2019 Year in Review I've never written one of these before but I thought it would be a good time to start, especially as I've had a year where quite a few things changed in my life. ReadCast In March of this year, I started building ReadCast, an app which converts articles from the web i...

As I'm writing this I've just got off a live chat with a Google Cloud Platform support agent who helped me escape this accidental bill. I can't say thank you enough for the agent that helped me out during this very stressful situation. So a week or so ago I was using ReadCast and I ran a...

So I recently created a service worker for one of my apps so I could turn it into a Progressive Web App. Although, for some reason I was under the impression that I should cache the main page of my app. I later realised that it was a very bad idea. I think I'm the only user of the site tha...

I wrote this essay way back in May but I couldn't really share it back then or I wouldn't get any grades so here it is for everyone to read. I can’t remember the first day I went to primary school, obviously it helped me learn the basics of learning to read and write but it also affect...

I wrote this essay way back in May but I couldn't really share it back then or I wouldn't get any grades so here it is for everyone to read. Did you know that the average person spends £600 on Christmas presents every year? Toys, clothes, iPhones: whatever it is, we spend hundreds of ou...

You might have noticed that I've recently redesigned this site. In fact, it's not just a redesign, it's a whole rebuild. From the ground up. The old site was a Systatic site (my old static site generator) that got its content from a Ghost backend hosted on Heroku. This site is much simpler...

A big thanks to Ben Furfie who helped by looking over this article and suggested loads of improvements. Every site needs to be hosted, and your Statamic site is no different. The recommended solution is a combination of Digital Ocean and Laravel Forge to handle your hosting and provisionin...

I'm getting to that point with ReadCast where it's starting to be pretty stable and the features are pretty much what I wanted them to be when I initially started.This is leading me to think about starting another side project. The only thing is: I want to do it for real this time.Before I...

Recently I've started to write tests in my Laravel applications. Tests are useful because they allow you to make sure important parts of your application are working, things like registration or subscriptions. Things that could be easily missed and could cause uproar if they broke. When I ...

I've just had the situation where I needed to setup my Laravel app to update my customer's information in Stripe when they change it in my app.The method I used to do this is actually undocumented on the official Laravel Cashier documentation, I found it while I was looking through the Cas...