Joel Clermont

Recently I wanted to have backticks in my git commit message. It didn’t work as expected though.

I prefer to use Git from the command line, but sometimes a GUI tool does a better job with specific tasks. One of those is diff highlighting, but today I found a way to make diffing with the Git CLI a lot nicer. Let’s look at an example.

Many times you can trace a bug back to a particular code change that was made. Or maybe it was caused by a package upgrade. But have you ever had something break when no code changed at all? How does that happen?

Recently I upgraded phpdotenv on an older project and my AWS connection stopped working. Why did one package upgrade break the other? And how did I fix it? Read on for details.

This is a really specific error you might never run into, but when you do, this blog post is here for you.

Recently I was creating a new table and using the timestamps helper in the migration. I noticed something that seemed wrong, so I dug a little deeper and learned something new about Laravel and MySQL.

Many years ago, when I moved my blog from WordPress to Hugo, I was very pleased to find Disqus as a way to still have comments on a statically generated site. Today, however, I have completely removed Disqus from this site.

For me, one of the main reasons I write tests is to have confidence that my code is working as expected and to catch myself if (or should I say when?) I break something in the future. I often think of testing the happy path and the failure path, but I’ll share some additional things I like to test in between that further boost my test confidence.

Laravel’s form requests really help reduce the amount of code in your controllers, especially around validation. Another convenience method they offer is authorization. I recently came across a small tip which isn’t explicitly stated in the docs and thought I’d share it.

Let’s say you have a form with two groups of related, but mutually exclusive, fields. When you POST and store a new record, no problem, only the right fields are sent in. But what do you do when that record is updated? How can you cleanly handle this?