• Trusting code

    You kinda have a relationship with code from your projects. You probably have feelings about it. As I've been thinking about code style, I've also been thinking about how it's important to build up trust in a code base.

  • Laravel: Going back() after form validation errors

    I’m SURE I must have done this before. Like…so many times. But this felt new today and is definitely worth remembering. When you’re using forms in Laravel, you sometimes want a “cancel” or “back” button or link that takes you to where you were before. And Laravel provides a handy url() helper that gets a […]

  • GIVE ME MY STATIC ANALYSIS!

    In which I lament my own utter incompetence, but also switch back from VS Code to PHPStorm in a flash and cry quietly over programming languages.

  • Getting to grips with Laravel’s service container

    I finally feel like I’m getting to grips with Laravel’s service container. I’ve understood HOW it works and WHAT is does for a while, but it’s taken a simple, real-world example to pull it all together and make it all “stick”. Disclaimer: I may still have all this wrong, in which case correct me in […]

  • Re-learning to learn to code (and discovering JavaScript’s foibles!)

    I don’t know JS So I’ve kinda got stuck in to learning JavaScript. I’ve previously said that I think JavaScript is like the assembler of the web: coding in vanilla JS isn’t really something you should do because it’s too easy to get things wrong, so you should have a layer of abstraction on top. […]

  • The Treachery of Code

    I think we should teach people to write code that's meaningful and understandable. It's my opinion that neither JavaScript nor CodeAcademy's new app are good tools for doing that.

  • You’ve got Mail

    In similar vein to the last pic, this one shows code. But it’s specific code. This is an email header: the writing on the envelope, the stamp, the ‘return to sender’, that gets you message from sender to recipient. I’ve been working a lot with emails in the last couple of days, trying to find […]

  • Code is Beautiful

    I’m seeing a lot of this these days. I’ve seen plenty of attempts at photographing code and I do find something beautiful in it. Not always symmetry, but patterns emerge and individual characters blend together into broader ‘brush strokes’ that appear. But it’s not just static either: this is the engine room of that increasingly […]