Wake up your RDS Aurora Serverless before running your migrations

When you're using an RDS Aurora Serverless DB instance with Laravel Vapor, you have the option to scale it down to zero capacity units when it's been idle. This is great for development environments -- it only takes a few seconds to come back up, and while it's hibernating, you're saving loads of money. One … Continue reading Wake up your RDS Aurora Serverless before running your migrations →

Bootstrap vs. Tailwind

People occasionally get into slap-fights over the tried-and-true Bootstrap vs. newer CSS frameworks like Tailwind. I've worked with both -- and each one has a place in the toolkit. Maybe not your individual toolkit, depending on what your job requires, but at $UNIVERSITY there was a place for both. https://twitter.com/ianlandsman/status/1309476045960228871 SUNDAY, SUNDAY, SUNDAY... Do I … Continue reading Bootstrap vs. Tailwind →

The UI Trap in Microsoft Teams

I have moved orgs and no longer live in Microsoft's Slack competitor, Teams. So before I forget the frustration, I wanted to write up the severe, crippling flaw in Teams' UI. Here's a screenshot. Note the leftmost sidebar: a "chat" tab, and then a separate "teams" tab: Ignore the un-compacted chat layout. After a few … Continue reading The UI Trap in Microsoft Teams →

On the Language of Job Posts

One of the articles in this week's Diversify Tech newsletter was interesting: Not Applicable: What Your Job Post is Really Saying. The whole post is great, and you should read it. Here's what really struck me: I recently had the opportunity to participate in the recruiting process for early- and mid-career developers at my company. … Continue reading On the Language of Job Posts →

Adding stubs to your Laravel project

The project that I am currently working on is primarily not using Eloquent -- instead, I'm using a JSON:API item class from a package, spiced up with some additional code I've mixed in. I'm making lots of these models, so I did a quick source-dive into the framework to figure out how the make:something commands … Continue reading Adding stubs to your Laravel project →

Starting a new Laravel app

I've started working on a new Laravel app. That isn't uncommon, but it is a good opportunity for some blogging! I wanted to do more restaurant reviews -- but the world has other ideas -- so here's some thoughts on how I'm setting the new app up instead. Oracle The database is unusual for this … Continue reading Starting a new Laravel app →

Why Laravel Vapor was Right for Me

I've been watching Jack Ellis talk about his upcoming Vapor course over the last week. I've seen a lot of folks curious if Vapor/AWS was worth the money and if it was right for them. We had a use case for Vapor and adopted it at the office as soon as they started selling it. It was … Continue reading Why Laravel Vapor was Right for Me →

Extracting Jenkins Credentials for Use in Another Place

I support a bunch of Jenkins servers for CI/CD. One of the things we wanted to do was stuff all our credentials into Jenkins so devs could manage them there instead of giving them rights in the AWS console to set secrets in SSM parameter store. On its face, this might sound kinda crazy: the … Continue reading Extracting Jenkins Credentials for Use in Another Place →

Using Amazon SES with Laravel Vapor

If you are deploying your Laravel apps with Vapor, you might want to use Amazon SES as your mail driver. There are two set-up steps for SES itself: Set your domain up with appropriate SPF/DKIM/DMARC records so Amazon & email recipients know everything is on the up-and-upAsk Amazon to take your AWS account out of the SES sandbox (aka email jail) The … Continue reading Using Amazon SES with Laravel Vapor →