A Spark of Activity

Today I was awake at 5 AM. It was the start a rare weekend to myself, and so I decided to try and make the most of it. I couldn't relax and play games or read — I had to do something. I had to build something.

Recently I've been working on the periphery of PHP and specifically Laravel a lot with work. I haven't properly touched PHP since the early days of my career, back in 2001-2006 and things have changed quite a bit. Gone is writing everything yourself, these days, Laravel does almost everything for you.

I've seen a bit of chatter about it among builders, that the whole modern stack of microservices is slowing us down and burning us out, and for what we want to build, maybe there is some merit to monoliths. I mean, cycles happen, and I think it's because we get jaded and want to do things differently.

So I thought, why not?

I spent a lot of today going through Laravel's bootcamp — where you build a very simple microblogging platform (Twitter on the opposite of steroids) with both the standard templating system, blade, and a more interactive system, Livewire. To experienced people reading this it'll seem extremely basic, but that's the joy of programming, sometimes you have to be humble and start from the same place as someone in their first year of coding.

Fortunately, I can breeze through it (there's a joke for Laravel folks) understanding many of the deeper concepts. The syntax is a little jarring, the <?php tag feels ugly without it's corresponding ?> and especially when you consider that over 20 years ago I stopped adding php and just used <? ?>. But it's okay.

I also spent quite a bit of time playing with ploi.io – a kind of Laravel Forge (CI/CD) clone that became its own things. I actually really like it, and the chap running it (kudos to solo dev!) seems active in Discord.

My next plan is build a really simple dummy SaaS style product using Laravel and probably Jetstream (the all-in-one starter kit for user auth). I recently realised .site TLDs are cheap as chips so I'm using them for my little ideas rather than .co's which are more expensive.

Today trackhits.site was added to my exhaustive list of domains. Let's see what the experience is like building with Laravel alongside my trusty collection of AI pair programming friends.

Feels good to spend a day writing code. My GitHub contribution chart shows the stark change since the recent dry spell (well: a lot of work time spent on non-code dev, planning, strategy, pm etc.) with 77 commits today (so far).

That IS a hot spot. However, it's now 20:26 and I started at 5:26 with only about 2 hours break cumulative today so I make that out to be 13 hours. I've loved getting absorbed into code again — discovering, learning, building little things.

Tomorrow will be more of the same. Let's see what this thing can do.