Walking before running

Background Years ago, I was brought in as a consultant to a company that had recently developed and deployed a ‘version 2′ of their core internal software, then had the entire development team leave (well, one person remained behind). Smallish business of maybe 50 or so folks, but no development team to support and grow…

Laravel down migrations

I get an email newsletter from Martin Joo every week or so. The newsletters generally have some useful tips around the Laravel framework or sometimes just general development tips. I’ve learned a couple of neat tricks here and there, and will continue to receive. This morning I received an email with a Laravel ‘tip’ regarding…

Four Thousand Weeks

I’m starting to read “Four Thousand Weeks” from Oliver Burkeman. I initially listened to much of the audio book, then bought a copy (link above to Amazon – no affiliate link). Have not finished yet, but the core message of the book seems to be There’s certainly more to it than this, and again, I’m…

Speed improvement story 1

I’ve accumulated a number of tech stories from various projects over the years. I thought I’d write some down and share. This first one… I’ve told the highlight portion during interviews years ago, and it probably comes across as either total BS, or me seemingly not knowing what I’m talking about, or what not, but…

laravel bulk imports

Small note, mostly for myself, as a reminder that when doing large imports of data, you may not need each block to be processed as an Eloquent model. That code above would generally be faster as Obviously there are even faster ways – preparing your data in some text format, and using your DB cli…

k as in knife

Many moons ago my earlier version of my blog had this list I use when spelling things for people over the phone. I managed to find it at archive.org and thought I’d repost… a as in aisle (or aye) b as in bdellium  c as in czar d as in djibouti e as in eight…