PHP assert not working in Laravel with Sail?

Recently, I hit a weird ‘bug’. The $file was not being created, so I’d added a quick ‘assert’ in the code, and… file_exists($file) was indeed false (checked when stepping through debugger), but assert was not stopping/failing. But… running a simple assert from command line was working. This was something different only when running under the…

Onboarding freelancers

Maari Casey over at uncompany had a recent LinkedIn post about planning for freelancers. She made some good points, but I think skipped one, and it’s not just relevant for freelancers. Even well before an organization might need extra work – be it freelance or employee – companies need to have a plan for onboarding….

Bad I9 PDF form

Have been needing to programmatically fill out an I9 PDF, retrieved from gov site. Should be fairly straightforward, right? Well… the field names are… a mess. Field names like topmostSubform[0].Page1[0].U\.S\._Social_Security_Number__Last_4_numbers_[0]topmostSubform[0].Page1[0].expiration_date__if_applicable__mm_dd_yyyy[0] topmostSubform[0].Page2[0].Employers_Business_or_Organization_Address_Street_Number_and_Name[0] and so on make it pretty… not straightforward to create a usable key/value combination to search and replace. But… today, I noticed it got…

Walking before running

Background Years ago, I was brought in as a consultant to a company that had recently developed and deployed a ‘version 2′ of their core internal software, then had the entire development team leave (well, one person remained behind). Smallish business of maybe 50 or so folks, but no development team to support and grow…

Laravel down migrations

I get an email newsletter from Martin Joo every week or so. The newsletters generally have some useful tips around the Laravel framework or sometimes just general development tips. I’ve learned a couple of neat tricks here and there, and will continue to receive. This morning I received an email with a Laravel ‘tip’ regarding…