This blog should serve as my personal knowledge base and contain some of the things that I learn when developing applications in my spare time.

I mainly expect to write for myself, but if you find it useful, I’m glad I could be of help.

Why?

The state of programming tutorials has gotten terrible. It has become increasingly difficult to find in-depth tutorials or knowledge sharing on specific things or more advanced topics.

If I want to learn a new technology or framework, I am generally able to grasp the gist of it relatively quickly. When you start searching for additional material, a quick search on your favorite search engine brings up hundreds of “tutorials” that the authors have simply lifted from the original documentation. Sometimes it’s just the entire code without any comments, sometimes it goes through every line of code and explains even the most basic commands as if the reader is a absolute beginner, such as:

$counter = 4; // sets the counter variable to four

The best example that come to mind are Docker tutorials. Every single website explains the same three steps as the documentation already did. Do I have to rebuild the container every time I change my code? This seems tedious during development. So I start searching for it and - since I’m still learning - I might probably not have the search terms 100% correct. So I end up sifting through six different tutorials that cover the same topics as the documentation, just with different container images or user names. These are the moments where I could cry out with agony.

Of course this may be exaggerated. But these spammy copy-cats make it near-impossible to find quality content for advanced topics.

The authors reasoning may often be: Sprinkle some SEO on it, put up some ads, and earn some easy money. Even worse, most of these websites bring up a popup within five seconds asking you to sign up to their “totally not spammy” newsletter (promise) and sell you more similar “quality” content for only $19.99. No, thank you.

Quality Content

This seems as good a place as any to give a huge shout out to the following sites for producing incredibly high quality documentation:

• Laravel (a PHP framework with almost all the batteries included)
• Laravel Livewire (full-stack framework for easily building dynamic user interfaces)
• Tenancy for Laravel (a multi-tenant package for Laravel applications - I might cover this in more depth some time)
• Spatie (a web development company from Belgium with a ton of open source packages - mostly for Laravel)

They don’t just cover the basics, but usually also some advanced topics. Love it! Thank you.

Conclusion

As of now, I’m writing a web application in PHP with Laravel mostly for fun, but maybe also for profit, we’ll see.

I want this site to highlight topics that I learned during this journey. Ideally it would also showcase how I incorporate this into my projects. Sources will be from experimentation (because I couldn’t find any other articles about it) or to highlight advanced topics that I discovered and found interesting. The latter would be mostly for my own reference.

Note: This blog is made with Hugo - a static site generator.