#dev

As part of an effort to stop relying on a couple big platforms for Everything I do on the web, I’ve been returning to some tools from the era Before.

In my Laravel app, I wrote an abstract class that has a fair bit of stand-alone behaviour. I wanted to test this directly instead of via the implementations...

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 downside is that your migrations may fail during deployments. When Vapor goes to run the php artisan migrate command, RDS often won’t wake up before Laravel’s DB connection attempt times out...

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.

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.

One of the articles in this week’s Diversify Tech newsletter was interesting: Not Applicable: What Your Job Post is Really Saying.

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’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.

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 the right thing for a subset of our apps. I wanted to document my use-case and the rationale behind it being right for us so I can share it with the curious folk.

Jenkins doesn't make it easy to pull secrets out of its credential store for moving to other servers. Here's a script to do it.