“…and we’d like the jobs sorted by Started, Pending, Finished, please.” How many times have you heard that and cringed? Didn’t marketing people learn the alphabet when they were young? Well, throw away those awful CASE WHEN… hacks and subquery tables. Make way for ENUM and ORDER BY FIELD! The…

It’s the end of the month, and your store manager comes to you with a request. The store ran a special promotion in the third week of September with the idea of luring back existing customers who hadn’t shopped in a while. He has all the sales data for the…

Recently I watched Misko Hevery’s talk “The Clean Code Talks — Inheritance, Polymorphism, & Testing” and was particulary struck by his polymorphism example. …

Just a quick tip that really extends an old post from here about MySQL’s ORDER BY FIELD ( ENUM and ORDER BY FIELD — customized sorting in mysql) Building an API and we want to allow users to request items and have them returned in the same order they ask…

Tag: Laravel 5.1+, Eloquent Like zombies, they lurch forward out of the swirling fog of the documentation, threatening your peace of mind…`firstOrNew`. `firstOrCreate`. `updateOrCreate`. You can look away, but you can never forget they’re there… Okay, probably better saved for Halloween than April Fool’s. Still, for a great many of…

Tag: Laravel 5.0+ This is taken from a post and discussion on Laravel Quick Tips that people found to be pretty useful, and so I thought I’d expand on it a little and share. I’m sure you’ve all had to do a human-readable “time left” before — for example, an…

Tag: Laravel 5.0+, Faker Hello, Mr. asdfgh qweefg! Welcome to kgjhjgjh! Thank you. Only the name’s not “asdfgh qweefg”. Sorry! It’s just easier.. You’re always showing everyone on Laravel Quick Tips these helpful little tricks. Why not show them how to give me a proper name? Nice plug! …

Tag: Laravel v5.0+ I’m a bit of a bouldering fanatic these days. When I first started about a year ago, I was a typical clumsy beginner; butt hanging out, feet scrambling noisily against the wall, searching blindly for toeholds, grasping and gasping for that handhold just out of reach. Lately…

Tag: PHP v5.0+ Driven crazy with all the flags being constantly added to your tables? Migrations files stacked higher than the *other* Jeff Madsen’s poker chips at a championship game? Have no fear! The Mahana Bitfield Library is a simple and useful library. Using Bitfield Masking we can condense up…