Like any other discipline, programmers must dedicate a certain portion of their time to improving their workflow and skillset. This might include working along with a programming video, or practicing a coding kata, or reviewing a new tool. In this series, one topic per episode, we'll review examples of what this developer practice looks like.

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A forum is a deceptively complex thing. Sure, it's made up of threads and replies, but what else might exist as part of a forum? What about profiles, or thread subscriptions, or filtering, or real-time notifications? As it turns out, a forum is the perfect project to stretch your programming muscles. In this series, we'll work together to build one with tests from A to Z.

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If you'd like to come along for the ride, I need to write the HTML and CSS for a blog design that we'll be using as part of an upcoming series. We'll be entirely focused entirely on HTML and CSS (using Tailwind), exclusively. This will give us plenty of opportunities to discuss common gotchas and techniques. We'll even run into a roadblock here and there.

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Inertia.js allows you to build single-page applications, while still allowing Laravel to be responsible for routing, controllers, authorization, policies, and more. Think of it like the glue that connects a server-side framework like Laravel, to a client-side framework like Vue. Despite all the hype, I'm only just now taking a first look at all that Inertia has to offer. If you're in the same position, why don't you come along and we'll learn it together?

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For such a simple concept, modals can often be tricky to implement. Where exactly do we place them? Where should the event listeners to toggle their display be stored? And how to we make them dynamic? In this series, one piece at a time, we'll discuss everything you need to know about modals within the TALL (Tailwind, Alpine, Laravel, Livewire) stack.

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It's time for a new entry in our "How to Read Code" series. This season, we'll dive into the Laravel Breeze source code, taking every opportunity to peek behind the scenes to learn how and why it was constructed in this way. While it's often unnecessary to review the underlying code of the packages and tools you use, that doesn't mean you won't benefit from doing so. If you want to become a better programmer, you must learn, read, and write a lot of code. This series focuses on the reading.

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While it's fun to see a car designed entirely with CSS from a single div, the day-to-day reality for a typical CSS designer is far less glamorous. Often, you'll lose hours upon hours due to some confusing CSS quirk that seemingly makes no sense. In this series, we'll dig our heals into the dirt and, together, decipher a variety of CSS oddities.

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This series is all about the little projects you build once you're off the clock. One topic per section, we'll toy with the fringes of PHP to, for example, blink our lights when a PHPUnit test fails. Why bother? Because it's fun! Come along and join me.

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As web developers, we use a wealth of software and tools to get our work done. Some are obvious, such as code editors, IDEs and terminals, while others offer minor optimizations to our workflows. In this series, we’ll go over all the software and tools that I personally use for web development, as well as my personal settings for each. I’ve picked up countless tips from watching other developers' workflows over the years, and I hope do the same for you in this series.

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Real-life programming isn't always glamorous. You're not always launching fancy new interactive features backed by weeks of marketing and hype. In fact, that's rarely the case. Instead, much of the time, we work on boring fixes and general maintenance of packages and tools that, frankly, not many people use. This is the reality. In that spirit, for season one of our new "Pull Up a Seat" series, come along as I work on extending the API for my laracasts/cypress package. We'll cover everything from the initial tinkering, all the way up to tagging a new release.

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