in the blockchain space. That and the friendly political attitude towards blockchain-based companies means that more foreign companies (like Binance) will set up shop in Malta, more local companies (like Intelliblock) will emerge and more opportunities for blockchain developers & consultants, corporate & legal services and marketing services will be there for the taking.
Writing SOAP Web Service Consumers in PHP
Recently I’ve had to interact with a number of SOAP web services, and I’ve come up with some techniques to help build good SOAP web service consumers. The two most important goals when building a SOAP consumer is for the code to be maintainable and testable. Dark Beginnings A natural first approach is to write one class that… Continue reading Writing SOAP Web Service Consumers in PHP
Copying Font Awesome Fonts with Laravel Elixir
For some reason, I always have trouble setting up Font Awesome (quickly) with Laravel & Elixir. It’s three easy steps. Pull in font-awesome with npm or yarn Import Font Awesome’s stylesheets in your app.scss file Copy Font Awesome’s font files to your public directory Configure Elixir to do this automatically for you in your gulpfile: This… Continue reading Copying Font Awesome Fonts with Laravel Elixir
The Perfect Staging Environment
I created a staging environment that I’m proud of, and I’d like to share it with you. I wanted my staging environment to accomplish two things: Always show the latest version of the project Be automatically populated with dummy data The Staging Server Accomplishing the above is easy with Forge and Laravel. The first step in… Continue reading The Perfect Staging Environment
Refactoring Advanced Eloquent Filters To Collections
Amo Chohan wrote a very good article detailing a technique he uses to clean up controllers when dealing with complex search queries in eloquent. I’m also enjoying Adam Wathan‘s latest release: Refactoring to Collections – a read guaranteed to make you smarter. Amo really nailed the functionality here – but I think the final class… Continue reading Refactoring Advanced Eloquent Filters To Collections
Stress Testing a Website with Throng
I recently needed to stress test a website to ensure that it could hold up in the real world – after some searching I stumbled upon Throng – a simple app for Mac. It allowed me to hit my website with concurrent requests for a specified period of time. You can download the 7-day trial of… Continue reading Stress Testing a Website with Throng
Creating an Embeddable Javascript Widget
One of the updates I’m working on for WhichBeach is the ability for other website owners to embed WhichBeach widgets that will display up-to-date beach data. This is very much a work in progress, but I’d like to share. I’ve never done anything like this before, so I thought I’d start by taking some inspiration from… Continue reading Creating an Embeddable Javascript Widget