• (Developer) Tools talk

    Last night I gave a talk at the Cheltenham WordPress MeetupĀ on the amazing toolkit called "(Developer) Tools" in your web browser. The group is very mixed in terms of technical ability so this was a great topic, and I put "Developer" in brackets because there's something in Developer Tools for all website creators, regardless of […]

  • Sublime to PHPStorm and Back: A coder’s text editor journey

    Coding News: I swapped my super-duper IDE for a less-functional text editor – you’ll never guess what happened next! Actually, it was a really good exercise, and here’s why. I was chatting with my friend Keiron today about text editors. I recently followed him in transitioning from Sublime Text to PHPStorm. But I explained to […]

  • 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 […]

  • On making an anti-social network

    Building a niche social network seems like an exciting prospect at first, but it only takes a little thought to realise that it's a bad idea.

  • 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. […]