Category: Experiences

I’ve been using an Apple MacBook since June 2021. While I don’t totally hate it, I still prefer a LAMP or LEMP stack as my default local web development environment. The best alternative I’ve found on the Mac is Laravel Valet, but it’s not without some minor niggles, mostly the fact that the web server […]

In my Goals Setting post for 2022, I shared that I wanted to improve my blogging activity, and “try and expand into some online videos and possibly even do some live streaming.” One of the biggest hurdles with creating technical video content is making sure that any code in the code editor is readable when […]

I don’t generally go into the personal details of my life in this blog, but this is one of those moments. Apologies if you are here for tech/WordPress-related stuff, and real-world stuff bums you out. I turn 45 this year, and that moment in my 16-year-old life is still as vivid to me today as […]

It has been 2 years since I last posted a workstation/office update. If I am honest, posting regular updates about my “daily drivers” was not something I ever planned, but I am always trying to refine and improve my work tools. I find it interesting to take a look back at what has changed over […]

I’ve never been one to set new years resolutions. I’m generally aware that most resolutions made on January 1st are never taken seriously, or only taken seriously for the first 2 weeks or so until one inevitably falls back on old habits. I also am not a solopreneur, business owner, or freelancer, so compiling a […]

This past weekend, I was fiddling with some “devopsy” things, and I had to figure out how to switch the default MySQL 8 authentication method from auth_socket to native_password. One of the big changes to MySQL in version 8 is the default authentication method. In older MySQL versions, when you installed the mysql-server package, it […]

And why is it (currently) Laravel Valet? One of the main reasons I switched from Windows to Ubuntu for my development workstation back in 2006 was that I was tired of complicated setups for managing local development environments. Because Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of PHP, spent a lot of time making Linux, Apache, and MySQL […]

#ClickPublish When I was young, I believed I was allergic to mac and cheese! I won’t go into the details of why, but that belief was so strong that once at a pre-grade 8 summer camp, I refused to eat dinner one night because it was mac and cheese. To this day, I still don’t […]

I generally consider myself someone to be open to new experiences and prepared to consider both sides in any given discussion. This does sometimes mean that I may express opinions that are not popular. As Morten once reminded me so well, “The devil’s advocate advocates for the devil”, and he’s not wrong. After I posted […]