Home | A Northwoods Cabin

Deploying a Nuxt Universal App to Vercel

A great explanation of how to deploy a Nuxt SSR app on Vercel with a bonus of showing when to use devDependencies versus dependencies in your package.json file.

Read the article here →

1 week ago

Timber Frame Cabin... v2!

Work has started on version 2 of the Northwoods Cabin, beginning with milling of trees into beams.

May 21

For When Things Get Gnarly in Eloquent

Jonathan Reinink has written some excellent content around Eloquent and this article is one that I reference frequently. Jonathan walks us through handling sticky situations when we need to get a single record back from a relationship without causing N+1 issues.

Dynamic Relationships in Laravel using Subqueries →

May 20

5 Ways to Shortcut Experience

Robbing developers of the chance to level up their own experience journey does more harm than good. Recognizing that it is the very process of failing and succeeding that truly matters, and it is what moves junior team members along in a healthy growth pattern.

May 14

Changing CLI PHP Versions on Laravel Homestead

A quick and easy way to change the working CLI PHP version in Laravel Homestead.

Mar 25

Eager Loading Polymorphic Relations

Derek MacDonald wrote a nice post about eager loading polymorphic relationships. This has been a difficult item to solve so it's nice to see a documented approach that works for many scenarios. Thanks Derek!

Eager Loading Polymorphic Relations →

Mar 16

Building a Laravel / MQTT App on Laravel Forge

Using a simple node script you can subscribe to an MQTT broker and forward messages to a Laravel application. Take a look at this article to see how we connected inexpensive temperature sensors to a web app for logging and reporting issues.

Feb 15

Handling Complex Data Flows

In this post, written for the Zaengle blog, I explore some strategies for navigating multi-step flows. Separating the data from the logic helps make the process more manageable.

"At its core, programming is nothing more than stacking little blocks of logic on each other, building up a structure comprised of detailed organization, intentional design, and functional beauty. Unless those goals are held front and center it is only a matter of time before the system devolves into a convoluted mess of overlapping, overstepping, messy code."

Read the entire article on the Zaengle blog →

Feb 12

Interrogations & Conversations

Reframing close-ended questions with open-ended invites conversation and removes the sense of being interrogated.

Feb 9

It's Not You, It's Me.

"Beneffectance" is the name of a cognitive bias that suggests a person will readily claim responsibility for positive outcomes, yet reluctantly admit having a part in negative ones.

Feb 7