An erratic grab-bag of articles, code samples, and random things which caught my attention.
Déjà vu is a relatively harmless sensation for humans, but what happens when our APIs relive the same moment over and over? Nothing good! Fortunately, help is at hand. Find out what idempotency is, why it's so important, and how suspiciously simple it is to add idempotency support to our apps.
In June 2025, I spoke at IPC Berlin about idempotency - what it is, how it protects our APIs, and what goes wrong when we forget about it! It was a great conference, in a fascinating city.
When working on a presentation in Google Slides, using emojis can be risky as they get lost if you need to export the deck to PDF. This is particularly true of the Mac flavour of emojis.
In May 2025 I spoke at the CyberwiseCon / DevDays Europe event in Vilnius, Lithuania. It was a week of firsts - first time delivering a new talk, first time in Vilnius. Success on both fronts!
When your content is popular, you'll have all kinds of scrapers trying to copy it and outright steal it. Read about how we defended ourselves with help from the White House, 10 Downing Street, and Willy Wonka.
In May 2025 I went to Stripe's annual conference, Sessions, in San Francisco, to hear first-hand about the future of payments.
Efficient video encoding has meant that sharing mp4/webm files has become more widespread. However for tools that don't readily support video playback (Google Slides..), it's sometimes still necessary to use gifs. Happily, ffmpeg makes this very easy!
When trying to update Chrome in Ubuntu 24, I ran into a warning about a libglib dependency not being met. Fixing this highlighted some interesting gaps between the GUI and CLI tools in Ubuntu which try to do the same thing, but in different ways.
Stripe metadata is great for config, entitlements, and... DNS? This experiment takes one good API feature and stretches it into the worst possible infrastructure layer.
Have you deployed a Lambda and got a confusing 'Cannot find module index' error? Followed that with a fruitless google search for cryptic error messages? An easy mistake to make, and, fortunately, an even easier fix!
The Dutch PHP Conference in March 2025 was a great couple of days, where I got the opportunity to talk all about idempotency, and do it in a unique conference setting.
Ollama is a great tool for running local LLMs. However, if you're using an older AMD graphics card in Ubuntu, it may not be making best use of your resources! Find out how to speed up your local LLMs running through Ollama.
When configuring Filament to operate from the application's root directory, you might encounter routing errors. This is due to naming collisions with Laravel's default routes. Let's look at the solution!
When running tests with Laravel and Pest, the 'A facade root has not been set' error is a common one for beginners. Fortunately the fix is simple!
Using Cloudflare Workers we can quickly build an effective API proxy, without spinning up any additional hardware. Whether its needing a CORS proxy, speeding up slow APIs via caching, or rate limit management on stingy APIs, this serverless tech is as easy to set up as it is powerful.
Save time by not building backends for simple CRUD apps. Use Google Sheets as both a free backend and JSON API endpoint!
In November 2024, I spoke at IPC Munich about how backend developers can improve front end speed. There were fantastic talks at the conference, in a wonderful city worth a visit!
Updates to Ubuntu 24.04 led to regular loss of wifi connection, often requiring a hard reboot. As ever with Ubuntu, there are about 3,928 possible solutions to any given problem. Here's the path which ultimately worked for me!
In June 2024, I had the pleasure of speaking at the PHPers Summit, in Poznan, Poland. My talk was about the quick wins available for backend developers who need to improve front end page speed.
Paywalled cookie banners ("Pay or OK") are a new twist on the cookie pop-ups we've all come to know. But what exactly is the twist? How do they work? Are they even legal?
Laravel's Process Facade makes it easy to work with system processes. Let's see how by building a simple domain expiry notification system!
Starting with PHPUnit 11, deprecation warnings will be fired if you're still using doc comments like "@test" above function declarations. This can lead to some pretty cluttered output in your test runs. Time to start using PHP attributes!
PHP UK is a fantastic developer conference which I have enjoyed attending many times in the past. This year was a little different, as I took to the stage for the first time!
Two Factor Authentication is an important method for ensuring account security. When I added it to my work Slack account, the mobile app refused to let me back into my workspace. Fortunately, there's a fix, though it does involve jumping through a few hoops!
