Posts from Chris

Read posts that I have written concerning web development and some of the technologies I work with.

August 5, 2024

Writing automated tests can help you find vulnerabilities in your code.

For example, I had a controller that was checking if the user was authorized to make a request. The controller used the Gate facade in laravel to detect if the user was authorized to update and create a model. This worked as expected when testing on the front end, but when I added automated tests...

February 20, 2024

GitHub Copilot: How I'm using it.

There are mixed feelings about GitHub Copilot. Many engineers love and use it daily, while others hate it and think it is harming the developer community. Personally, I’m one who is really grateful for GitHub Copilot, and I use it pretty regularly.

February 19, 2024

How to use Laravel Scramble in Production

To define a viewApiDocs Gate, the process is pretty simple. First, you need to go to your AuthServiceProvider, and find your boot() method. In this method, you will define the Gate as follows...

April 5, 2022

How to Create Multiple Wildcard Routes at the Same Root Path in Laravel.

Sometimes, you may want to make sure that multiple types of resources are available at a same root wildcard path on your applications website. In this article I go into depth on how to do this with Laravel.

January 31, 2022

How to add Amazon affiliate and Google AdSense ads to your Vue app.

Sooner or later, if you are developing a content site, niche blog, or some other website that attracts organic visitors, you may decide you want to start making money with your website in the form of ads. When you go to do that, you may end up using some sort of script tag that the ad service provides you with that you need to add to your html somewhere.

January 22, 2022

Show Your Work! Here's my latest.

My wife got me this awesome book by Austin Kleon titled, "Show your Work!". The book is super easy to read and I highly recommend it. The title is pretty clear, but the point of the book is how to share your work and use that as a way to get discovered. Here is me sharing my work.

December 10, 2021

How to perform SQL calculations in a Laravel Eloquent Query.

Often, you will come into circumstances where you need to append an attribute to a model, or calculate some piece of data from multiple database columns when returning data from your Laravel application. In Laravel, it is easy to make general calculations on single columns, like summing, or getting an average, but when you need to calculate data on say, 2 or more columns you may need to do some raw sql queries.

December 7, 2021

How to add Vue Components Globally in an InertiaJS application.

For an application I’m building now, I’m using Laravel Jetstream, with Inertia Vue as the frontend. One thing that quickly frustrated me was importing components I needed over and over again. I wanted to import the main components that I used most often to make my pages and components easier to read and maintain.

November 15, 2021

How to order by a related model in Laravel

I'm building an application that display's customer orders. I want my users to be able to order orders by Customer name if they would like. In order to do this, I added a select statement to the query when the request included an orderBy="customer" key and value.

September 23, 2021

How to remove warning in vue to configure feature flags to esm module bundling: Laravel Mix

In Laravel, when using Laravel mix to bundle assets and utilizing Vue 3 for your frontend, you may run into a warning in your console that can be confusing,

August 25, 2021

How to return errors in an error bag when using Laravel Form Requests.

If you are using a form request, the validator is baked in, and it seems tricky to implement. Fortunately, Laravel provides a simple way to give your form request a named error bag out of the box.

January 25, 2021

How I Hosted my Strapi CMS Driven Website for Free.

A couple months ago, I was rejected for a job with an awesome company. It was a bummer, but it made me rethink the ways I was marketing myself as a software developer.

December 3, 2020

Part 1: Today we got my wife's visa. Here's how being in Mexico 3 years has completely changed our lives for the better.

Almost three years ago, when my wife and I were entering the United States after getting married in Mexico, we were turned around at the border.

December 2, 2020

How we grew a wholesale nursery's website users from 15/day to over 200.

When we first started managing this website, we saw around 15-20 users, on average, of their website per day. Now, in September of 2020, we are seeing anywhere from 200-300 users of their website daily, and in the past year have seen over 50,000 people checking out products on Garden Gate's site.

November 26, 2020

I don't have experience with Gatsby. Why am I building a Gatsby plugin then?

I have zero experience with Gatsby. The only experience I had had before with Gatbsy was going through some of the docs and deciding to use NuxtJs for my personal portfolio website instead of Gatsby, but this week I started work on a Gatsby Plugin.

November 15, 2020

Why I am glad I was rejected by my dream company... twice.

I don't know a single person on the planet that likes being rejected, and I am not an exception. When I saw a job position in customer technical support open at Webflow this Spring, I immediately applied.

November 3, 2020

How to get organic traffic to your developer blog.

As developers, we can get organic website users to our blogs much easier than other people because we are always searching around for things we need to learn.

November 1, 2020

How to share a "Fork this on GitHub" link

Here is how to share a fork link to your project on Github to make it easy for people to quickly fork your git repo.

October 30, 2020

How to remove the # symbol from your Vue Router website url.

In order to quickly remove the # symbol from your URLs, within your index.js file where you create a new Vue Router instance, add the history mode setting to it.

October 29, 2020

How to Create a Sitemap in Laravel for a Website that Contains Thousands of Records.

In this article, I'll share how you can build a sitemap for a large website with thousands of records in Laravel 8.

October 27, 2020

Laravel 8: Second Look at Inertia

My question is this. Why are we making it easy for developers to not learn API development?

October 9, 2020

Building a Honeypot Field in Nuxt

This is how you build a custom honeypot field with Vuejs and Nuxt that keeps spam submissions at bay on your website.

October 8, 2020

How to cross-publish posts from Strapi with Zapier

Well, you got your new CMS up and running. You are using Strapi, like me, but you are kind of lazy, like me. You don't have to manually share content on LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social sites. What can you do about it? Use Zapier!

October 7, 2020

Should you use a no-code tool to build a web app?

In this article, I will share my reasoning for why I don't recommend building a web application entirely with a no-code product, and instead, recommend using a web framework that can make coding your full-stack projects faster.

October 5, 2020

Triggering a deploy in Netlify automatically after updating content in Strapi

Netlify offers a feature called "Build hooks". These are unique URLs that you can configure for your application to trigger deployments automatically whenever a post request is made to that endpoint.

October 3, 2020

A Great NodeJs Backend Option for Frontend Developers or No-Coders

If you are a frontend developer or no-coder, you probably have thought about building your backend with NodeJs to utilize your JavaScript knowledge.

October 1, 2020

Laravel 8 and Laravel Jetstream- Initial Reactions

Today I was exploring the newly released Laravel 8 framework and found the fresh composer package that Laravel developed for authentication view scaffolding. I was initially a little concerned about the move away from React & Vue, but I decided to give it a try anyway. I was very happily surprised that Jetstream looks like a wonderful improvement for the Laravel framework.

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