First-class callables in PHP 8.1

October 14, 2021 — The newest release of PHP, v8.1, is around the corner and it will introduce a whole lot of new features, from the read only properties to the native enums. It’s pretty exciting!

Throwing response exceptions conditionally in Laravel 8.x

October 13, 2021 — When you’re using Laravel’s Http client to make Http requests and something went wrong from the server-side, the server would return one of the error reponses such as 500 Internal Server Error, 502 Gateway Timeout, and so on.

Check if a PWA is opened as a standalone app or not

October 11, 2021 — When working with Progressive Web Apps (PWA), there might be a case when you only want to show certain things when the website is in standalone mode.

Dry running Composer update without actually updating dependencies

October 5, 2021 — It would always be a good idea to cross-verify/confirm a destructive action before you actually perform it. For instance, while giving users the ability to delete something important, let’s say the user account, it’s a good idea to present them a confirmation popup before he/she deletes the account permanently.

Simple blinking cursor animation using CSS

October 1, 2021 — The other day I was feeling a little nerdy (like all the cool kids) and so, I attempted to add this cool-looking blinking cursor at the end of my blog’s tagline like so.

Always destructure your component props in React.js

September 28, 2021 — While working with React.js components, there are two ways using which you can retrieve/access the component props.

Custom thumbnails for native video element in HTML

September 27, 2021 — The <video> is an HTML element that can be used to embed a media player on a page that can a variety of video formats. Here’s how a simple video embed with an external video source would look like.

Retrieve request URL without specific query parameters in Laravel

September 24, 2021 — When you have a request in hand and if the URL is having a query string with different parameters, the easiest way to get the entire URL with the query string is using the fullUrl() method like so.

Prevent object extension — Object.freeze() vs Object.seal() vs Object.preventExtensions()

September 20, 2021 — When it comes to prevention of modification/updation of an object in JavaScript, there are few things that you can do.

Abort a fetch request manually in JavaScript

September 17, 2021 — The Fetch API, as you might know, is a modern replacement of the good old XHRHttpRequest (popularly known as Ajax) that gives nicer developer experience (DX) by giving a promise based implementation.

Amit Merchant