Author Archives: Rich

Papercrafting for sewists

…or sew-ers—oh, you know, people who sew. How about stamps that make it look as though you ran your scrapbook layout (or card, or wall art) through your sewing machine (actually, you could do that, too, but you don’t have to)? Or how about dies for cutting shapes that give you “stitched” ovals, hearts, and circles? And then […]

Collections: One API to rule them all

A version of the Laravel Collections library has been released for JavaScript.  This dependency-free library for working with arrays and objects has (almost) the same API as the similarly named library in Laravel 5.6, meaning that we can apply the same knowledge/techniques when working in Laravel or Javascript. The “(almost)” above refers to the fact that […]

Static Analysis for PHP

Static Analyzers for PHP were the topic of Episode 73 of the PHP Roundtable podcast (June 12, 2018), with a panel of folks who have been building these code-checking, bug-finding tools.  The basic idea is that these tools bring the analysis techniques usually found in strong typed languages and compilers to PHP. A static analyzer is a program […]

Cape Breton Island

In 2013, we rented a small apartment on Cape Breton Island circled the island to see how people lived way out in the Atlantic.  We kayaked, saw puffins (though we were there late in the season) and eagles.  We went out and listened to local music, and had a fisherman take us out off the […]

React in Laravel in Lando

React is one of the most popular Javascript frameworks, and is currently being integrated into the Drupal core and contrib modules, and is a central part of the forthcoming WordPress Gutenberg editing system, and widely used in other PHP applications including Laravel. One of the biggest barriers to getting started with React is the necessary […]

May 2018 Podcast Log

Here are a few of the podcasts I’ve been listening to whilst walking the dog or commuting to work this month: The React Podcast #4 (March 29):  Babel and open source sustainability with Henry Zhu.  Henry, the maintainer of Babel, talks about how he got involved and shares some of the history of Babel and Javascript language development. […]

PHP Formatter Trial

I gave the new (alpha release) PHP formatter in the Prettier suite a try: https://prettier.io/blog/2018/04/09/plugin-php-0.1.html Prettier is a popular package for Javascript and other languages, and it has a package to integrate with Sublime Text.  To get started, I installed the package globally: npm install –globally prettier/prettier prettier/plugin-php and tried it on some of our […]

Coding Standards

TL;DR: For PHP, I suggest we write code in the style of PSR-1, PSR-2 and PSR-12.  It’s worth reviewing the standards every year. Let’s get boring: coding standards. There, I’ve said it.   If you haven’t clicked away to Twitter or Instagram check Remedy tickets already, let me try to hook you with a reminder of a couple […]