Demat ! I'm Yannick, a senior backend developer based in Brighton, UK.
With the new fiscal year just a few days ahead, as a contractor you've probably heard about the Budget changes. And if you are like me up until a few days ago, you might not be sure whether you should take action or not. Let's try and bring some clarification to these changes.
When I started contracting about a year and a half ago, I absolutely didn't want to have to deal with anything accounting-related. Which is fine really, as getting an accountant is highly recommended anyway - for various good reasons - and there is a plethora of companies on the market that do just that.
I currently work on a Laravel project composed of multiple microservices that I run locally using Homestead (box v0.4.0 at the time of writing). As I started tinkering around I noticed that requesting the different APIs was super slow, up to 20s per request, which was really unexpected (and annoying to say the least).
If you are somewhat following what's happening in the tech world, you must have heard of Docker.
When using packages maintained by other developers, you may eventually find yourself waiting for a fix, an update, or the merge of a PR that will be available with the next release. I you can't wait, a workaround is to fork the corresponding repository, make the changes you need and then use your fork instead of the original package.
With the always wider adoption of API-driven architecture, chances are you already had to deal with cross-origin resource sharing at some point.
For quite some time now I have been prefering accessing databases from the CLI, but sometimes it can feel overkill when wanting to quickly check or update something, say.
There are a few tutorials out there about how to set up Sublime Text and Xdebug so they play nice together. The good news is that in our case, Homestead has covered the configuration of Xdebug for us: the tool is already available and reporting for duty.
Homestead offers a nice pre-packaged environment. But as a project grows in complexity, there will be a time where extra packages will be necessary. How to install them properly, and not to lose everything any time we need to recreate the box? How does one extend Homestead?
I wrote this short get-started guide mainly for my own use, to have a reference handy to quickly set up a new Laravel project with a MySQL database. But as I felt the need to write it, one might find some interest in it as well.