Lazy Loading a Laravel Model relationship through a repository

If your Laravel Model needs access to repository for pulling relationship data, think again. It’s the wrong way round, don’t do it. Your models need access to data without any N+1 issues from using Lazy load. So if you need to merge some data streams and return a collection, rather than use a repo call […]

Paying the Mac “Tax”

Paying the Mac Tax, or “should I buy our developers Macs or cheaper PCs?”. Often the idea of buying staff an Apple Mac’s for work seems like a poor business decision. It’s expensive and surely nothing more than “pretty thing”. Doesn’t everything work on Windows anyway right? You can hear it in your mind saying, “how […]

First thoughts on Amy (x dot aiiiii)

Last week I was part of the lucky few to get onto Amy’s good list. I made it to the automated personal assistant free account and she happily just set about handling her first meeting. https://x.ai/ So how’d it go? Over-all it was great, and sooooo close…… The on-boarding was real easy. The instructions are REALLY […]

gitlab CI fail 128 and how to solve it

If you are seeing this, then it means an earlier test has spannered out so bad that it’s now preventing other tests from working. This quickest way to un-block it is… ssh into the runner and delete the .git/index.lock! Then re-run and it should all clear out. HTH fatal: Unable to create ‘/home/admin/tmp/builds/runner-XXX/.git/index.lock’: File exists. […]

2 new Laravel things I’m using

Just wanted to share these two simple things I’ve recently found for Laravel 5.3 1. Repository Generator https://github.com/andersao/l5-repository This packages just removed about half a day of setting up the backend CRUD per. Model / Entity. A few commands, follow the instructions and then boom, you’ve got a fully functional repository class. Sure, I’d need […]

Strengths Finder 2.0 – Gallup

Strengths Finder 2.0 – Gallup My Personal Strengths @dancourse > 1 Strategic > 2 Ideation > 3 Relator > 4 Includer > 5 Significance The book, Strengths Finder 2.0 We all like a good personality quiz, c’mon you’ve been tempted by a few Quizzes on your Facebook profile and Buzzfeed right? You hope they may […]

The Lean Startup – joining up the pieces

What a relief to find this book. It’s already beginning to tie up a few concepts I’ve heard over the years and make them form a better picture of what’s been going on in the Tech / Startup industry. The Lean Startup It was Jamie King who mentioned it at Games for Health Conference UK […]

4 simple ways to increase you GitLab CI test speed

Our in-house development projects are well covered for Unit and Frontend tests since we adopted BDD (behat) and a bit of TDD (phpspec). However, creating lots of tests has an impact downstream on our shared Gitlab CI server. Every-time we push a new set of changes to GitLab the tests are taking 30mins to complete and […]

Manual QA #FTW :(

Recently I’ve been looking to improve our app delivery QA. We’ve had to come up with a solution for our team to run the QA. So we got the test plan from them and currently the QA was being run from a spreadsheet… on one person’s machine. So after much chatting with our WMG Team, I lead the […]

[ReflectionException] Class LocalUsersSeeder does not exist

Just a quick techie post to help out any other laravelians’ who might hit this issue with Laravel 5.2 and database seeding. I’ve written a seeder and it keeps failing to seed when I run this, artisan migrate:refresh —seed [ReflectionException] Class LocalUsersSeeder does not exist Turns out the quick fix was all I had to […]