Blog
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Your degree isn’t enough: my advice to students
A degree, whether it be in computer science, software engineering, mathematics or a related field is often marketed as the golden ticket for those wanting a lucrative career in programming. An often extortionately expensive goose that will eventually lay golden eggs for years to come. While it’s absolutely true that a degree has serious value in technical career paths, it should be…
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Improve your browser security in 5 minutes
Chances are, you do the majority of your work and everyday computer usage through your web browser. It is your portal to the vast majority of what the World Wide Web has to offer, and unfortunately is one of the most common vectors for malicious software or attackers to leverage as they try to break their way in. Through these…
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Fun with Clippy.js
Remember Clippy? The (not very) helpful assistant that was a major part of Microsoft Office for numerous years? Sure you do! These interactive assistants were part of the Microsoft Agent suite of technologies and were incorporated into Windows XP as well. It was also infamously used in BonziBUDDY – the fun and interactive gorilla that also happened to be… spyware. Whilst these technologies have…
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Documentation in Laravel 8 with Enlighten
The importance of software documentation, even in an agile world, is undisputed. Keeping documentation, especially for APIs, up-to-date however can be an additional burden on a development team, and thus automatically generated documentation can help supplement this by producing reference materials. This is where Enlighten comes in. In this guide, we’ll get Laravel Enlighten up and running, which utilises your existing PHPUnit tests (because you should be writing tests) to…
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PHP and Composer on the Windows Subsystem for Linux
In this guide, I’ll be showing you step-by-step what you need to do to install the Windows Subsystem for Linux, and then both PHP and the Composer package manager. As a prerequisite, this requires an up-to-date version of Windows 10. Windows 8.1, 7, and below are unsupported. I will write about setting up PHP environments under legacy Windows versions in a later article. Step…