Nearly there on Nickelpinch

Lot's of progress today on Nickelpinch while the kids napped. I am about 2 hours away from it being at v1.0.0 and I am super excited to use it.

Once it's working I'll be revamping the http://www.nickelpinch.org page with up to date info. Stay tuned!

Excited to code tonight

Setting aside some time tonight to work on Nickelpinch, my open source finance app I've been working on. Hope to be in alpha by end of the night!

Yum

One of the many benefits when working at home is having an amazing partner make a tasty lunch for you.

Finally installed Wordpress app on my phone. Now I have zero excuses to not post more!

Laravel; Auth::attempt() works but user not logged in.

This was a funky problem that took me a while to figure out.

When a user was logging in, the Auth::attempt() was returning true if there were good credentials passed. However! Using Auth::check() or any other Auth method showed the user wasn't actually logged in. What the heck?

After much hunting, I found this answer on Stack Overflow.

The problem is you have used "userId" as your primary id - but you have not told Laravel.

I realized I did NOT use id as the id for the users table, I went with uid because I thought it made more sense. That's fine, but then you need to tell your Users model what the primary key is by adding this line.

protected $primaryKey = "[your-primary-key-here]";

If you were searching and having this issue, I hope it helped!

Fun fact: increasing the font size of Sublime Text 2 has greatly helped my ability to focus. Apparently trying to work w/font size of 11 isn't possible anymore with my eyes. Changed to 18 point and it is wonderful.

Laravel; having a conditional choose your @extends template

I am firmly entrenched in the Laravel camp now. One thing I love about Laravel is their blade templating language. However, there is some quirkiness that isn't immediately obvious.

Let's say you have a template that is extending another template. You want a conditional to determine which template you want to extend. (The use case here for me is a messaging system. Logic + layout is the same on back-end and front-end, but they extend different templates).

I was trying to get this to work:

@if($var)
@extends('account.base')
@else
@extends('base.base')
@endif

@section('content')

<h1>Here are things!</h1>

@stop

All it was doing was outputting the one @extends('base.base') line. After much hunting, I found this great answer on StackOverflow. So, @extends() must be on the first line of a blade template, which is a little weird, but whatever. Used ternary operator like this and it works!

@extends($var ? 'account.base' : 'base.base')

It's not the people you miss, it's the moment.

It's not the people you miss, it's what you felt during those moments. And those feelings can't really be felt again. It was for a younger you. Focus on where you are now, don't try to recreate the past.

Time for Reflection

My family just got back from our first vacation in over three years. After us getting married and having two wonderful children it was definitely overdue.

I have had a lot of small revelations about things that I am still processing. As I iron out the details I will be sharing them. Expect posts aplenty!

Just finished the todo list for the next four days, after which we launch a new project that is running on Station, the new CMS package for Laravel we developed. It's going to be intense, and worth it!