Harry

2024 in Review Hey there! Welcome to my third successive Year in Review post. I create these posts to write up a summary of what's happened in the year, how my blog has performed, and what went on along the sides. ...

Finally got around to doing my yearly review post. Hope everyone has a good 2025 and feel free to point me to yours if you have your own posts! I love reading them!

harrk.dev/2024-in-revi...

Put together a home server using spare parts and now I’ve fell down the self hosted hole 🙈 There are so many cool self hosted projects out there. Too many!

Telling your users that an "Unknown error has occurred" helps nobody.

It's something I see more often than I'd like and the solution is to peruse a checklist of 100 things that can go wrong.

Help users by giving them clear error messages and in turn they can help you.

Figured it's worth mentioning since I assumed this applied to any collection which just caught me out. It only works when you have a collection of eloquent models (as far as I know). If this holds a regular array instead, it won't work.

It felt like yesterday when Rhythm of War was released. Can’t believe it has been 4 years since and now here we are with Stormlight Archive book 5. I’m not ready for this!

Yoohoo 👋

Gave Simple Analytics a spin and got to say I'm impressed. Having a single script you can copy and paste without tweaking it between each site is a godsend when you're adding a load of them.

Considering taking the HSK1 test next year as a little personal challenge. My Mandarin is all over the place so having some structure should help that.

octopus go schedule

Finally got Octopus Go as my fixed price tariff expired. Now I simply plug in the car whenever and it sets up a charging schedule taking advantage of cheaper energy rates overnight 😍

I had to tackle this issue last week and stumbled on the same post. Hetzner should’ve sent out a notification about it since it was of their doing. Would’ve saved me time at least.

He’s actually done it!

duckduckgo search results for randomqr

Every now and again I'll get an email from somebody who has distributed a QR code that goes to my website, asking if I'm able to fix it. (It's static, so no)

I've never been able to reproduce it and my generator never passes in my URL. It's stumped me, until now.

Could it really be this simple?

uptime monitor response time

Spent this afternoon tinkering with my blog's cache settings and now we're talking 50ms or so per request. UptimeRobot alone is showing a huge drop in response time.

Considering the server is located in Germany, I perhaps should've done this sooner!

array_walk and array_map why you do this?! Every time I’m caught out by the parameter switcharoo!

UK based 👋

Charizard ex

After so many lame packs I finally got something rare!

I recall how excited you were to finally find something that worked for you. It really sucks at the moment but here’s hoping the situation improves soonish.

Nice to see you here. How you were missed…

I love that my discover tab is full of cats. No clickbait, politics, conspiracies... just cats. It's bliss.

Ah crud, not again.

It’s a great strategy to get follow backs, it worked here. 👀

That’s awesome! I haven’t tried reverb yet, but it’s somewhere on my list haha

Awesome to see more #laravel peeps over here! Excited to hear what everyone is working on.

👋

Haha amen! Hope to see more people migrate over here!

Handling Inbound Emails With Mailgun And Laravel Did you know, that you can not only send emails using Mailgun, but you can receive them too? I'm not talking about the webhooks that can report when a user unsubscribes, an email fails to send, etc....

Did you know you can use Mailgun to capture inbound emails? For example: to capture leads for a CRM. Here’s how I do it with #laravel

harrk.dev/handling-inb...

The left thumb stick on my Steam Deck just had to break before a 13 hour flight. Yay…

How To Geolocate IP Addresses With Laravel For this article, I will show you how to grab geolocation data from a visitor's IP address. We won't be using any third-party APIs however we will be using MaxMind's GeoLite2 database, which does requ...

It's been five months since I last wrote a blog post. So I wrote a quick guide on geolocating IP addresses in #Laravel using the GeoLite2 database.

harrk.dev/how-to-geolo...

チキンカツ好き！🤤

PSA! Don't forget to double-check the data you send over WebSockets. These can be inspected via DevTools by your users just like an API request can.