Code Workshop

Besides the regular stuff, I’m undertaking some Micro-Saas work. One is an SMS scheduling tool for small businesses, Recustom. What’s it for? Recustom is a low-config tool to create customer contact SMS templates. The templates are easily configured to send an automated SMS for the future. For example, when a customer is paying for their… Continue reading SMS scheduling for business – Micro-Saas Case Study – Recustom

I’m working on an Australian dropshipping platform for ecommerce businesses, Elvenda. It’s a technically interesting platform because it needs to regularly import and export thousands of products from a range of ecommerce platforms (so you can dropship with WooCommerce, Shopify, BigCommerce, and plenty of others). The product also has a robust payments engine, seamlessly making… Continue reading SaaS Case Study: Elvenda – Dropshipping in Australia

Working through an issue today, I needed to pass a parameter through to sub-routes inside a route group in Laravel. It’s not very well documented, and very powerful. E.g. a signed in user can have a few apps. App with ID 3, 6, 10 etc. Anything they do, once they’ve chosen which app they’re working… Continue reading Laravel: Passing down a parameter in a route prefix/route group

It’s important when deploying a new platform to monitor the first few interactions and keep an eye out for unintended issues. Logging requests and responses against the server is a great way to get a birds eye view of the action. With Laravel 5, this is best done with middleware. Create a clean git branch… Continue reading Laravel 5: Logging all requests and responses

Pretty often when debugging a mobile app in a web browser, we need to disable access control allow origin, OPTIONS checks, and SSL. Creating a new Chrome shortcut on the desktop with the following flags will allow you to run Chrome without web security. Mac: open -n -a Google\ Chrome –args –disable-web-security –user-data-dir=/Users/[you]/chromedev/ Windows: “C:\Program… Continue reading Chrome: Disable Web Security

It’s difficult to find clear, up-to-date instructions for writing a native Android module for your React Native project. I spent about half a day piecing this all together from a few sources, so here’s how it ended up. Prerequisites: React Native is installed and up and running If you used expo, you should have ejected… Continue reading React Native: Writing a native Android module

Apparently, the whole world doesn’t speak english! Here’s how to add i18n support to your react native project. This article specifically addresses expo, since we’ll be working around i18n tools requiring react-native link. We’re working on WooToApp, which is a native app builder for WooCommerce Stores. It now features internationalisation and language switching (of course!). Add… Continue reading I18n in Expo and React Native

I’m backporting Flow into a large React Native project of mine. It’s unclear sometimes how to do things ‘the right way’ with Flow. This is what’s working so far: Any type that is used across multiple components should exist in it’s own JS file, and be imported as a type. Here’s how that looks in… Continue reading React Native – using Flow

It’s a painful road getting an existing project set up with tests. An existing React Native app of ours, out in the wild, is getting retrofitted with unit tests. The great part is, I know what to test. I know what type of bugs have been introduced in the past and what we’re likely to… Continue reading React Native: Testing with Jest

Seeing this error? “WooCommerce: To perform the requested action, WordPress needs to access your web server” This permissions issue haunts me after every new WordPress install. There’s a one-liner fix that doesn’t involve 777’ing your whole server.   Here’s the magic cure: Open wp-config.php Add define( ‘FS_METHOD’, ‘direct’ ); at the end Save and close,… Continue reading WooCommerce: To perform the requested action, WordPress needs to access your web server