Blog - Liam Hammett

Why I Prefer Discord Over Slack

Sep 14th 2018 by Liam Hammett · 8 minute read · #opinion #discord #slack #chat

I’ve used more than my fair share of chat apps and solutions in the past, for both personal and professional use. AIM, MSN, Skype, IRC, Pidgin, HipChat, and Mattermost — to name the few that I’ve used for at least a year.

But over the years, they’ve all mostly faded away with two standing at the forefront: Slack for professional use, and Discord for gaming and casual use.

I use both on a daily basis, but strongly prefer Discord out of these two options, for both general use and coding discussion. Here I’m going to explain why Discord is better.

CSS Filter Utility Classes

Sep 12th 2018 by Liam Hammett · 4 minute read · #css

(Ab)using CSS variables to apply multiple filters with one utility

Note: This article has a CodePen demo with inline examples, check it out towards the end.

The filter property is a bit of an oddity when it comes to CSS.

Catching an exit(); in PHP

Sep 8th 2018 by Liam Hammett · 1 minute read · #php

What do you do when something goes wrong in your PHP application? Probably throwing an exception, so it can be caught at a higher level and handled appropriately.

What happens when instead of throwing an exception, an exit(); is executed? Can you catch it?

Bitmask Constant Arguments in PHP

Aug 23rd 2018 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.

Throttle Simultaneous API Requests with Laravel

Jul 13th 2018 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?

Laravel Set .env File Variable

Jul 13th 2018 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.

imliam/laravel-env-set-command

Set a .env file variable from the command line. Contribute to imliam/laravel-env-set-command development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Use Operator on Any Website

Jul 5th 2018 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!

PHP Shareable Social Media Links

Jun 27th 2018 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.

Cenafy For Bash

Mar 10th 2018 by Liam Hammett · 2 minute read · #open-source #bash

Photo of someone being Cenafied in a terminal

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:

Lua Collections

Mar 4th 2018 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.

imliam/Lua-Collections

A robust Lua collection class based on Laravel collections. - imliam/Lua-Collections

github.com

PHP Function Chaining with Pipes

Feb 24th 2018 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.

jQuery.scrollup.js Plugin

Mar 14th 2017 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.

Example of how scrolling up to the top of the frame refreshes the page

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.