• 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 […]

  • Typical supper-time learnings: Will It Fly?

    A typical conversation over an evening bowl of porridge in the Wintle household. This is how a) one of our children learns random stuff and b) Bedtime takes FOREVER.

  • 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. […]

  • 10 Things I’ve Learned

    My friend/colleague/client Huw, has posted 10 things he's learned recently and challenged me to do the same. So here goes. 10 things I've learned recently.

  • Please. Don’t. Play with the…

    With a pre-schooler, a simple activity, like trying to plug a hose into a water butt, turns into a mind-bending philosophical monologue.