When positioning dropdowns, tooltips, or context menus with Floating UI (formerly Popper.js), transitions sometimes don't behave like you'd expect. The first time the element is positioned the transition won't originate from the right...
There are two vim emulator plugins for VS Code that are well known -- amVim and VsCodeVim. I've been using amVim for years, but discovered today that the other emulator works better with one tiny tweak to the default extension settings.
In my continued effort to spruce up the site, I added a way to render 🔥 tips and callouts directly from markdown based content. This is all made possible via a CommonMark extension. Turns out it's pretty easy to do because we can extend another...
Torchlight is a syntax highlighting service created by the legendary Aaron Francis (Thank you Aaron, it's awesome!). It generates beautiful code blocks and I love how they look. However, I wanted to take it a step further and add a "Copy to...
Although the Laravel framework has its own conventions, there are several others I tend to follow that (I think) make me more efficient, so I want to share them with the world. These are my personal “best practices” for conventions in Laravel models,...
Today is the official release day for Laravel 9. This release is packed full of goodies. Unfortunately, I've been a slacker about upgrading to PHP 8. If you're like me and still on PHP 7.4, here's how you can upgrade.
Updating PHP to...
Hi folks! It's been over a year since an article was published on this site. Yes, I fell off the content treadmill a bit last year. Anyway, we're back! Did you have a good year? Hope so!
My year was fun. Although I shared little on the...
The year is almost over, so get prepared for a flood of year-end posts! Okay, not really. However, there are three I'd like to write — a reading list recap (this one), a 2020 year in review, and a 2021 goal and learning list.
This year I vowed to...
Webmentions are a protocol that allows sites to track when links are made to them and to receive notifications of those links. They are a neat way to keep tabs on the kinds of interactions related to a website or article, such as likes, retweets,...
The ProblemAlthough I do most of my writing in Notion, I have to put posts into Statamic to publish them on my website. For more CSS-based demonstration posts, I needed a better way to display the code and the result. Sometimes code snippets...
Now that I've got a mac with TouchID, I rarely use my password. It's incredible how convenient that little button is. One place I found myself still typing my password was running sudo commands in the terminal.
Here's how you can use...
Friday, I received a snazzy new M1 Macbook Pro in the mail. This article outlines how I was able to set it up for doing web development. We'll set up Homebrew, PHP, MySQL, Composer, and Laravel Valet. Let's jump in!
Heads up! I wrote this...
It's that time of year! That exciting time of... new stuff? In this week's article, we'll take a departure from the normal coding and design writings to explore why getting a new laptop seems like such a big thing in my world.
A New...
Recently I launched Jetty UI Kit — a collection of blocks for quickly making landing page designs in Figma. In this article, I'd like to outline what went into the product, how it sold, and reinforce a few of the lessons I learned along the...
Recently I added a signup form for my email list to the site. Using ConvertKit's API, Tailwind CSS, and AlpineJS and the Javascript Fetch API made it easy to whip up. The result is a form that's much more customizable than the embeddable forms...
This week I launched my first digital product — a landing page UI kit for Figma. Launching a product is something I've wanted to do for years, but I never actually committed and did the damn thing until now. I've been working on a few things,...
Using Figma isn't difficult, but when you can use it efficiently, it becomes a heck of a lot more fun! The following tips will help you improve your workflow. The faster you get, the more productive you are, and the more fun you can have while you...
Figma is a badass collaborative design application. It may seem simple, but there's a lot of power hidden in that simplicity. After years of working with it, I've picked up a handful of practical tips. In this article, I'll share some of...
Anyone can design something that looks good. It just takes some attention to the right details. With design, details matter, but how do you know which details matter most? The answer is that it just takes a little practice and observation. In this...
It's no secret — I'm a huge fan of Alpine. For me, it hits that goldilocks zone between minimalistic and powerful. Alpine is straightforward to get started with, especially if you have a VueJS background. However, there are a few hidden...
Vim can be a polarizing editor, and while it may seem cryptic when you start, it can be incredibly powerful. Many folks never bother to learn vim, which is a shame. Some people go crazy with vim and make it their primary editor. For me, the sweet spot...
All too often, we settle into a git workflow that gets us by, but we stop there. When was the last time that you improved your workflow? This article will show you how I've supercharged my git workflow and explain how you can do the same....
Ask any of my friends about my keyboard "problem", and you're sure to get a laugh. Not because I have a glass case of collector's edition mechanical keyboards, but because I have been on a constant quest to find the "best"...
Was updating my site today and noticed that my navbar is still using vanilla javascript to handle the toggling of the responsive menu at mobile size. This will not do!
Here's how I converted it to Alpine JS.
This was the script that was...
Now that Tailwind CSS 1.4 is out it's a great time to upgrade your old, tired app. Okay, maybe your app already had version 1.3, but if not, the latest two versions (1.3 and 1.4) bring some amazing improvements. Most notable are the new space...
Have common files you don't want to version in any projects? -- put them in a global gitignore file! I don't know about you, but I'm sick of adding .DS_Store or .vscode to gitignore files on a per-project basis.
Run the following command...
Yesterday it was finally time to give my site some more visual flair, but with an extra twist! I recorded the whole process. Check out the sped-up version to get a glimpse of how it was done.
As developers it is crucial to keep learning all the time. Otherwise, you might get caught up in your day-to-day work and stagnate. The cure? Learn something and apply it in your workflow! Here are three tips I wish I could've given myself sooner.
We'll cover how to add syntax highlighting to code blocks in Statamic v3 using Prism. With a couple quick steps you'll have your code blocks looking spiffy!
We'll add some custom functionality to the composer package we created in part one to create a Laravel boilerplate with things set up just how we prefer.
Laravel provides frontend scaffolding, but you may want a more
customized boilerplate to start projects from. Learn to create your own package
to do just that!
Interested in using Sublime Text for Laravel Development? Here's how to set it up from scratch like a Pro!
If you're still using Sublime Text, I would highly recommend that you check out Visual Studio Code instead. It outclasses sublime text...