Welcome to my new site!

Published 23/05/2020 | Last updated 17/12/2021 | 591 views

Learn about the tech behind this site, who I am, and what kind of things I intend to post on here.

Hullo!

It's great to have you here. My name is Luke, as you likely already know, and I'm a software engineer, primarily in web. I have an awesome job, and sometimes I want to share that awesomeness with other people. This site is my means of being able to share that information.

Sometimes I'm busy, sometimes I'm not, so don't expect content every second of every day. However, I'll do my best to post on a semi-regular basis.

What will I be posting about? Laravel, PHP, Vue, Alpine, Javascript, CSS, Tailwind, packages, libraries, how-tos, walkthroughs and event silly ideas I've had. Basically, anything and everything related to my profession.

Feel free to browse around and go crazy. Thank you for visiting my humble virtual abode.

What is your site built with?

Good question (and thanks for asking)! This site is built on Laravel and Statamic. Yes, I could have used plain HTML, but I opted for Statamic for a number of reasons:

  1. I wanted to try Statamic
  2. Its my site - I can do whatever I want
  3. I get some extra goodies, like asset management and a nice markdown editor
  4. It gets better over time, without much effort from myself
  5. Some other reasons that slip my mind at this moment

Anyhow, I think point #2 is the most important on this list.

I also use TailwindCSS, which I looooove. It takes all the work out of writing and maintaining CSS. I'll probably do a blog post for it at some point. If you haven't used it already, you so should.

Finally, whilst at the time of this writing I haven't included any javascript, if at some point in the future I end up including some, it will likely be Alpine JS. Reactive JS feels so much cleaner than non-reactive JS, but I don't want to include a huge JS script for a blog. Alpine manages to stay beautifully smol whilst giving me all the power I need. Again, if you haven't already, check it out.

Update: As of December 2021, my blog now runs on a native Laravel install with Wink as the content management system. This simplifies upgrades and other such things a lot for me. That's not to say don't use Statamic; Statamic is a wonderful tool. Just Keep Is Simple Stupid.

Like what you see?

If you enjoy reading my content, please consider sponsoring me. I don't spend it on cups of coffee; it all goes towards freeing up more of my time to work on open source, tutorials and more posts like this one.