Idempotency is a critical concept to be aware of when building robust APIs, and is baked into the SDKs of companies like Stripe, Paypal, Shopify, and Amazon. But what exactly is idempotency? And how can we easily add support for it to our Laravel APIs?
Discover how to tackle Laravel's testing challenges in multi-database scenarios. Say goodbye to the notorious 'Lock wait timeout' error.
I recently appeared on Evervault's Decrypt podcast, and had a great time! We talked about the importance of developing empathy for users, product roadmap challenges, issues adding AI to dev workflows, and managing the transition from a development role to a leadership one.
Learn to seamlessly integrate YouTube videos with sleek icons and optimised loading techniques. Discover best practices for faster, smoother video integrations!
Value objects are a great way to add safety and consistency to a dynamically-typed application, while also improving readability and testability.
Effortlessly collect SEPA bank details using Stripe and Cloudflare Workers. Learn how to streamline the process in this serverless tutorial.
Discover how to effectively A/B test content on social media, even with the challenge of link preview caching. Boost engagement with the right headline and image combinations.
Rolling averages are perfect for smoothing out time-series data, helping you to gain insight from noisy graphs and tables. This new package adds first-class support to Laravel Collections for rolling average calculation.
Lazy loading of images helps to radically speed up initial page load. Rich site designs often call for background images, which can't be lazily loaded in the same way. How can we keep our designs, while optimising for a fast initial load?
How can we best showcase a portrait image in an application designed for landscape images? TV news has the answer! With a small bit of CSS, we can achieve an eye-catching "blurred background" effect.
Multi-tenant applications in Laravel typically detect the tenant from the URL. Queues and artisan commands are powerful tools, but have no URLs attached. How do we make them tenant-aware?
It's an increasingly-common experience for online publishers to discover that their content has been stolen wholesale, and posted on a different domain without permission. What can you do if this happens to your site?
Google drive is a handy place to store videos. Often those videos need to be shared and embedded elsewhere, but finding the embed code for these videos isn't nearly as simple as with Youtube or Vimeo!
Fonts are one of the largest resources on any page after images, and can have a big impact on CLS when they vary in size from the underlying system font. Font subsetting allows us to radically shrink font file sizes, speed up initial page loads, and improve our page speed scores.
Back in 1990, Ireland qualified for the men's football World Cup for the first time. It was a very exciting time for the whole country, though as an eight year old I wasn't quite up to speed on the finer details of why...
Responsive ads are a great way to maximise publisher revenue from display ads. Not knowing the size of the ad to be served in advance can have a big impact on Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and, ultimately, Google rankings. How do we maximise revenue while minimising CLS impact?
Google Analytics is a very powerful tool for understanding the source of web traffic. A common source of confusion is the "Direct" channel source - where does this number come from?
Google's Two-Click Penalty is intended to protect users and advertisers from accidental clicks on ads. When does Google apply the penalty, and how can we avoid it impacting our sites?
Core Web Vitals are a series of metrics which attempt to put an objective measure on web page performance. They cover the speed of site loading, the way the page jumps around while loading assets, and how quickly a page can be used by a visitor. In short, they attempt to quantify how fast a page "feels". These metrics will be used in the Google rankings for a page, so what are the common optimisations we can make to ensure our pages score well?
Privacy regulation requires getting user consent before making analytics calls. A common question of site owners is "how many users do I have who are on site but not allowing cookies? The Measurement Protocol API is a way we can estimate how many users fall into this grouping.
With the release of Android Lollipop, the way that Chrome manages tabs was changed. When the task switcher is activated, each tab shows separately, almost like a new app. How do you ensure your website stands out here? Fortunately with the release of Chrome 39, there is a way – you can now customise the toolbar colour with just one line of HTML, the theme-color meta tag!
Eircom's eFibre product is their fastest home broadband offering, promising speeds of up to 100mb. The connection speeds are generally quite good, being capable of handling TV, Netflix and a handful of other connected devices all at once without any real issue on the speed. However the one black mark against the service would be the intermittent issues with the eircom DNS servers. This can often cause internet connection problems, where the net connection shows as active but nothing loads. Frustrating!
