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…

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….

Just worked through a small problem with a friend who had sporadic issues with the wordpress “redis object cache” plugin. “socket read errors” were not uncommon, and sometimes “script already running” messages from redis itself. I didn’t quickly get a handle on what the plugin is trying to cache, or how, but my sense is…

Talking with a friend today, I was reminded of an idea I shelved (temporarily) several years ago. The tech recruiting world is going through a bit of a shakeup; tens of thousands of layoffs just a year or two after years of a hiring binge in the industry. Large tech companies have traditionally had the…