by Liam Hammett · 6 minute read · #php
PHP has a handful of core functions that can accept boolean arguments in the form of constants that have a binary value.
These can be combined together in a single function argument, essentially passing multiple boolean flags in a very compact manner.
They work a bit differently to how most people implement options in their userland functions, so let’s take a look at how they work.
by Liam Hammett · 2 minute read · #open-source #php #laravel
Laravel comes with a handy ThrottleRequests middleware out-of-the-box that blocks users of an API from being able to send more than a particular amount of requests within a defined amount of time.
This is extremely useful for preventing an API from being abused by spammed requests, but isn’t suitable for every use case.
What about an API call that takes a lot of limited processing power, or performs an action that simply can’t be running twice at the same time?
by Liam Hammett · 2 minute read · #open-source #php #laravel
Need a quick way to set an environment variable from the command line that’ll save it to the Laravel .env file?
Here’s a command to do just that.
by Liam Hammett · 3 minute read · #typography #css
Operator is a beautiful monospaced typeface that took the world by storm as it proved that coding typefaces can be both elegant and functional.
One way it helped stand out from the crowd is how certain italic glyphs take inspiration from script typefaces, making them distinct from the ordinary characters.
Improve it again by adding coding ligatures to it with Operator Mono Lig and you’ve got one swish font to code in!
by Liam Hammett · 2 minute read · #open-source #php
I recently had the need to generate various “shareable” links to help share a particular URL to different social media platforms. The problem is that every platform requires information in a slightly different way.
Lo and behold, just a few days later, Dennis Smink shared their method of doing so in their article “Laravel Shareable Trait” that covers the few biggest platforms.
by Liam Hammett · 2 minute read · #open-source #bash
Based on the wonderful Chrome extension of the same name that lets you know who the champ is, this is a version for Bash that lets an unsuspecting victim who left their terminal open know about the champ via the magic of ASCII art (and even some killer singing, if they have the say command like on Mac OS).
You can install it as a command with wget:
by Liam Hammett · 2 minute read · #open-source #lua
When working on Lua code bases, I frequently find that the code gets more difficult to read as the project gets more complex, partially due to how almost everything in Lua is an iterable table which allows for some extremely powerful functionality.
Introducing Lua Collections.
by Liam Hammett · 11 minute read · #php
Back in December 2016, freelance developer Sebastiaan Luca wrote a post on their blog inspired by an RFC proposal for PHP core about chaining functions, and here I am going to be responding to that blog post.
I highly recommend reading the aforementioned post and RFC to get an understanding of what function piping is as they do an amazing job at explaining the benefits it brings.
In short; it’s syntactic sugar to help make code more readable.
by Liam Hammett · 1 minute read · #javascipt #jquery #open-source
A jQuery plugin to recreate the commonly used “pull-to-refresh” found in mobile devices, but this time for the desktop browser.
The “pull-to-refresh” pattern and similar variations are commonly used all over mobile devices to perform a variety of functions such as refreshing a web page, checking for new mail and loading old chat messages as you’re scrolling through, but rarely makes its way over to desktop devices for one reason or another.
