Wafy's Tools

By Jeff , 7 September, 2026

2026 August

On the job front. I am still coming up short. I had another interview recently, but I think they are looking at someone else. Going to be looking for an alternative as soon I get the rejection letter. I did make some changes to the WhereAreGames site finally. Nothing too major just some quality of life for the army list widget. Had a couple hiccups in the changes, but seems to be stable now. I should have done more, but was on a bit of a time crunch. Still avoiding to working on the back end or even the front end, I need to wait to know what languages I will be working with.

By Jeff , 3 August, 2026

2026 July

Well I am the closest to getting a job since this whole things started. Had a second interview last week and I felt it went pretty well. I won't find out for sure for a couple weeks, apparently they need to talk to other candidates :-) . So my fingers are crossed. I am hoping to re-look at python and .NET languages a bit more to prepare for any follow up or even if I am accepted. The job seems to be up my ally, as it is kind of what it was liked before the last company purchased the company I was in.

By Jeff , 6 July, 2026

2026 June

Still looking for a job. Apparently no one is looking at my resume. Even had a meeting with a recruiter that stood me up on the initial meeting. Apparently my resume that my previous companies resume fixer company gave me a dud. Which sucks. So I am attempting to try getting certified in something that I know, to start. To at least show that I can be up to date. I have kind of put the framework exploration on hold. Didn't get much traffic with it so not much a point. Getting a bit discouraged that I will get a programming position.

By Jeff , 1 June, 2026

2026 May

Still no job. Applied to plenty of them, but not much of a bite. I did get one interview last week, but they decided to go with someone else. On the programming front, I decided to take a detour. Given that most jobs are asking to use Laravel or Symfony I figured I should probably learn something about them. As you might have seen in the feed I did the boot camp with Laravel, which still rubs me the wrong way. I can see the appeal and have no problems working in it, if need be. Just feel it is a bit bloated.

By Jeff , 29 May, 2026

Laravel - Basic Authentication: Login/Logout

Another pretty straight forward lesson. Just basically added a log in controller that hides much of the information needed to authenticate the user. It even has an option for "Remember Me" built into the authentication function. It also helps track the session for the "Remember Me" as well.

The forms and routes are similar to the previous lesson, They even suggest copying the register view to build the login view. The rest of the lesson was to change the CSS which I didn't do to my app, as it was already a step up from my apps. 

By Jeff , 29 May, 2026

Laravel - Basic Authentication: Registration

This lesson was a bit involved. Though I am pretty impressed with the authorization aspects of Laravel. There are a lot of helper methods that seem to take care of a lot of the grunt work. I can see why people use this framework for their projects.

Authentication seems to be mostly taken care of behind the scenes. The next lesson will teach the log in process which should be interesting. This one was more of the authorization. 

By Jeff , 29 May, 2026

Laravel - Edit and delete Chirps

This one also gave me a little hope for the framework. There is a lot that goes on behind the scenes from what I can see. Which can be good depending on the project. Laminas had some of that also, but kind of moved away from that. Like the ability to assume the framework looks up a model for you and you can just accept it in the controller. All based on the route binding model in the routing. Which kind of explains the option to add a model in the controller setup from artisan. 

By Jeff , 28 May, 2026

Laravel - Creating and storing Chirps

This lesson was about forms and storage. Not sure how I feel about the way forms are created in Laravel. I am a little spoiled by Laminas, in that they use form objects to generate and validate the forms. Laravel seems to let you create your form in the view and then in the controller you can validate the form. While this is just a small amount of code, I am not sure I like it. It is very simple to add validation and even customize the messages.

By Jeff , 28 May, 2026

Laravel - Showing the feed

This was a relatively short lesson. Pretty simple and showed off how to build components more. Like the Layout component it looks like you can build sub-views that you can put code to be displayed. Seems like a neat concept, verse building a view object to do similar things.

By Jeff , 28 May, 2026

Laravel - Our first model

I am beginning to see the appeal of Laravel. There are a lot of built in functions for the database and models. Learned about some new features of PHP 8 that hadn't tried to use also. Between the database and the models there are a lot of the basic functions built it, even some not so basic ones. For example there is a latest function for the model that will look at the latest entries based on the timestamps automatically. As long as your fields match their expected names, it just works.