Blog index

Someone near and dear to me recently opened a business (let's call it Generic Company) that runs entirely offline and is pretty low-tech. The owner does not need or want an online presence. It so...

If you've read my 2022 Programming Stack article, then it shouldn't be much of a surprise to hear that it hasn't changed much for 2023, with one notable exception: I've replaced Electron with Tauri....

A list of Laravel and PHP packages I absolutely need in every project, continuously updated. This list is relatively short because I follow the principle "avoid packages until it hurts". I use...

In 2019, I started the "tradition" of reflecting on the past year, mainly from a developer & geek point of view. I think it's a useful tool for summarizing how I've grown as a developer, and what...

Tauri is an exciting alternative to Electron for building cross-platform desktop applications. While not as mature as Electron and still missing some features, it offers a fresh approach via its...

I talked before about BankAlt.com, the first side-project with dynamic PHP/MySQL functionality I ever shipped. In that article I expressed my desire to resurrect the legacy PHP 5.X project and make...

My recent tweet on refactoring Laravel Eloquent query conditions to a trait proved popular so here it is with a little more context, in permanent form. My biggest side-project at the moment...

Electron uses the Chromium engine for rendering. This is the same engine that powers the Chrome browser. Sometimes you might run into a situation where a certain JavaScript or CSS feature that your...

I've been working and experimenting a lot lately with Carbon, the sublime PHP date and time utility library. I've tweeted a lot of Carbon tips and decided to collect all these tips into a permanent...

Following up on my previous article on grouping data using MySQL Common Table Expressions, I am offering an implementation of the same technique in Laravel. Note This requires MySQL v8.0+....