long-form writing
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How do people blog for thirty years without running out of things to say?
Throughout my time on the Internet, I’ve made numerous attempts at blogs, some ranging from simple online journals to others where I’ve essentially just ‘reblogged’ whatever it was that I found interesting at the time. I think it’s generally fair to say, with the benefit of hindsight, that airing my dirty laundry, insecurities, and perhaps…
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Boulevards of broken dreams
When speaking to any experienced software developer, there’s a good chance at some point they will tell you all about the countless incomplete side projects that they have accumulated over the years – the projects that still sit dormant in their Git repositories. The side hustles that failed to materialise and were gradually swept away…
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Finding one’s place within the pack
Back in January, I silenced the sceptical voices in my head and conquered my impostor syndrome. I stepped away from the comfort and familiarity of my role at Stickee – a company where I was fortunate enough to cut my teeth and spend four years honing my craft with bleeding-edge Laravel technologies – in search…
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Don’t truncate in Laravel Excel imports
One of the greatest things about Laravel Excel is its event system – you can easily register closures or classes to be executed during certain events in the import lifecycle, such as before and after the import. I’ve often wanted to truncate a database table to import the data ‘fresh’ before an import – I…
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Switching back to WordPress
For the past five or so years, I’ve meandered back and forth between various site generators: Gatsby, Hugo, Jekyll, and most recently, Jigsaw. It has been an exercise in tedium keeping the website up-to-date and wrestling with whatever template or starter kit I had used, and honestly, I simply cannot be bothered with it at…