Harry
@harrk.bsky.social
Lead Developer @ Helix Rail. Thoughts own. Blog: http://harrk.dev 📍Cheshire, UK
Finally got around to doing my yearly review post. Hope everyone has a good 2025 and feel free to point me to yours if you have your own posts! I love reading them!
harrk.dev/2024-in-revi...
harrk.dev/2024-in-revi...
2024 in Review
Hey there! Welcome to my third successive Year in Review post. I create these posts to write up a summary of what's happened in the year, how my blog has performed, and what went on along the sides.
...
harrk.dev
December 28, 2024 at 1:28 PM
Finally got around to doing my yearly review post. Hope everyone has a good 2025 and feel free to point me to yours if you have your own posts! I love reading them!
harrk.dev/2024-in-revi...
harrk.dev/2024-in-revi...
Put together a home server using spare parts and now I’ve fell down the self hosted hole 🙈 There are so many cool self hosted projects out there. Too many!
December 15, 2024 at 8:05 PM
Put together a home server using spare parts and now I’ve fell down the self hosted hole 🙈 There are so many cool self hosted projects out there. Too many!
Telling your users that an "Unknown error has occurred" helps nobody.
It's something I see more often than I'd like and the solution is to peruse a checklist of 100 things that can go wrong.
Help users by giving them clear error messages and in turn they can help you.
It's something I see more often than I'd like and the solution is to peruse a checklist of 100 things that can go wrong.
Help users by giving them clear error messages and in turn they can help you.
December 12, 2024 at 5:43 PM
Telling your users that an "Unknown error has occurred" helps nobody.
It's something I see more often than I'd like and the solution is to peruse a checklist of 100 things that can go wrong.
Help users by giving them clear error messages and in turn they can help you.
It's something I see more often than I'd like and the solution is to peruse a checklist of 100 things that can go wrong.
Help users by giving them clear error messages and in turn they can help you.
It felt like yesterday when Rhythm of War was released. Can’t believe it has been 4 years since and now here we are with Stormlight Archive book 5. I’m not ready for this!
December 6, 2024 at 8:19 AM
It felt like yesterday when Rhythm of War was released. Can’t believe it has been 4 years since and now here we are with Stormlight Archive book 5. I’m not ready for this!
Gave Simple Analytics a spin and got to say I'm impressed. Having a single script you can copy and paste without tweaking it between each site is a godsend when you're adding a load of them.
December 3, 2024 at 9:27 PM
Gave Simple Analytics a spin and got to say I'm impressed. Having a single script you can copy and paste without tweaking it between each site is a godsend when you're adding a load of them.
Considering taking the HSK1 test next year as a little personal challenge. My Mandarin is all over the place so having some structure should help that.
December 2, 2024 at 12:49 PM
Considering taking the HSK1 test next year as a little personal challenge. My Mandarin is all over the place so having some structure should help that.
Finally got Octopus Go as my fixed price tariff expired. Now I simply plug in the car whenever and it sets up a charging schedule taking advantage of cheaper energy rates overnight 😍
November 30, 2024 at 7:32 PM
Finally got Octopus Go as my fixed price tariff expired. Now I simply plug in the car whenever and it sets up a charging schedule taking advantage of cheaper energy rates overnight 😍
Every now and again I'll get an email from somebody who has distributed a QR code that goes to my website, asking if I'm able to fix it. (It's static, so no)
I've never been able to reproduce it and my generator never passes in my URL. It's stumped me, until now.
Could it really be this simple?
I've never been able to reproduce it and my generator never passes in my URL. It's stumped me, until now.
Could it really be this simple?
November 23, 2024 at 4:16 PM
Every now and again I'll get an email from somebody who has distributed a QR code that goes to my website, asking if I'm able to fix it. (It's static, so no)
I've never been able to reproduce it and my generator never passes in my URL. It's stumped me, until now.
Could it really be this simple?
I've never been able to reproduce it and my generator never passes in my URL. It's stumped me, until now.
Could it really be this simple?
Spent this afternoon tinkering with my blog's cache settings and now we're talking 50ms or so per request. UptimeRobot alone is showing a huge drop in response time.
Considering the server is located in Germany, I perhaps should've done this sooner!
Considering the server is located in Germany, I perhaps should've done this sooner!
November 23, 2024 at 3:01 PM
Spent this afternoon tinkering with my blog's cache settings and now we're talking 50ms or so per request. UptimeRobot alone is showing a huge drop in response time.
Considering the server is located in Germany, I perhaps should've done this sooner!
Considering the server is located in Germany, I perhaps should've done this sooner!
array_walk and array_map why you do this?! Every time I’m caught out by the parameter switcharoo!
November 21, 2024 at 5:13 PM
array_walk and array_map why you do this?! Every time I’m caught out by the parameter switcharoo!
After so many lame packs I finally got something rare!
November 20, 2024 at 8:04 PM
After so many lame packs I finally got something rare!
I love that my discover tab is full of cats. No clickbait, politics, conspiracies... just cats. It's bliss.
