Yesterday we had PHP Thames Valley in Reading. Thanks to @daveliddament.bsky.social and @mintopia.net for bringing us not one, but two magnificent talks! Follow us for future events: meetup.com/php-thames-v...

I've been using Claude, GPT and Gemini for tasks like content, image and coding, but I don't get the results that others are crazy about. They're dumb in most cases. You can't say it's only a context issue. It's useful for grammar checks and summarising large data. What am I missing, premium models?

I got my first subscriber for a project launched with a single subscription form on 3 July. It's a really slow start, but exciting! Now I'll refine the landing page to clarify the project's purpose and share it with you once complete.

Yesterday, when I was driving home after dark, there was a car whose driver (instead of flashing their high beams at me) thanked me for giving them priority by quickly turning their lights off and on again. I was surprised that I had never thought about this before.

I woke up at 7:30 today, made a coffee and sat down at the computer for some nice early coding. But my son sad no, feed me and wait for further instructions.

It was another great evening with another fantastic talk! Join us at the next PHP South West on 8th October 2025 when Graham Campbell will be talking about database optimisation. Follow for more updates: meetup.com/php-sw

Come and learn about @filamentphp.com at PHP South West this evening in Bristol, directly from its co-creator @danharrin.com. I'll be there!

Welcome to modern society built on AI!

I've started writing weekly blog posts to collect the things that infused me or I was working on, but mainly for accountability and a pinch of self-marketing. It will be delayed, so it contains the things I did the previous week. The first post is arriving this Sunday.

I've always been puzzled how fixed energy prices are not classified as a scam.

This is the same as forgetting: remote work doesn’t mean exclusively working from home. Until you stay productive, you can work from your favourite coffee shop, pub, or seashore. Just like you're not forced to work only for UK companies, there's a whole world out there looking for remote workforce.

I'm coding with Cursor for a week now and I must tell you how amazingly WON'T replace any developers in the next few years. Does it make me more efficient? Hell ya! Does it write better code than me? Of course not. But you should all use AI for coding, it's the best feature since code completion.

Welcome everyone from PHPverse 2025! Such a fun day with some great talks. Are you all pumped to make PHP great again?

Farewell Brian Wilson.

Working from home almost exclusively for five years, I could get used to this working environment at lunch breaks, that's for sure.

It took six hours to find the root cause, then another six to deploy it. This is why you will always need human developers 😏 Aside from the joke, I can't wait to read the post-mortem.

That really takes some nerve!

There is no safe and valid business reason for AI video generation with sound other than for misinformation. Similar to when they cloned Dolly the Sheep and the world decided that human cloning wasn't cool. Folks need to decide this isn't cool.

It's hard not to share your journey when you have doubts, but also stay motivated every day. Learn to trust yourself first, then you can seek feedback.

I'm finally working on a side project which requires to build a bunch of forms. I was genuinely eyeing with Livewire Flux Pro for a while, but building my own components from scratch in Blade is unexpectedly fun.

This is something I couldn't keep up with. I stuck on frontend choices as soon as I started the project. I also realised I was trying to address multiple things in my life at the same time, so I've decided to focus on myself in the next 6 months first. Then, I'll continue my SaaS dreams.

You can't store and serve hundreds of hours of content for eternity that only a few people watch for $19, especially when you're making new content every day. I don’t agree with the decision, but we have to understand streaming was an utopian dream all along. Long live the physical media.

Three things why it's better for my mental health being on Bluesky: 1. Almost zero spam with blocklists. 2. Much fewer people are trying to sell their hot (shitty) takes to get shares of ad revenue. 3. Zero ads – which is literally now every third post on X.

Yesterday I subscribed for a month’s trial on YouTube Premium and I'm also testing JetBrains AI instead of GitHub Copilot, which sucks on PhpStorm. I feel this day a bit calmer to be honest.

I've just set up a legacy CraftCMS 3 project locally to extend here and there (and probably upgrade) for one of my clients, and it's also running on PHP 7.4 and MySQL 5.7, and it works. Old code sparks joy ✨

Normally I would always recommend to follow or at least learn from first party code written by the creators of a framework, but this look like React written in PHP. It makes me uncomfortable.

Tomorrow is the first day of March, and I decided to try something new: in the next 6 months, I'm going to work on one product idea for a month and ship it by the end of the month, then jump onto the next one. That means I should have 6 products to own by September.

Fascinating story from @chiphuyen.bsky.social : Large tax company launched an AI chatbot. The response was... underwhelming. Barely any customers use it. They tried to find out: why? Hallucination? UX issues? Something else? Turns out users used this tax service to NOT have to ask questions!

"You can have comfort and you can have growth, but you can't have both."

That's it, I'm done with GitHub Copilot. It was really helpful last year working on a .Net project where I had no prior knowledge, but in the past few months I'm using it for PHP and web and it's like a bullshit salesman who only needs my money: it's annoying and hallucinating most of the time.

Being a developer isn't just about sharpening your knowledge, but it's also about sharpening your blades often.

Today's tech failure: Google told me that I'm running out of space, so I deleted about 7 GB data from Drive and after 2 hours it still says those files are exist according the quota service. I know that they have to deal with bazillion of data like every minute, but this just awkward.

Great, I'm already 8 days behind. It was a very long week, so many things happened and I got cold.

Quick tip: don't use Unsubscribe in Google Mail, because it won't unsubscribe you from the list. Emails will keep coming, but they go directly into spam folder, although your name stays on their list. Always use the provider's unsubscribe method, then Google's if they fake or don't offer that.

I just completed "Historian Hysteria" - Day 1. Wasn't really prepared for 2 parts, but luckily I found the time and wasn't too difficult after all. I didn't focus on validation or edge cases, only to pass the examples, then run with the actual input. Folder structure might also change. #AdventOfCode

Advent of Code 2024 starts in 3 days and this will be the first time I participate: adventofcode.com 🎄

I got a new Macbook, and I have a couple of hours free in the afternoon, so first time in my life I'm going to write my .dotfiles to automate the setup.

OK, so here's a thing: NEVER assign a custom domain to iCloud+ if it's for your business. Even if if it's temporary and you remove it you won't be able to register an Apple account with that domain for another 30 days. (And I hope Apple Support has right on this, will confirm later.)

The current job market is absolutely shit, but this is the quality when you search for any open positions on LinkedIn.

I moved my company emails from iCloud+ to Google. I wish I had never added it as a Custom Email Domain in the first place. Now that I deleted it I have to wait at least 30 days to be able to create a company Apple Account using the same domain. So, I can't use Apple Business Manager for a while.

We're cooking 👨‍🍳

I'm working on side projects in full time for the next few weeks. First realisation: OMG, I forgot everything, but luckily it's in my muscle memory. Second: scraping a website isn't just fetching a url anymore, you have to wait all the JS crap to load the actual page in.

The three days long .NET Conf 2024 starts today from 4pm UK time. The main focus is on .NET 9 and C# 13: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hM4i... Full agenda: www.dotnetconf.net/agenda

*taking a deep breath*