• Why I love (and how I make) simple, static, minimal-tech websites

    There was some interesting chatter a while ago in my tech social bubbles about the tiny decline in WordPress’s CMS market share. This was followed by some interesting Twitter replies. But I chose to pick up on my friend Keith Devon’s response: And it caused me to reflect on how I now build small/quick sites […]

  • Programming styles and books

    I confess, while I have my CS degree and am well-read, I've never read many of the "classics": Clean Code, Refactoring, The Pragmatic Programmer. So with Sandi Metz's "99 Bottles of OOP" on offer, I thought I'd make a start there.

  • Coding for fun

    Back at the end of 2020, Jhey Tompkins wrote an excellent article titled “Playfulness In Code: Supercharge Your Learning By Having Fun“. I loved this article and though the examples in it were more visually playful than technologically playful (and yes, HTML and CSS are technological – I just couldn’t find a better way to […]

  • Raise your hands! It’s voice controlled WordPress!

    I love doing fun coding projects. I was listening to the Syntax podcast yesterday, they did a show about “Nifty Browser APIs“. That is, things you can get code to do in a browser, like locate where you are and play sounds and… do speech recognition…? “That sounds fun”, went my train of thought, “I’d […]

  • I know nothing, really, but could nav menus be a browser API?

    Let’s not start with nav menus. Let’s start somewhere else… What do Github, Laravel Forge, MacOS, VS Code, Sublime Text, JetBrains IDEs like PHPStorm, Google Chrome’s dev tools, Windows Terminal, the Warp terminal application, and Netlify all have in common? They all have “command palettes” – as do an increasing number of both native and […]

  • Turbo Admin: The Story of a First Software Product

    Someone asked me today if and how I had had any success marketing Turbo Admin, as they were developing a software product of their own and wanted to hear some experiences. And the truth is that I have no idea what I’m doing. I hate marketing. I’m a total newbie. And Turbo Admin – a […]

  • Things all developers need to make in their career #17: A static site generator

    There’s a sort-of-joke that there’s a bunch of things that all developers are supposed to code from scratch at some point in their career. A blog. A to-do list app. The “canonical” applications. And one of these is a static site generator. I’ve actually never built any of these things from scratch. But while making […]

  • Getting to grips with Docker and Laravel Sail (on Apple Silicon/M1)

    So I wanted to have a play with Laravel Breeze and Jetstream. In doing so I noticed that the instructions for Breeze (and for Laravel in general) suggest a Docker-based Laravel Sail install by default. I had not looked into Docker despite a lot of hype around it recently in my tech world. So I […]