I’ve been posting more about this new service over on linkedin, but haven’t posted much here. CyclopsMonitor is a web monitoring service – checking if a web address is up, how fast it responds, if specific content is available, when SSL/TLS certs expire, when domain name expires, and… sending you notifications when problems occur. Currently,…

I’ve been testing out the Jetbrains AI service the past few months. Used Copilot for a while in 2023, then Codeium for about a year, and am now trying Jetbrains. I can’t say I notice much of a difference for most of the standard code I deal with, but I did recently start using Jetbrains…

Inspired by the AUTM conference, I got inspired to look at some of the common processes techtransfer folks do. Main idea was to try to develop something relatively ‘standalone’ that might address a use case I learned about, so I decided on building a web-based open source techfinder tool to publish licensable technologies. The notion…

Two Laravel packages I use often are packages to impersonate a user and packages to log activity (including model changes). Both are useful, but there’s typically one piece missing. Activity log packages will log *who* initiated a change, but not who the person may have been impersonated by. If I log in as me, then…

I’ve scoured many of the top results for “Laravel performance” in google, bing, duck duck go, etc… and am flummoxed that one of the key things to help boost Laravel performance is almost never mentioned. Specifically, I’m talking about the toBase() method in the query builder. The toBase() method will instruct the query builder to…

“Your present identity should not constrain your future habits”. For this quote from the audio book “Hello, Habits“. Obviously the book is about ‘habits’, but the phrase could easily have been “Your present identity should not constrain your future self”. In either reading of this, it’s been stuck in my head for while now.  How…

I’ve been (re)working on a tool I’d built… way too long ago now. AppliedTo was a tool I’d built to help manage and track outreach efforts for freelance/contract work, but it probably would find more use for folks tracking full-time job applications. Revisiting some of the earlier decisions, I realize I focused a bit too…

The idea of a deployment per branch is not a new one, but often more difficult to set up than it might first appear. There are multiple approaches to take, many dependent on your final target setup. I recently came across a project targeting Laravel Forge, building on their SDK to provide an automated deployment…

Recently, I hit a weird ‘bug’. The $file was not being created, so I’d added a quick ‘assert’ in the code, and… file_exists($file) was indeed false (checked when stepping through debugger), but assert was not stopping/failing. But… running a simple assert from command line was working. This was something different only when running under the…

I’ve been using github copilot on and off in 2023 (more on than off the last few months), but just recently learned about https://codeium.com. Couple of points in their favor: 1. They exclude non-permissive licensed code from their training models (no gpl, etc)2. There’s a “chat” interface to ask for explanations of code. I’m not…