How to Customise the Logo in Your Laravel Jetstream Application

Laravel Jetstream comes jam-packed with lots of great features but some people struggle to change the logo in their application. Let me show you how it can be done in 2 simple steps.

How Puny Works under the Hood: The Basics

Let me show you how some of Puny's internal codebase works and why I'm in love with it.

Deploy an AWS Lambda Function from the Terminal

Lambda's GUI is perfect for toying with your function's code, but what if you have Node dependencies or additional files you want to upload from your local machine or CI/CD? Learn how to deploy from your terminal in this article.

Execute an AWS Lambda Function from the Terminal

Sick of manually testing your Lambda functions using the AWS interface or hitting your stage URL in Postman? Learn how to invoke / execute your function from the terminal using the AWS CLI.

Learn Go by Building an Uptime Checker: Getting Started

Begin by installing Go and writing the oh so generic "Hello, World" application.

3 Simple Tailwind CSS Tips and Tricks

Here are 3 simple Tailwind CSS tips and tricks that you can start applying and using in your Tailwind based applications right now!

3 Simple Alpine.js Tips and Tricks

Here are 3 simple Alpine.js tips and tricks that you can start applying and using in your Alpine.js components right now!

5 Simple Laravel Tips and Tricks

Here are 5 simple Laravel tips and tricks that you can start applying and using in your Laravel applications right now!

Highlight Laravel Blade Templates with Highlight.php

Out of the box, Highlight.php doesn't support Laravel Blade templates. I'll show you how to register a custom syntax so that you can start highlighting your Blade content.

Setup MailHog with Laravel Valet

Testing emails can be a pain. Luckily, there are plenty of tools out there that can make the process a lot easier. Let me show you how to setup MailHog, a local development tool for testing emails.

2020: A year in review

Parsing Markdown with PHP: Autolinking and Strikethrough

Let's take a look at how you can extend the CommonMark converter to make working with links easier and allow you to strikethrough text.

Parsing Markdown with PHP: Getting Started

Markdown is a great way of making notes, writing articles and generally managing content. Let's take a look at how quickly you can begin using Markdown in your PHP applications.

Build a Remaining Character Count Component with Alpine.js

Learn how to build a remaining character counter in Alpine.js using only a few lines of code.

Unconventional Laravel: Responsable classes

Sometimes your controllers can get rather large, especially if you have lots of conditions and data formatting. Have you ever considered moving some of that complexity out into a dedicated response class?

Unconventional Laravel: Middleware-as-a-Service-Provider

Have you ever used a service provider to set a default value for a third-party library? Have you ever done this based on the current request or URL? Have you ever considered doing this inside of middleware instead?

Running GitHub Actions for Certain Commit Messages

A quick look at how you can configure your GitHub Actions workflows to only run when a certain phrase is present in the commit message.

Unconventional Laravel: Custom Pipeline Classes

Laravel makes use of the internal `Pipeline` class and it's more common in userland too, but have you ever considered tidying up these pipeline processes with custom pipeline classes?

Writing Reusable Alpine Components

Reusability is important when it comes to scaling projects and future-proofing the maintainability of a project. Let's take a look at how you can write more re-usable components in Alpine.

Accessing Helper Methods in Your Livewire Components

Helper methods can be, well, helpful. Did you know that you can actually write helper methods in your Livewire classes and use them really easily in your Blade views?

Creating Custom Magic Variables in Alpine.js

We all come across tasks that are repetitive and probably struggle to find ways of making them more re-usable in our Alpine components. Since v2.5 we can register custom magic variables that can help us out with that.

Replicating `$.slideToggle` with Tailwind CSS & Alpine.js

One of jQuery's most powerful and popular features is the `slide` helpers and lots of people would like to replicate these in Alpine, so let's take a look at how we can do just that.

Unconventional Laravel: Route groups and `$router`

When registering grouped routes using `Route::group()`, it's normal to register those nested routes using the `Route` facade, but have you ever used the `$router` variable?

Unconventional Laravel: Synchronous jobs for reusability

Code reusability is a big thing to consider when working on larger applications, but have you ever considered using synchronous jobs?

Unconventional Laravel: Auto-validating models

Join me as I go through some strange and unconventional things that you can do in your Laravel applications, starting with auto-validating Laravel models.

Add Classes to Active Link in Laravel

Adding a class to make the current page "active" in your application's navigation is a simple UI improvement. Let me show you how I typically do this in my apps.

Share Data With Your Frontend in Laravel

Sharing data with your frontend doesn't need to be difficult, let's look at a couple of way of doing it.

Manually Refreshing a Livewire Component

Livewire provides a clean API for automatically polling and refreshing a component, but what if you want to manually refresh a component?

Clearer Time Values with Carbon

How often do you see something like `2 * 24 * 60 * 60` and wonder what that value actually represents and what those magical numbers mean? Don't worry, Carbon's constants are here to help you out.

Generate an Array of Dates Using Carbon

I find myself needing to loop over an array of dates quite often for forms at work. It's surprisingly easy thanks to Carbon.

Simple Repositories in Laravel

Abstracting common queries in your Laravel applications can be done in many ways. Let's take a look at the simplest way using the "Repository pattern".

Directive precedence in Alpine

Lots of people get caught out by the fact that Alpine evaluates each directive in a particular order. Let's look at the order it uses,

Hiding elements until Alpine loads with `x-cloak`

`x-cloak` can be used to hide elements until Alpine has initialised all components and has control of them.

Maintainable Alpine Components

Writing maintainable code is an important part of any software project. Let's take a look at some ways you can make your Alpine components more maintainable.

Track Your Users Last Activity in Laravel

It's quite common to keep tabs on when an authenticated user last used your web application. The information can be really useful when calculating software adoption, usage frequency and return rate.

An Alternative Approach to Computed Properties in Alpine.js

I previously wrote about using functions as computed properties in Alpine, but what if there was a better way?

Anonymous Alpine Components

One of Alpine's main selling points is that it provides most of the reactive goodies that Vue and React do at a much lower cost. What if you don't need reactivity for your site? Well, Alpine can definitely still fit into your stack!

Pseudo Computed Properties in Alpine

One feature that I love in Vue is computed properties. You access them in the same way as normal data properties, but you can dynamically generate the value. Let's take a look at how we can do this in Alpine.

Get an Array of Unique Values in JavaScript

PHP has a function to pull the unique values out of an array, but why doesn't JavaScript?

Prevent Updating or Saving of Laravel Models

Recently I've needed to disable particular methods and mutations on my Laravel models.

What is Alpine.js?

A brief look at the new Vue-inspired JavaScript framework, with no virtual DOM.