We use cookies on this site to enhance your user experience

By clicking the Accept button, you agree to us doing so. More info on our cookie policy

Blog

Creating my first npm package
Creating my first npm package

I’ve been a web developer for over 12 years now and I use so many different npm packages every day throughout both my day job and my side projects, but I had never made my own npm package before. I decided that I wanted to see what it’s all about and how you go about creating your own package and deploying it to npm.

Lessons learned designing the Showcase layout for Bulma Clean Theme
Lessons learned designing the Showcase layout for Bulma Clean Theme

I was thinking about what features I could add to my Jekyll theme and it occured to me that I didn’t really promote my theme very well on my own website. As my website uses Bulma Clean Theme it gave me a good opportunity to create a new feature for my theme, that I could end up using to promote my theme. A bit of a win, win situation.

Development is like a jigsaw puzzle
Development is like a jigsaw puzzle

Last week I decided to buy a jigsaw puzzle and as I was building it, I had a thought that puzzles share a lot of the aspects of development. After all, a jigsaw puzzle does require a lot of problem solving skills.

Streamlining your code deployment
Streamlining your code deployment

One of the scariest things as a developer is pushing new code live, hoping it all works as expected and remembering to do all the deployment steps and in the correct order too! But luckily there are some steps you can take to make it easier, which will probably have an unexpected side effect of allowing you to push your code more often.

Creating a simple report in Laravel
Creating a simple report in Laravel

Recently I was tasked with creating a report in a Laravel project and I thought I would share some of the things I learned along the way. I’m going to use a shop as an example with an orders table that contains the orders, but these principles should apply to pretty much any report. Firstly I want to get the number of orders for the previous week and then I want to get a count of orders by week and year so I can put this data into a report.

Introducing Mere Blog Theme
Introducing Mere Blog Theme

A few weeks ago I was reading an article about how everyone should write a blog. Writing can help you demonstrate your knowledge, but also help out others that are trying to learn the same thing. I write a blog on my own website, which was built with Bulma Clean Theme (a Jekyll website theme built with Bulma), but it’s a bit much if you just wanted to create a blog. So I decided to get my notepad out and start sketching some blog theme ideas.

Latest Posts

Hosting a Laravel app with AWS Beanstalk
Hosting a Laravel app with AWS Beanstalk

There are lots of possible hosting solutions available for Laravel, from Forge, to Vapor to the new Laravel Cloud. I’ll start out by saying that these other solutions are much easier to get up and running than beanstalk, but I thought I’d share some of the “fun” I had getting it up and running.

Testing window.open() in JavaScript with Jest
Testing window.open() in JavaScript with Jest

I recently had to write a test for a React component that opened a new browser window. To open the new window I made use of window.open() in my code. This made the component easy to write, but I had to think a bit differently about how to write the test for this.

Why did I become a writer?
Why did I become a writer?

There has been a lot of discussion on Threads recently about becoming a writer, but don’t give up your day job. I have seen a lot of arguments from all sides, some people saying they became a successful full time writer, others saying they would never give up their job, then there are others who became writers full time then went back to another job. Writing has always been a hobby for me, but this discussion has made me think more about why I write.

How NOT to make a website

How NOT to make a Website

By C.S. Rhymes

From £1.99 or read for free on Kindle Unlimited!

Nigel's Intranet Adventure

Nigel's Intranet Adventure

By C.S. Rhymes

From £1.99 or read for free on Kindle Unlimited!