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New book announcement!
Announcing the new book, The Little-Astwick Mysteries - Trouble at the church, by C.S. Rhymes. It is now available for pre-order on the Amazon Kindle store for £2.99, with the release date of the 1st February 2024.
Using prettier to format your Jekyll theme
I have been using prettier for a few years to automatically format code, especially JavaScript and TypeScript projects, as it helps standardise the output on a shared code project. I have maintained a few different Jekyll themes over the years and wanted to use the power of prettier to automatically format code consistently.
First impressions of React Native as a Web Developer
I decided to try out React Native to build a native app and see how it works. I’m an experienced web developer but have limited knowledge of apps. I helped build an app using Apache Cordova and PhoneGap many (many) years ago and also worked on another app using the ionic framework a few years later. If I’m honest I can’t really remember how they worked as it was so long ago, so it was kind of like starting fresh for me.
Querying Laravel Eloquent's Many to Many relationships
A while ago I wrote about how to use a many to many relationship in Laravel, (all the way back in April 2019). Now I want to build on this example and show how you can query many to many relationships, but also how you can add additional constraints to the query to further filter your results.
Optimizing Laravel Eloquent queries
Here are a few tips and tricks that I have learnt along the way to help optimize your database queries in Laravel. Sometimes, little changes can add up and make a big difference overall.
Building a directory system API in Laravel
Sometimes it’s difficult to know whether to buy a system, use an existing open source system, or even build your own system. Each approach has its own risks and rewards. As a developer sometimes you get the opportunity to try things out and build a prototype to see what is possible. I recently got this chance and built a prototype for an API.
Latest Posts
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
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?
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.
