Michael

Reason 1,000,001 why OpenAI sucks - blog.thms.uk AAfter days of debugging unexplained span usage in Sentry - despite an ultra-low sampling rate - I discovered `traceparent` headers in requests traced back to OpenAI. Turns out, it's always AI.

It appears as though OpenAI's crawler is crawling the web with tracing headers set. Wasting even more resources than they already do by instructing all the tracing libraries out their to trace all of OpenAI's requests...

blog.thms.uk/2025/05/open...

#web #webdev #ai #openai

Using Laravel's `PromptsForMissingInput` interface - blog.thms.uk Discover how to enhance your Laravel Artisan commands using the PromptsForMissingInput trait. Learn to dynamically prompt for missing arguments, apply real-time validation, and leverage Laravel Prompt...

Yesterday I had a fun discussion with my son who had written a seeder to create the inital admin user in his Laravel project.

So that led me to write this blog post about Laravel’s PromptsForMissingInput interface:

blog.thms.uk/2025/04/prom...

#laravel #php

Cross-Language Queues: Sending Jobs from Node.js to Laravel - blog.thms.uk Did you know you can push jobs into a Laravel queue from outside your application? Whether you're offloading tasks from a Node.js service or integrating Laravel with external systems, queues make it e...

Did you know you can push jobs into a Laravel queue from outside your application? Whether you're offloading tasks from a Node.js service or integrating Laravel with external systems, queues make it easy to handle background processing efficiently.

blog.thms.uk/2025/03/lara...

#laravel #php

Installing and configuring Plausible Analytics Community Edition on Ubuntu - blog.thms.uk Running through how to install Plausible Analytics Community Edition with its requirements on a bare Ubuntu server.

New blog post:

Installing and configuring Plausible Community Edition.

blog.thms.uk/2025/01/plau...

Creating a Custom PHP Carbon formatter using macros - blog.thms.uk Using a Carbon macro to customise formatting of date intervals.

You probably all know this, but it was new to me: Carbon supports macros to extend the API

I recently used a macro to round the output of longAbsoluteDiffForHumans in a Laravel project, and because it’s new to me I wrote a short blog post:

blog.thms.uk/2025/01/cust...

#php #laravel #carbon

Smart Routing with Nginx: Serving Different Sites Based on IP and Cookies - blog.thms.uk This post shows how you can use nginx to set a different website root based on a combination of the visitor's IP address and cookies. You can use this to allow staff and contractors to test a new site...

The other day I needed to find a way to show a completely different site to users based on their IP addresses and/or cookies in their browser.

I wrote blog post about how I accomplished this here:

blog.thms.uk/2024/07/smar...

#ngnix #web #webDev

Using session cookies with Node.js and Axios - blog.thms.uk This post shows how to use `axios-support-wrapper` to add support for `tough-cookies` to the Axios HTTP client in Node.js, so that you can use session cookies in Node.js

This morning I learned how to use sessions and session cookies with axios in Node.js.

I wrote a very short blog post about this:

blog.thms.uk/2024/06/node...

#node #nodejs #axios

Event Listeners in Laravel 11 - blog.thms.uk Simplifying event listener registration in Laravel 11

It really annoys me that in Laravel 11 you cannot have multiple listeners for the same event in an array like you could in L10.

It's not like it's a big deal, as it's simple enough to implement, but just seems like a step backwards.

What do you think?

blog.thms.uk/2024/05/even...

#Laravel #PHP