In my day job, I maintain a fairly large-ish Laravel application. It started out as a few separate vanilla PHP web apps, which I consolidated onto Laravel 4, then upgraded to Laravel 5. I’ve added a few new apps to the suite as business needs arose. In the Laravel 4 version, I used creolab/laravel-modules to, […]
It shouldn’t be this hard. I must have installed and re-installed Ubuntu 16.04 twenty times before I found the magic combination to allow my old-ish HP laptop to boot straight into Ubuntu (or boot at all). My son got a new laptop and discarded the beast that was his HP Pavilion. The thing must weigh […]
It’s been more than five years since my last race (the 2011 Houston Marathon which I never wrote about). As soon as I crossed the finish line of that marathon five years ago I swore I was done racing. I was burnt out, I was physically hurt, I knew I didn’t want to keep pushing […]
So I write these little tech snippets mostly as a personal journal for my future self. Anyway, got caught again at work by a weird situation where dev and test/prod environments differed. Well, not really, but kind of. What? I deployed our main app last month after upgrading it to Laravel 5 and all seemed […]
I went to Eldora Ski Resort recently for a little solo snowboarding, and the weather was a blizzard. It was still an awesome day though, mostly because there was a surfeit of powder and a deficit of people on the slopes. But man was it windy. Also, it’s weird how silent it gets when you’re […]
I gave a little presentation at work the other day on using automated testing in my Laravel project using Codeception. Here’s a screencast. The audio is a little low, so there’s a basic transcript below the video. Enjoy. ========================================== Transcript… ========================================== [chrome: show feature request in jira] so here’s a little example of writing an […]
Here’s another instance of being wary when your development environment does not exactly match your production environment. In PHP, for the longest time, when you fetched records from a MySql database, every column, no matter the column type, would be returned as a string. Primary key “id” of 42, type integer? String. Column “pi” of […]
These tech posts on how I did something are mostly just a diary of my own server maintenance, so that in 11 months, when the website I googled is no longer found, I can remember what I did, why, where and how. Familyvance.com was getting slammed by Russian bots with the former Soviets comprising more […]
My sister and her family came for a visit over the Christmas Holidays and we spent a couple of days skiing up at Eldora Mountain Resort. Eldora is a small ski area (not really anything “resort” about it), about 50 minutes drive from our house. I took some shaky video of the trip which you […]
I went for a snowy run the other day on the trails behind our house and created a video to share the beauty. Video is taken along the East Boulder Trail at the Gunbarrel Farms trailhead, behind our house. Maybe the videos are a little too much sharing, a little too much self-promotion, but that’s […]