In my latest work on Trendwatch, I’ve been refining both the feature implementation process and my approach to managing commits. Every development cycle brings new insights, and this time was no different. Below are some key lessons learned and the … Continued
In this post, I share the latest updates on my Trendwatch project, a hobby aimed at building a system to crunch trading data for tax purposes. Along the way, I’ve learned valuable lessons about version control, testing, and the importance of starting with solid tests. I discuss my shift in approach to GitHub commits, how Behat has helped improve my testing practices, and how these experiences are shaping my professional growth. Looking ahead, I’m excited to explore dev.to and connect with the broader developer community as I continue my journey.
I’m coming to terms with the idea that Trendwatch is going to be more of a hobby project rather than something into which I fully commit my time and energy. And so, a few months after my previous post, I’m coming around for another swing at it.
I had gone to what I initially called “multiple rounds of refactoring” and could probably be better described as “multiple rounds of rearchitecting”. Although I had much of the code working, I just wasn’t satisfied with the quality and readability of the code design.
Introduction When I realized that I didn’t understand how the taxable capital gains were being calculated on my T5008 statements, I decided to build an app to help me automate my data entry, accounting, and reporting workflows. Laravel may or … Continued
I was doing a git bisect in my current development branch of Hello Bruce Trail to help nail down a particular problem. At a certain point I reached a commit that I could not test properly to determine whether it … Continued
The Problem I’ve been revising and refactoring the way I handle the EXIF/GPS calculations in hellobrucetrail.com so often that I’m starting to think I may be “overfactoring”. Is “overfactoring” a word? A quick google search shows several hits that use … Continued
Docker. It’s a technology I’d heard of several years ago and hadn’t looked into. I finally started reading about it. It looked interesting and I’ve been wondering about using it in my Laravel development workflows. One of my goals in … Continued
Introduction Development of the integrated Hello Bruce Trail is shifting to more of a focus on the front end. After reading several articles about test tools for JavaScript, I decided to look into adding tools like Jasmine and Karma to … Continued
I deployed the 0.3.1 version of the integrated Hello Bruce Trail site to the demo site this week. It incorporates various under-the-hood changes that support CRUD operations (create, retrieve, update, delete) on Geomaps and the ability to upload photos. As … Continued
The purpose of this article is to explore and create a way to automate the copying of theme settings from one WordPress site installation to another. A common workflow when adding a new feature or design component to a WordPress … Continued
What does the SiteOrigin Headline widget offer? Do we need it, can we get by with the basic HTML <h1>, <h2>, etc, tags? Can we get by with the basic HTML tags? Maybe. After trying out the Headline widget, will … Continued
I found a USB hard drive that’s been collecting dust in a closet for about three years. I noticed that it has a capacity of 500GB and therefore would make a great sandbox in which to find out whether Mac … Continued
Now that I’ve upgraded my iPhone to iOS 7 it won’t sync anymore with my MacBook. The message I get from iTunes is “The iPhone … cannot be used because it requires iTunes version 11.1 or later.” The iTunes I … Continued