Identity and habits

“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…

PHP assert not working in Laravel with Sail?

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…

Onboarding freelancers

Maari Casey over at uncompany had a recent LinkedIn post about planning for freelancers. She made some good points, but I think skipped one, and it’s not just relevant for freelancers. Even well before an organization might need extra work – be it freelance or employee – companies need to have a plan for onboarding….

Bad I9 PDF form

Have been needing to programmatically fill out an I9 PDF, retrieved from gov site. Should be fairly straightforward, right? Well… the field names are… a mess. Field names like topmostSubform[0].Page1[0].U\.S\._Social_Security_Number__Last_4_numbers_[0]topmostSubform[0].Page1[0].expiration_date__if_applicable__mm_dd_yyyy[0] topmostSubform[0].Page2[0].Employers_Business_or_Organization_Address_Street_Number_and_Name[0] and so on make it pretty… not straightforward to create a usable key/value combination to search and replace. But… today, I noticed it got…