laravel

  • 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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  • Tips for being a better listener from a former helpline volunteer

    The Internet has a wealth of great articles with a wealth of useful advice on supporting your fellow developers, colleagues, and most critically, yourself, as you progress through your software engineering career, or whatever path you find yourself upon. This really motivated me to write my own post on this topic, one of which is close to my heart. For a bit of

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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

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  • Why I continue to develop with PHP

    I have no doubt that if you work in any realm of software engineering, or have at the very least spent enough time on Twitter, you’ll have encountered the seemingly endless cycles of arguments about what programming language, framework, or paradigm is best, and why everyone else is wrong. PHP is no stranger to being a point of contention among different

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