Today, I almost contributed to Laravel . 🤣 It was a little sus that I wanted to add something so obvious, I was wondering why the core developers hadn't thought of it. I forked it, made a commit, and was about to press the New pull request button when I realized I was an idiot. Obviously.

I asked AI to refactor our Laravel exception handler, because it's a pile of if-instanceofs, butt ugly. Most of them did good (handler methods and a match expression). Claude did this: every handler method starts with the same if-instanceof check and returns null on false. 🤦

It's a f* disaster what frontend development has become. We're in a meeting looking at designs for a simple product list campaign page when the lead frontend guy says 3 MONTHS might not be enough for this. WTF?! 10+ years ago we'd put things like this together in days. Basic HTML, CSS, minimal JS.

Ten years ago there was this megahit "No Good in Goodbye" from the band called The Script. There was just one problem with it:

"goodbye".indexOf("good") --> 0 👍
"nice try".indexOf("nice") --> 0 👍
"trust gone".indexOf("us") --> 2 👍
"soldier on".indexOf("soul") --> -1 🤷

😏

Interesting: I asked Claude about injecting something into Laravel's default exception handler. It came up with this solution with two parameters for the parent constructor. This is hallucination. The valid parameter is Container, but back in Laravel 5.x times it was Log, hence the confusion. 🤔

Two years ago, when I got my new job, the first thing that happened was that, with Slack open in one of the central channels, the cat marched across the keyboard, and of course, it hit Enter at the end. 😺😅

Strange behavior with Laravel Installer: it self-updates to 5.11 even though the latest version is 5.11.1, and then it won't run on PHP 8.3 anymore because it wants to use mb_rtrim() which requires PHP 8.4 or the new polyfill-mbstring 1.31. Wonder why it doesn't self-update to 5.11.1? 🤔

Back in the saddle! After the tricky day 6, and a somewhat complicated day 7 (I hate programming permutations, even though the repeating perms are easier to code), day 8 was a walk in the park. Or rather, between antennas. 😊

Ah, the beauty of Advent of Code! I'm still struggling with yesterday's (day 6) part 2. There's obviously something wrong with my loop detection, but I have no idea what. I'm so desperate now that I'm brute forcing every possible cell in the map and still don't have the right answer. 🤓🙄😫

Advent of Code 2024, Day 2. Unexpected difficulties. 😅

I was adamant that I could solve part 2 without creating the subsets of the original array of numbers. Well, after struggling with it for an hour, I gave up, and created the subsets. It was so easy, short, and clean. I was so mad at myself. 😆

Here we go, Advent of Code 2024, Day 1. 😀🎉🚀🎅

adventofcode.com

Well, the first few of days are just a warm-up. Last year day 5 was the first I couldn't solve right away. From then on it was all downhill. I made it to day 22 with missing parts here and there. Let's see how I do this year. 🤓

Announcing the pre-release of the PHP Installer for Extensions (PIE) 🎉

Think of it as Composer for PHP extensions: they’re distributed via Packagist and handled similar to regular PHP packages.

Check it out and share your feedback 🐘💜

thephp.foundation/blog/2024/11...

Yesterday I was looking at code from applicants for our open PHP dev position, and two things are common: they are insanely over-engineered, and they are written in PHP from years ago, as if the guys don't know anything about what has happened to the language since 8.x. Really strange. 🤨🤔