christalks.dev latest posts

Integrating with external APIs is a common task for a developer, but it can quickly become a hard to maintain mess!

One of the biggest hurdles in migrating a legacy site is the users database.

Kubernetes can be confusing and creating service accounts for deployment is no exception.

Learn how to implement robust authentication using pre-shared keys and HMAC signatures to protect your webhook endpoints.

Sometimes, the standard Heroicon set just isn't enough.

Laravel is an excellent framework that supports multilingual functionality out of the box - but it doesn't go as far as setting up the routing for you.

If you're working on your responsive game, this tiny tooltip trick might be of use to you!

The state machine pattern isn't something you often hear about, but its critical to almost every piece of technology you experience in every day life

Interfaces - often known as contracts - felt like a big leap in the early days of programming.

PHP Attributes are a powerful feature of PHP >= 8.

Following on from my recent introduction to my auditing package, I'm going to show how quick and easy it is to implement an audit log viewer into FilamentPHP admin panel

I recently wrote a package (Simple Laravel Auditing) with the aim of making it quick and easy to add auditing in your Laravel Application

Laravel makes heavy use of drivers for everything from session management to caching, and there's no reason why you shouldn't use it too!

Installing node is made easy with Node Version Manager.

The action pattern is a common programming pattern that allows you to abstract code into elements known as actions.

A quick and dirty guide to installing Rancher, complete with SSL certificate to manage your Kubernetes clusters

Meilisearch is an amazing open-source search engine with an intuitive API to rival the likes of Algolia.

I use Spatie Media Library - a lot - and one really useful technique is to have the same storage system, with environment prefixes

Adding ReCaptcha to your forms is a necessary step when handling public form submissions, but adding it for Livewire is a little trickier.

Queues are a powerful tool in the Laravel framework.

API's can be a pain - throttling is an issue you'll often encounter, particularly with large datasets.

A quick tip for adding globally available 'helper methods' in Laravel

I thought I'd share this quick tip as I'm in the process of building a system that handles large quantities of data.

I've been writing some tests to check my new subscription form functions as expected.

I share a surprisingly simple zero-downtime deployment technique that utilises Deployer 7 and GitHub Actions to automatically and atomically deploy Laravel applications.

As we make the switch from BitBucket to GitHub, I've been embracing GitHub Actions for automatic test running.

Detailing my decisions and choices when making this blog I give a quick insight into the technology stack that I chose and some of the reasons why.