For years now, SASS has given CSS the functionalities that native CSS wish it could. These includes variables, selector nesting, mixins, extends, and much more. One simple but very powerful thing SASS gives you is the ability to outsource a similar set of style rules into a reusable “function”. This lets you centralize style logic […]

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 […]

We’ve all been there. We don’t want to do it, we don’t think we need to do it, but it’s necessary. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer (11) is a necessary evil for most business requirements. Certain businesses even require earlier versions than that. *shudder* Fair warning, this article is only keeping the most recent version(11) in mind. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 the last post, we saw how easy it is to conditionally display markup and use inline logic in blade templates. Conditionals are a very useful tool and you will probably use them often. In this post, we will explore how to reduce repetitive code and help adhere to DRY(don’t repeat yourself) principals. What’s one […]

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 […]

Every here and there, you may come across a use case where it’s necessary to reduce a video file by 50-80% without any noticeable loss of quality. Often times it’s for front-end performance reasons, but can also come in handy if a server has an upload limit(50MB on a typical WordPress site for example). There […]

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, […]