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I regularly find myself trying to determine what is the proper way to build Livewire components. The beautiful thing about Livewire is that it’s extremely flexible, but with flexibility comes issues. Recently I was working on refactoring an older Livewire project, and I noticed a negative pattern scattered throughout the whole project. What’s worse is that I still do this in my current work. So, what’s...

Lately I've had an itch to build something, but my existing projects didn't seem to scratch that itch. I spent a lot of time trying to decide what I should code or what I could turn into an actual side hustle. Having simplified my life (gotten rid of my businesses), I realized that I wasn't looking for something to replace that. I was looking for something fun . Why a forum? The honest truth is that I love...

I think everyone has heard the phrase: don't reinvent the wheel. Out of the whole series, I find this lesson the most difficult to remember when starting a new project. My philosophy on development When working on a project, I try to utilize as few dependencies as possible. I haven't forgotten the heavy Bootstrap, jQuery, and WordPress page-builder sites that have been popular for a long time. I make every...

Anyone that has worked in web design or development for several years will likely have seen how quickly new technologies and tools come and go. I started learning HTML & CSS in my early teens (mid-2000s), and everything changed in that time. I'm happy with the frameworks and tools I use now, and they have stayed relatively consistent for several years. The last significant change that I made was adopting...

Developing the low-hanging fruit is a lesson I can use in nearly every aspect of my life. But it's extra beneficial when I build an app or website for a client. You should build what you need first, only the bare minimum. You shouldn't spend time adding fancy features or making it look pretty before your main features work. The idea here is that additional features are useless without the basic...

Honestly, I'm embarrassed to write this one out. I've always known that testing was necessary, but I dread writing tests. So I didn't. Most of the stuff I built was for me and unlikely to be used by others. And it was always okay. I don't need testing if I'm the only one using it. This philosophy has been my mentality for a long time. I started learning Laravel almost seven years ago, coasting by because I...

Welcome to a multipart blog post about a few development lessons I recently learned. These lessons took too long for me to learn. While I wrote this to remind my future self, I would also like to help others if they struggle with the same things. Part 1: Test Driven Development (TDD) Part 2: Developing the low-hanging fruit first Part 3: You don't always need the newest toy Part 4: Don't reinvent the wheel...

Last year my business partner mentioned that we should use the extra 50" TVs as leaderboards to help gamify our recently expanded selection of events at Divrsion. This is easier said than done, but I loved the idea. The idea was that players would check in to events with a consistent login. Their account would hold a history of events that they attended. Players would accumulate points based on how they do...