27 Sept 2022
I read a thought-provoking Tweet recently which unfortunately I’ve been unable to dig up now. Essentially, it proposed the notion that, when building software, we need fewer code reviews and more pair-programming.
25 Aug 2022
Notion is an excellent productivity tool, which I use extensively for my daily journalling. Another awesome tool I use as a developer is Eleventy (11ty). 11ty is a static site generator built in Node.js. A static site generator means the building of webpage occurs in a separate process to viewing the website. This has the huge benefit of serving up a load of uncomplicated, plain HTML pages to the end user, really fast.
20 Apr 2022
I’m pretty new to 11ty, and I’m figuring things out as I go. One of those things recently was cache busting my CSS. I’m by no means an expert in front-end development, but I figured it couldn’t be that hard to add a fingerprint hash to my CSS files to ensure changes are always pulled in by the browser when viewing my site.
17 Nov 2014
Packages are great. For PHP, Composer has made modularising your code and managing dependencies within your app easy peasy. The topic of this blog post, however, is about what exactly constitutes a package, and where things do and don't belong. I will be talking in the context of the Laravel, as this is what we use at work, but these points should be roughly relatable to any modern framework that utilises Composer.
26 Jul 2012
I've never really *got* web development frameworks. Sure, I understand what they're trying to achieve and I can appreciate they can save you a lot of time. But I don't see the benefit of them in the long term.
15 Jul 2012
I'm a web developer by trade; concerning myself more with how stuff works, rather than how it looks. It's somewhat of a cliche, but, as with a lot of people, I don't feel I chose my career, it sort of chose me. I simply did what I found interesting. I liked computers, so I did 3 years at University studying them; got myself an internship, followed by a job, and since then haven't really looked back since.
19 Oct 2011
Well, after a rather long time of just not really "getting" Twitter, thanks to my 101 Project (and heavy persuasion from my work colleagues) I've decided to give Twitter a bash. I'm @samdking - look me up!
28 Sept 2011
Today, I am launching my project for the next 1001 days (or, in long, that's roughly 2 years and 9 months). The project is to list down 101 things you would like to achieve in that time. I got the idea off a friend, and my aim is to inspire someone to do the same (y'know, that and actually complete the list).
18 Sept 2011
Something dawned on me today when working on my ongoing project to create a lightweight, completely from-scratch PHP framework (I've blogged about this several times if you care to catch up). When you're starting out at something and learning the ropes, your rate of improvement, success and general productivity in the activity is far greater than when you've grasped it. In my experience, this is true of learning PHP
22 Jan 2011
After almost 18 months, I've finally bitten the bullet and invested in some paid hosting for my domain SamuelDking.co.uk. Simply enough, I'm tired of constantly seeing 'Cannot connect to database' messages when trying to view the site. The free hosting wasn't bad and did its job, but my new server should be a lot more reliable.
22 Sept 2010
When learning the ins and outs of web design, after learning the obligatory HTML and CSS, the next logical step for most is learning a server-side language; the most popular choice being PHP. PHP opens up the possibilities of what can be acheived on a webpage and often bridges the gap between web design and web development for most.
20 Sept 2010
A quick to post mention Coda, from Panic: 'Shockingly Good Mac Software'. With a company tag-line as confident and self-assured as that, it'd be a shame not to check out this bit of software. In a nutshell, Panic develop web-based software for Macs. The particular bit of software I'm interested in is Coda.