A common type of question I find on Stack Overflow are beginners having trouble with figuring out why their AJAX application / functionality isn’t working. They usually go something like this… I have two input boxes which accept the username and password and sends it to the PHP login page via AJAX. But when I type in my credentials, I don’t ...

While reading Indi’s blog post about the Colombo Hackathon, I was really surprised about the comments some people were making. They were bordering on the xenophobic and some were outright against the concept simply because there was commercial backing behind it. I don’t understand why commercial backing or presenting to an open audience is a bad thing.  I find that ...

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. - Brian Kernighan

For the past 16 years I've been professionally programming, other than for a year-long stint where I worked on Java, I primarily worked on PHP codebases. And by 'professionally programming', I simply mean that someone else paid for the computer and electricity running my code. Most of my time has been spent on large PHP codebases that aren't based on ...

I'm sitting in a lounge drinking bad coffee and I have a few hours to kill, so I thought I'd get this story out of my pending pile. This is a story about how some Sri Lankan government institutions - and some of the people who staff them - are terrible at their jobs. I hope their version of hell ...

Congratulations! You've done the hard part and you've just been hired for a new role. You're excited about your first day of work. You get in bright and early, you do the round of hellos and introductions and you complete your environment setup. Now what? Hopefully, your team will have an onboarding plan ready and their expectations for you should ...

Let me paint you a word picture. You're a part-time university student, doing full-time work as a web admin for a small e-commerce company. Due to a website overhaul, you've just been tasked with updating the product catalog of said e-commerce company. You need to update the hundreds of products and move them to their new categories using the aging ...

This is a continuation of the previous post "In Search of a Better Writing Experience". In this post, I'm going to cover the steps I took to move my existing blog from WordPress to what I have now - a 11ty static blog. Before I started the conversion process, I'd already looked at a few static site generators and had ...

This is a continuation of the previous post "Wordpress to Markdown and then on to 11ty". In this post, I'm going to cover the final step of publishing the post, once I've written it. Recap # First, a quick recap of where we are in this whole process. My old blog has been converted to 11ty and it's being served ...

We use Jira at work to track tasks. So, anytime you make changes to code, the commit message usually includes the ticket ID in the message. It goes something like this: [PROD-123] I understand that it's an antipattern, but it's convenient. This is useful when you're looking at a busy repository and going through the history to find a specific ...

I've written about my writing setup previously, so I won't go into details here. I've been running it for a couple of years now and have not written much at all! Part of it is because I was too lazy to write. But part of it was because the steps required for publishing a post were numerous and too cumbersome. ...

The last few months of my employment have largely been spent moving big parts of our subscription functionality to one central location. This functionality used to be spread across three different systems, but we’re consolidating to make upgrades faster. Since some of this code had been written many many years ago (we’re turning 10 this year! but the code itself ...

Let me paint you a word picture. You're a part-time university student, doing full-time work as a web admin for a small e-commerce company. Due to a website overhaul, you've just been tasked with updating the product catalog of said e-commerce company. You need to update the hundreds of products and move them to their new categories using the aging ...

It's been a minute since I posted here. Part of that is because I was lazy and didn't follow my own goal of posting once a month, but part of that is because a lot of stuff happened in the last few months so I had good reasons to not get around to it. Here's a quick run-down of what's ...

Want a primer on how OAuth works? If so, check out this post on how you can use OAuth to access your user information on Asana. I do a brief introduction to OAuth and create an example using NodeJS. It’s published on the Fusebit blog and can be viewed here. Asana OAuth: How to Access User Data Using OAuth Asana OAuth: How to Access User Data Using OAuth

I wrote about the different ways you can set up a Laravel development environment. The post covers an introduction to development environments and examples include Docker, Vagrant, and Composer. It’s published on the Fusebit blog and can be viewed here. Laravel Development Environment: A Complete Introduction Laravel Development Environment: A Complete Introduction

Now that the event industry is starting to come out of the COVID-imposed restrictions, we're seeing a lot of growth and subsequently, a lot of strain on our systems. And so, while we upgrade our systems, I've also been working on an incident management process at Rentman for the last few months. I presented our approach and learnings at the ...

That's right, I got married! Rewinding a bit. I haven't posted much in the last few months, because both work and my personal life have been packed with a lot of exciting things and I haven't had the time and space to write about things. Back in November, my team wrapped up the development of a stand-alone service that would ...

The last few months of my employment have largely been spent moving big parts of our subscription functionality to one central location. This functionality used to be spread across three different systems, but we’re consolidating to make upgrades faster. Since some of this code had been written many many years ago (we’re turning 10 this year! but the code itself ...

I wrote an introduction to Open Redirect vulnerabilities and how they might affect your Laravel application. The post contains examples and how you avoid the most common mistakes. It’s published on the StackHawk blog and can be viewed here. Laravel Open Redirect Security Guide Laravel Open Redirect Security Guide