I recently came across this video on Youtube and while the author makes some convincing arguments for using bitfields. I’d like to share my experiences having worked with them in a few applications. A long time ago, I also thought that bitfields were neat.

A few months back I upgraded docket and this site to CakePHP 4.5 from an earlier 4.x release. I wanted to share my notes from the upgrade process so that if you’re considering an upgrade you have a better idea of what to expect.

I’ve been working on content for my CakeFest workshop this year, and thought it would be interesting to see a commonly used authorization pattern implemented as an extension to CakePHP’s authorization system. The pattern I wanted to implement was ‘sudo mode’. Often this pattern is used in applications that have longer session duration.

I have been following the Webauthn standards and browser support since the early days of FIDO compatible keys. I strongly believe that hardware keys are our best path forward to provide phishing resistant, easy to operate authentication, that doesn’t compromise on privacy.

I recently decided to go down a rabbit hole of wanting to learn a new client side library. I was interested in learning more about libraries that aimed to have a minimal footprint even at the cost of providing a more modest API. For this site I have simple requirements, and I wanted to see how simple the ‘simple’ abstractions are these days.

Modern PHP development generally means using a suite of tools to perform code formatting and static analysis. For a long time, I have been using composer to install theses developement tools. While using composer works great, when you’re working on multiple projects it results in duplicate copies of frequently used tools.

A few weeks back I came across a site that can generate all of your GitHub activity into a single chart. Looking at mine, I noticed that I have been fairly consistent in my activity over the past 15 years.

Each year I try to learn a new language, framework or technology. This practice encourages me to continuously learn new skills and be a newbie again. This year, I’ve spent the past few months working on a mobile client for Docket . While the mobile web UI works well enough, I wanted to see if the UX could be smoother with a native application.