November 15, 2024 at 12:06 PM
I love that my discover tab is full of cats. No clickbait, politics, conspiracies... just cats. It's bliss.
Did you know you can use Mailgun to capture inbound emails? For example: to capture leads for a CRM. Here’s how I do it with #laravel
harrk.dev/handling-inb...
harrk.dev/handling-inb...
Handling Inbound Emails With Mailgun And Laravel
Did you know, that you can not only send emails using Mailgun, but you can receive them too?
I'm not talking about the webhooks that can report when a user unsubscribes, an email fails to send, etc....
harrk.dev
October 20, 2024 at 5:13 PM
Did you know you can use Mailgun to capture inbound emails? For example: to capture leads for a CRM. Here’s how I do it with #laravel
harrk.dev/handling-inb...
harrk.dev/handling-inb...
The left thumb stick on my Steam Deck just had to break before a 13 hour flight. Yay…
October 9, 2024 at 10:57 AM
The left thumb stick on my Steam Deck just had to break before a 13 hour flight. Yay…
It's been five months since I last wrote a blog post. So I wrote a quick guide on geolocating IP addresses in #Laravel using the GeoLite2 database.
harrk.dev/how-to-geolo...
harrk.dev/how-to-geolo...
How To Geolocate IP Addresses With Laravel
For this article, I will show you how to grab geolocation data from a visitor's IP address. We won't be using any third-party APIs however we will be using MaxMind's GeoLite2 database, which does requ...
harrk.dev
August 19, 2024 at 11:36 AM
It's been five months since I last wrote a blog post. So I wrote a quick guide on geolocating IP addresses in #Laravel using the GeoLite2 database.
harrk.dev/how-to-geolo...
harrk.dev/how-to-geolo...
PSA! Don't forget to double-check the data you send over WebSockets. These can be inspected via DevTools by your users just like an API request can.
May 18, 2024 at 12:26 PM
PSA! Don't forget to double-check the data you send over WebSockets. These can be inspected via DevTools by your users just like an API request can.
Deciding it was time to retire the Vive and try something more recent. I jumped on the Meta Quest 3 bandwagon. Zero cable problems and I can play all my SteamVR games. It’s made jumping back into VR so damn easy!
March 30, 2024 at 4:31 PM
Deciding it was time to retire the Vive and try something more recent. I jumped on the Meta Quest 3 bandwagon. Zero cable problems and I can play all my SteamVR games. It’s made jumping back into VR so damn easy!
Got the urge to dust off the ol’ Vive. Recall why I don’t use it much, the wire management is a nightmare!
March 22, 2024 at 7:03 PM
Got the urge to dust off the ol’ Vive. Recall why I don’t use it much, the wire management is a nightmare!
Cloudflare R2 is an S3 alternative that gives you 10 GB of storage for free with zero egress fees. I've written up a post on how you can get started with Cloudflare R2 using #Laravel.
harrk.dev/how-to-integ...
harrk.dev/how-to-integ...
How To Integrate Cloudflare R2 Storage with Laravel
Cloudflare R2 is a zero egress fee object storage which is compatible with the S3 API. This means you aren't at risk of vendor lock-in and can swap to another provider at any time.
Cloudflare R2 | Ze...
harrk.dev
February 25, 2024 at 10:30 AM
Cloudflare R2 is an S3 alternative that gives you 10 GB of storage for free with zero egress fees. I've written up a post on how you can get started with Cloudflare R2 using #Laravel.
harrk.dev/how-to-integ...
harrk.dev/how-to-integ...
Updating to Laravel 10 and Lemon Squeezy all went smoothly. Did a little extra by adding DaisyUI and a landing page touch-up. Next step is to deploy but I need to get my LS store approved first, which can take a couple of business days. So I'll just keep polishing while I wait...
February 11, 2024 at 8:27 PM
Updating to Laravel 10 and Lemon Squeezy all went smoothly. Did a little extra by adding DaisyUI and a landing page touch-up. Next step is to deploy but I need to get my LS store approved first, which can take a couple of business days. So I'll just keep polishing while I wait...
Focus for this weekend: Get a Laravel 9 project updated to v10 and swap out Stripe for Lemonsqueezy now that it finally supports tax-inclusive pricing 🚀
February 10, 2024 at 10:50 AM
Focus for this weekend: Get a Laravel 9 project updated to v10 and swap out Stripe for Lemonsqueezy now that it finally supports tax-inclusive pricing 🚀
First post on Bluesky! 👋 Doing a quick test post by sharing my third blog post (I'm on a roll!) this month. Covering how you can use nvm to install multiple versions of Node.js on a single machine.
How To Switch Between Node.js Versions Using nvm
When working with multiple projects, or you've pulled down a repository from another developer with a different setup from yours. Then you cannot always depend on running the same version of Node.js b...
harrk.dev
February 6, 2024 at 8:41 PM
First post on Bluesky! 👋 Doing a quick test post by sharing my third blog post (I'm on a roll!) this month. Covering how you can use nvm to install multiple versions of Node.js on a single machine.