A screenshot showing a context menu, with the option to add the word "joltage" to the system dictionary highlighted.

#AdventOfCode

I wish PHP developers would stop telling me (also a PHP developer) about how (supposedly) people say PHP is dead, but that it is not dead.

Would it shock them to know that I was already aware of this information? 😄

Pretty amused that the name of the --no-trunc option of docker history is itself truncated

Oh the irony

Yeah, I came to that conclusion too. Sometimes though, the business logic is complex enough to not be easily reflected by simple equivalent logic with the DB facade.

Another common problem is what to do in the down() method when the up() method has already destructively edited the data 😬😅

Do you ever do data changes during a migration? As opposed to just schema changes?

I try to avoid it for various reasons, but it's not easy to convince others, and sometimes it seems inescapable... but it always feels wrong.

A screenshot of Kevin's terminal window from the course video, showing some migrations that have been created with timestamps just after 3:58am

Watching Kevin McKee's series on Laravel Filament on #laracasts

Glad to see I'm not the only one who's generating migrations at 3:58am 🦉🌛

My heart sinks when a product explainer video says something like "this isn't just a simple tool for drawing boxes and arrows, it's a revolutionary, game changing, multi functional, super-powerful..." blah blah blah.

I just wanna draw some boxes and arrows, dude 😵

I think we can all agree that it should be a crime to load ads which jump page content downwards after it's been rendered for the user

I just completed "Print Queue" - Day 5 - Advent of Code 2024 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2024/day/5

I found today surprisingly easy, once I'd thought about it for a few minutes. I could have predicted part two though, and implemented for it accordingly and used that to solve part one as well...

This time I took a completely different approach with part two. The part that really slowed me down on part one was handling the diagonals. I got the first set of diagonals working fine quite quickly, but reversing the logic was a nightmare - until I thought to reverse the input with the same logic!

I just completed "Ceres Search" - Day 4 - Advent of Code 2024 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2024/day/4

Having said what I said yesterday, I actually completed part two quicker than part one!

Part 1: About an hour
Part 2: About 40 minutes.

As always, part two took considerably longer than part one. In this instance, about 5 minutes for part one, and about 45 minutes for part two. I bet if I knew regexp better I could have shaved at least 30 minutes off that.

I just completed "Mull It Over" - Day 3 - Advent of Code 2024 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2024/day/3

Pretty sure I need to learn regular expressions more thoroughly. Didn't have time this evening though, so wrote a little do/while loop with a file pointer to ignore the "bad" parts of the string.

I just completed "Red-Nosed Reports" - Day 2 - Advent of Code 2024 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2024/day/2

That one was more of a struggle - I misinterpreted how the Problem Dampener worked, which threw me off for a while, as I was applying the "dampening" after I'd already done a transformation.

I just completed "Historian Hysteria" - Day 1 - Advent of Code 2024 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2024/day/1

Very straightforward, but I expect as the month goes on things will get much trickier!

Dear Slack,

You were already very annoying. Adding "AI" features, and popups etc to try and encourage me to use them, has made you even more annoying.

Yours sincerely,
Alex

Just created myself a handy bash alias:

alias agnostic-composer="composer --ignore-platform-reqs --no-scripts"

Really useful for quickly getting a freshly-cloned Laravel Sail project to the point where you can do `sail up`, for example:

git clone ...
agnostic-composer install
sail up

Set up a bird feeding tray on my balcony. A bird has done a shit in it.

#Monday

Well... credit where credit is due... Bitbucket auto-saved the PR description, and out of an hour of work, I only lost two words! 😁

Desperately hoping my laptop recovers from whatever CPU fugue it's just got itself into, and that Bitbucket isn't about to lose the last hour of my work for me on Friday afternoon 😫🤞🏻

YEAAAH HTML! 🤘🏻 WHO CARES ABOUT GRAMMAR

Did it reportedly go somewhere?

Installed Ubuntu Noble on my laptop last night. It's really great how easy it is to install a Linux distro these days!

Anecdotes? Androgyny? Anaplasty? Anacondas?

// Hasta la vista, baby

I'm planning to learn some Grafana basics - enough to get a feel for how I can use it to help make sense of the noise - and start considering the possibilities for a SAAS idea I have.

a close up of a man 's face with his eyes closed Alt: Michael Scott from The Office putting his head in his hand

I just finally worked out why the popular PHP date library is called "Carbon"

Only took me several years.

lofi hip hop radio - beats to study/relax to 🐾 YouTube video by Chillhop Music

Right, time for me and the raccoon to get some stuff done.

I tend to avoid writing comments in my code, in favour of...

- descriptive variable/method/class names
- logical structure
- short methods
etc

BUT I find comments are essential for tests, because test code can get cluttered, complex and confusing.

But maybe I'm just bad at writing tests? 🤔

Do you include a check for rolling back your migrations in your CI pipeline? 🔙

It's obvious that the pipeline needs to run migrations forward, but it's easy to forget that checking rollbacks is very important too!