Alex Miles πŸ‘¨πŸ»β€πŸ’»'s Avatar

Alex Miles πŸ‘¨πŸ»β€πŸ’»

@ghostaldev.com.bsky.social

PHP developer πŸ‘¨πŸ»β€πŸ’» General code botherer πŸ–₯️ Musician 🎸 Sci-fi/fantasy fan πŸ‘¨πŸ»β€πŸš€

17 Followers  |  28 Following  |  41 Posts  |  Joined: 23.08.2023  |  1.811

Latest posts by ghostaldev.com on Bluesky

Pretty amused that the name of the --no-trunc option of docker history is itself truncated

Oh the irony

23.07.2025 09:26 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Yeah, I came to that conclusion too. Sometimes though, the business logic is complex enough to not be easily reflected by simple equivalent logic with the DB facade.

Another common problem is what to do in the down() method when the up() method has already destructively edited the data πŸ˜¬πŸ˜…

10.06.2025 20:15 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Do you ever do data changes during a migration? As opposed to just schema changes?

I try to avoid it for various reasons, but it's not easy to convince others, and sometimes it seems inescapable... but it always feels wrong.

10.06.2025 17:31 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
A screenshot of Kevin's terminal window from the course video, showing some migrations that have been created with timestamps just after 3:58am

A screenshot of Kevin's terminal window from the course video, showing some migrations that have been created with timestamps just after 3:58am

Watching Kevin McKee's series on Laravel Filament on #laracasts

Glad to see I'm not the only one who's generating migrations at 3:58am πŸ¦‰πŸŒ›

21.05.2025 15:33 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

My heart sinks when a product explainer video says something like "this isn't just a simple tool for drawing boxes and arrows, it's a revolutionary, game changing, multi functional, super-powerful..." blah blah blah.

I just wanna draw some boxes and arrows, dude 😡

20.05.2025 16:12 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

I think we can all agree that it should be a crime to load ads which jump page content downwards after it's been rendered for the user

11.12.2024 17:09 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Day 5 - Advent of Code 2024

I just completed "Print Queue" - Day 5 - Advent of Code 2024 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2024/day/5

I found today surprisingly easy, once I'd thought about it for a few minutes. I could have predicted part two though, and implemented for it accordingly and used that to solve part one as well...

07.12.2024 03:21 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

This time I took a completely different approach with part two. The part that really slowed me down on part one was handling the diagonals. I got the first set of diagonals working fine quite quickly, but reversing the logic was a nightmare - until I thought to reverse the input with the same logic!

04.12.2024 22:40 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Day 4 - Advent of Code 2024

I just completed "Ceres Search" - Day 4 - Advent of Code 2024 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2024/day/4

Having said what I said yesterday, I actually completed part two quicker than part one!

Part 1: About an hour
Part 2: About 40 minutes.

04.12.2024 22:38 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

As always, part two took considerably longer than part one. In this instance, about 5 minutes for part one, and about 45 minutes for part two. I bet if I knew regexp better I could have shaved at least 30 minutes off that.

03.12.2024 18:59 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Day 3 - Advent of Code 2024

I just completed "Mull It Over" - Day 3 - Advent of Code 2024 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2024/day/3

Pretty sure I need to learn regular expressions more thoroughly. Didn't have time this evening though, so wrote a little do/while loop with a file pointer to ignore the "bad" parts of the string.

03.12.2024 18:57 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

I just completed "Red-Nosed Reports" - Day 2 - Advent of Code 2024 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2024/day/2

That one was more of a struggle - I misinterpreted how the Problem Dampener worked, which threw me off for a while, as I was applying the "dampening" after I'd already done a transformation.

02.12.2024 21:25 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

I just completed "Historian Hysteria" - Day 1 - Advent of Code 2024 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2024/day/1

Very straightforward, but I expect as the month goes on things will get much trickier!

02.12.2024 19:51 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Dear Slack,

You were already very annoying. Adding "AI" features, and popups etc to try and encourage me to use them, has made you even more annoying.

Yours sincerely,
Alex

02.12.2024 17:55 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Just created myself a handy bash alias:

alias agnostic-composer="composer --ignore-platform-reqs --no-scripts"

Really useful for quickly getting a freshly-cloned Laravel Sail project to the point where you can do `sail up`, for example:

git clone ...
agnostic-composer install
sail up

21.11.2024 14:46 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Set up a bird feeding tray on my balcony. A bird has done a shit in it.

#Monday

11.11.2024 12:09 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Well... credit where credit is due... Bitbucket auto-saved the PR description, and out of an hour of work, I only lost two words! 😁

25.10.2024 18:13 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Desperately hoping my laptop recovers from whatever CPU fugue it's just got itself into, and that Bitbucket isn't about to lose the last hour of my work for me on Friday afternoon 😫🀞🏻

25.10.2024 16:34 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

YEAAAH HTML! 🀘🏻 WHO CARES ABOUT GRAMMAR

25.10.2024 16:30 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Did it reportedly go somewhere?

23.10.2024 22:29 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Installed Ubuntu Noble on my laptop last night. It's really great how easy it is to install a Linux distro these days!

13.10.2024 15:22 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Anecdotes? Androgyny? Anaplasty? Anacondas?

13.10.2024 15:20 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Post image

// Hasta la vista, baby

10.10.2024 14:16 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

I'm planning to learn some Grafana basics - enough to get a feel for how I can use it to help make sense of the noise - and start considering the possibilities for a SAAS idea I have.

09.10.2024 00:07 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
a close up of a man 's face with his eyes closed Alt: Michael Scott from The Office putting his head in his hand

I just finally worked out why the popular PHP date library is called "Carbon"

Only took me several years.

30.09.2024 23:10 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
lofi hip hop radio - beats to study/relax to 🐾
YouTube video by Chillhop Music lofi hip hop radio - beats to study/relax to 🐾

Right, time for me and the raccoon to get some stuff done.

30.09.2024 22:29 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

I tend to avoid writing comments in my code, in favour of...

- descriptive variable/method/class names
- logical structure
- short methods
etc

BUT I find comments are essential for tests, because test code can get cluttered, complex and confusing.

But maybe I'm just bad at writing tests? πŸ€”

18.09.2024 02:39 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Do you include a check for rolling back your migrations in your CI pipeline? πŸ”™

It's obvious that the pipeline needs to run migrations forward, but it's easy to forget that checking rollbacks is very important too!

17.09.2024 03:52 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

I've definitely experienced this... coming into a project where *everything* had been generalised and abstracted "for flexibility" meant I had a much harder job figuring out the answer to the simple question of "what is this piece of code FOR?"

11.09.2024 04:22 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Using "πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ" was also a particularly nice shorthand for the reviewer being able to acknowledge that something was admittedly a very minor issue, but still worth highlighting.

And the emoji made it easier for PR authors to quickly scan through the comments and get a feel for the PR feedback overall.

10.09.2024 13:30 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

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