At the Dublin leg of the 2014 Agile Tour, I gave a talk based on my experience leading a team's agile transition from a classic waterfall approach. When preparing our move to agile, I found it fairly easy to find the success stories from other company's transitions. However, during our transition, we hit some rocky patches along the way, often making us question the whole transition. So for my talk I focused a little more on the things that went awry for us along the journey – what can happen when a number of smart people make what look like sensible, low-risk calls which turn out to be neither!
One of the nice things about using git for version control is the amount of data it stores during development. Git log is a powerful tool for finding out what’s been going on in your project, all via a simple text-based interface. But if Jack Nicholson has taught us nothing else, it’s that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. So we took a look at some of the more fun and interesting ways of generating code visualisations – GwitLog, Gource and Christmas Commits.
When doing any sort of non-trivial development, sooner or later you’ll likely end up having to send emails from your application. Email is a key part of many application for things like event notifications or user account verification. Testing that the right mails get sent at the right times can often be more hassle than it really should be. Fortunately, a tool called Mailcatcher exists to make this process much easier.
Recently I ran in to a particularly odd database problem – a mysql table that both existed and didn’t at the same time.
Character encoding in PHP can be fun at the best of times. Trying to send a non-ASCII character in a html email – a euro symbol, for example – can be just such one of those times.
Recently I needed to move a database I had running in RDS to a machine on a new digitalocean account. Usually a fairly simple process, the first step of which is to export the database using mysqldump. But when I ran the command locally, I got an unusual error - "Couldn't execute 'SET OPTION SQL_QUOTE_SHOW_CREATE=1':You have an error in your SQL syntax"
On several recent projects I’ve been using VirtualBox and Vagrant to spin up new development machines. My code was mounted from a windows host, and initially all was going well. Then suddenly my app started spitting out javascript errors. Digging in to chrome’s error console, it looked like the last 40 or 50 bytes of the file were missing. Same for the CSS files. A frustrating investigation had begun...
Recently I was working on a new project on a virtual box set up through vagrant. For those of you who haven't used it, vagrant is an amazing tool that makes it crazy-easy to set up and deploy uniform development environments on virtual servers. However, I ran in to a very frustrating issue when trying to install the node.js framework express through npm.
Topical pages like the Property Tax Calculator tend to get shared more often on social networks, so we took a few small steps to ensure that the page looked it’s best when it shows up in a twitter timeline or Facebook feed
Last week we launched a Property Tax Calculator on Daft.ie. This calculates the Local Property Tax (LPT) due to be paid when the new tax scheme starts in July 2013. So, where did the idea come from, and how does it work?
How much traffic is a mention on RTE's lunchtime Liveline show worth to a website?
Google recently published a list of 30 updates made to search over the tail end of 2011. Tucked away in the middle of the list is mention of improved support for rich snippets. However it looks like google has also been testing out ways of extracting structured data from pages which have no defined snippet and contain multiple items – starting with real estate classifieds. What’s equally interesting here is that it seems having clear and valid markup may have an extra impact on your site’s appearance in the Google results and number of visitors clicking through!
We’ve decided that in running the half marathon that we’d like to try and raise money for the Mark Pollock Trust, which is where you hopefully come in…
Daft.ie is Ireland's largest property portal. After listing an advertisement, it can be "renewed", confirming continued availability, and pushing the ad back towards the top of the rankings. As ads can only be renewed once a day, a question we often get asked is "what's the best time to renew my ad in order to get maximum exposure?" Great question! Let's figure it out by taking a look at the time ad replies are sent through the site.
Bookmarklets allow us as a user to add some basic functionality to a web site from our browser, without needing to have access to that site’s server. Once the bookmarklet is clicked, whatever javascript it contains will execute on the current page.
Twitter recently launched “Hovercards” on the web interface. Whenever I move my mouse up, down or across my timeline, these hovercards are springing up and obscuring other tweets in the timeline. Personally, I’ve been finding this feature far more annoying than useful, so would like to turn it off. Let's try this with a bookmarklet.
DeClutter is a javascript bookmarklet which will remove from your timeline any tweets which match a “blacklist” of keywords you’ve defined.