Dev Blog
.sub_heading {Ramblings from life as a software developer
} }AI is killing the software industry
AI is the best development tool in years, and it's quietly cutting the bottom rung off the ladder that trains new developers.
Laravel vs Rolling Your Own
From rolling a custom CMS from scratch to landing firmly in the Laravel camp for any new project.
Just press F5
A love letter to the F5 key, and the ritual of refreshing the page and hoping for the best.
One day I'll tidy that up
There’s a function in every codebase that starts with a perfectly reasonable name and ends up doing something no single function should be asked to do.
So... What Kind of Test Is This?
Unit, feature, integration, contract, smoke, regression - stop arguing about the label and start with the risk you're trying to remove.
I Don't Want to Be a DevOps Engineer
In defence of WAMP for solo development - Docker has its place, but not every developer needs the whole stack just to write code.
The Bigger the Failure, the Easier the Fix
In software, the biggest failures can sometimes be the easiest to fix.
I Hate The Big Blue Blob
An honest, long-held dislike of WordPress: the plugin sprawl, the bloat, and building the thing you actually need instead.
Experience Is Knowing What Not to Do
After years of writing software, I’ve learned that experience isn’t about knowing all the answers. It’s about recognising the wrong ones — avoiding unnecessary complexity, resisting fashionable technology, questioning the obvious, and knowing when to stop fixing something and start again.
The Dependency Update Lottery
Every developer knows the feeling: you hit “update” and hope for the best. Sometimes everything works perfectly. Other times one innocent package update triggers a chain reaction of breaking changes, deprecated dependencies and mysterious errors.
I Just Like Making Things
I’ve never really been that interested in the job title. Software Engineer. Developer. Programmer. Full Stack Developer. Whatever we’re calling ourselves this week.They’re all basically different ways of saying: I make things, and that’s the bit I like.
Leaving the agency
After eight years at the same agency, comfortable and stuck looked identical from the inside, until a chat became a job offer.
The gap between
You've got the licence. You haven't got the miles - on the gap between finishing a course and being job-ready.
