Writing

Building a responsive sidebar application layout

I wanted to share a CSS and webcomponent layout that I’ve been pretty happy with in a few projects. With webcomponents now widely supported, I was able to remove one of the last bit of inline scripts I had left in docket converting it to a webcomponent. The layout offers a layout with a 250px sidebar and content area.

My Upgrades to CakePHP 4.5.0

A few months back I upgraded docket and this site to CakePHP 4.5 from an earlier 4.x release. I wanted to share my notes from the upgrade process so that if you’re considering an upgrade you have a better idea of what to expect.

Sudo Mode with CakePHP Authorization Plugin

I’ve been working on content for my CakeFest workshop this year, and thought it would be interesting to see a commonly used authorization pattern implemented as an extension to CakePHP’s authorization system. The pattern I wanted to implement was ‘sudo mode’. Often this pattern is used in applications that have longer session duration.

Webauthn in CakePHP

I have been following the Webauthn standards and browser support since the early days of FIDO compatible keys. I strongly believe that hardware keys are our best path forward to provide phishing resistant, easy to operate authentication, that doesn’t compromise on privacy.

Getting started with Ajax Pagination & AlpineJs

I recently decided to go down a rabbit hole of wanting to learn a new client side library. I was interested in learning more about libraries that aimed to have a minimal footprint even at the cost of providing a more modest API. For this site I have simple requirements, and I wanted to see how simple the ‘simple’ abstractions are these days.

Using phive to install PHP tools

Modern PHP development generally means using a suite of tools to perform code formatting and static analysis. For a long time, I have been using composer to install theses developement tools. While using composer works great, when you’re working on multiple projects it results in duplicate copies of frequently used tools.

Designing my first Keyboard PCB

In 2021, I designed and built a custom split keyboard . I quite enjoy that keyboard, and it has been my daily driver for the past eight months. After completing the hand wired board, I wanted to learn more about electronics, and keyboards. The natural next step to me was to learn how to take my custom layout to the next level of completion.

Improved CASE expression in CakePHP 4.3

CakePHP 4.3 was recently released, and it contains a greatly improved way to build CASE expressions. CASE expressions are great when you want to do conditional aggregation or add computed fields to results. Lets say you wanted to create SQL that mapped integer values to string names, you could use SQL that looks like:

Switching to NeoVim Native LSP

I do all of my day to day work in vim, specifically NeoVim . One of my favorite plugins as of late has been the CoC plugin. CoC provides language server integrations, autocompletion, linting, and formatting all in one easy use package.

Testing SQLServer and PHP locally in 2021

I’ve recently been working on overhauling the test database fixture system in CakePHP . My goals are to separate fixture schema management from fixture data management. By doing this applications will more easily be able to use their existing schema management to generate their test database. This project has entailed fixing many differences between the database servers that CakePHP supports.