Category: Uncategorized

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

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

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

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

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

I often find myself in the situation where a design calls for form inputs to transform the user’s text. It’s pretty easy to do nowadays: This is what it looks like: But – I’ve always found these types of interactions frustrating whenever I come across them. The expectation of the user is jarred when the… Continue reading Applying Text Transform to Form Inputs

I wrote an article about how learning the language of the business should effect your code over at BRND WGN. One way to alleviate the problem with ‘naming’ in programming is to write code using the jargon of your client’s business. With every new skill, comes a new bundle of terms that separate the complete… Continue reading Learning the Language