Completely Hiding The Wordpress Version Is Hard
We develop and maintain a couple of WordPress sites. There are a number of things we will do as standard to secure each site. One of these is running WPScan. It checks for all kinds of things but...
Automatically Find The Best Image Compression
Recently I was tweaking the default quality values used to compress images on one of our sites. The quality value is a number between 0 and 100. 100 produces a large file size and has high...
Data Transfer Objects In PHP 8
Data transfer objects (DTOs for short) are simple PHP classes which have one job: Store some data. Until recently the spatie/data-transfer-object package was our go-to when creating DTOs. This...
Keeping Up With Web Dev
The internet moves fast. New libraries, new tools, major updates to existing tools, security vulnerabilites etc. To keep up with this we created a #learning channel in Slack. This serves two...
Asking for help
Sometime back in the summer just gone, I got a bit stuck. I’d been running this business for something like eight years, and somehow I’d lost track of where we were going. A lot of things that...
Testing With Laravel In Maintenance Mode
It is standard in our projects to include simple routes which are used to signify if the application is alive and working. They are primarily polled by Kubernetes liveness probes. The tests are...
Customising The fallbackPlaceholder In Laravel's Fallback Route
There is a neat feature in Laravel called a Fallback Route. This is the route which will handle the request if none of the others can: Route::fallback(Controller::class); The fallback...
PhpStorm "No appropriate protocol" Database Error
We recently started migrating from MySQL Workbench to use PhpStorm's internal database integration. In doing so we came across a rather cryptic error: The last packet successfully received from...