As a developer, a fair portion of your time is spent on the command line. Certain command are used religiously, so why not save a keystroke or ten? Let’s take a common unix need: updating your packages. When you update, you use something like this: sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade Wouldn’t it be […]

Digging into the trenches of responsive design can be surprisingly daunting, especially if you’re new to this kind of thing. The amount of shiny front-end build tools seem overwhelming at first, but they are ultimately here to help you. In this post, we’re looking at a shiny build tool called SASS. It’s actually not that shiny, […]

Inline SVGs are a lesser known trick for performant assets. Using them in traditional static sites is problematic due to how verbose they are. Inline SVGs can be anywhere from a few lines of code to a hundred! Not the prettiest solution. That is why it’s much better to use a component based approach. Using […]

If you develop custom WordPress themes, there’s no doubt ACF (pro) is in your toolbox. Simply put, it feels like a natural extension for developing custom themes. If you still haven’t picked up this tool, I’d recommend hopping over to their website and see what you’ve been missing. Out of the box, you get powerful […]

Cypress is an end-to-end testing framework designed to provide coverage for front-end UIs. Learning how to automate tests has its learning curve, but the benefits grow with your application’s complexity. I was tasked to test a process that involves uploading multiple types of files. In particular, application/pdf and image/* mime-type files. Doing this with Cypress […]

Have you ever needed to merge a branch but exclude certain changes that aren’t ready yet? This shouldn’t happen super often, but on bigger projects you’ll probably run into something like this. Luckily with Git, there is always a way. Even if you’re not an advanced Git user, this trick should be fairly straightforward to […]

When learning a new programming language, a calculator is a great way to flex your ability. Going the extra mile and tacking on extra features proves to be an even more valuable experience. In this article, I will show you how to implement a neat feature: the ability to multiply without an * operator.

In the last posts, we learned about layouts and partials, but Laravel provides even more functionality. You may ask: why use a component when you can just use partials? In Laravel, components are packed with additional functionality. Components give you separation of concerns, letting you outsource PHP logic to a method outside of your blade […]

In our last post, we learned about Laravel Blade and its capablities. That post only scratched the surface, blade can do so much more! In this post, we’ll dive into conditional statements and rendering. Every good templating engine has simple ways to conditionally show blocks of markup. Blade makes this very easy. If you’re used […]

Defining bash aliases has always been a neat little trick for saving time on the command line. When learning about aliases, a few ideas may immediately jump out. There are also some you may not have thought about. I hope to uncover at least one of those. In this post, I’ll list 5 of my […]