What I’ve Been Up to Lately

So, uh, yeah … it’s been a while, hasn’t it?

I had hoped to be better about blogging here this year and, well, as you can see, that hasn’t happened … again.

But it’s not really out of laziness or a lack of care. The middle part of this year has been a bit nuts. We’re in the midst of a migration of our massive multisite WordPress website at work over to an entirely new content management system, plus we just had a name change for the university, and have what feels like a million other plates spinning in the air at the same time.

And then in my free time, I’ve been working on several other projects (which we’ll get to shortly).

So that doesn’t leave much time for blogging.

But I’m now in a spot where I have a little bit of time to blog. So let’s catch up on what I’ve been doing the past couple of months.

This Year’s Vacation and Photos

So let’s get the fun stuff out of the way first.

This year, my parents, brother, and I took a much brighter and shorter road trip compared to last year. Hitting up Pikes Peak and the Grand Canyon was amazing, but essentially traveling the distance from New York City to Los Angeles to Las Vegas in under 10 days was extremely daunting and not exactly a relaxing vacation.

Instead, we set our sights on Kansas City and Omaha.

While it wasn’t the photogenic trip of last year, I got to knock Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska off the list I have yet to visit.

In Kansas City, we got to visit the Negro Leagues Museum, which is an absolutely must-visit for any baseball fan. While I grew up with a love for baseball, there was a lot that I didn’t know and that wasn’t told.

For example, there were black players on teams since the advent of the sport. Still, it was players like Cap Anson who spewed racist rhetoric and essentially pushed black players out until Jackie Robinson played for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Also, Anson is somehow in the Baseball Hall of Fame despite the harm he caused.

There’s a whole lot of gold in that museum, and it should be on everyone’s list of places to go if you’re visiting Kansas City.

We also hit up Worlds of Fun on July 4 for an excellent (if hot) day at the amusement park.

We then travelled up to Omaha, visiting the Union Pacific Railroad Museum in Council Bluffs, Iowa, the Omaha Zoo, the Durham Museum, and exploring the Omaha area.

The Omaha Zoo is impressive, and I’ve been to the renowned Fort Worth Zoo several times. It’s a massive zoo with top-notch facilities and incredible exhibits. But I will warn you that it’s on the side of a bluff, and you start at the top of the bluff. Which means you then have to walk up the bluff, and probably when you’re tired and just want to get back to the car.

Also in the parking lot of the zoo is a memorial to old Rosenblatt Stadium, the former home of the Men’s College World Series. It’s now a small Wiffle Ball park with the original sign over the scoreboard and some seats from the stadium. As a fan of baseball as well as collegiate baseball, it was neat to visit this historic site.

Overall, it was a great vacation at a great time to get away from work for a week and a half.

Checking Out Laracon US … Online

Also, I did get to check out my first Laracon US, albeit only online. I wish I could have been there in person, but it’s been a stupid, crazy summer.

I was surprised by just how much I enjoyed the conference online, though. Things started strong with Aaron Francis’s opening talk, where he hammered home the idea of just building things, just shipping things, and just being awesome. And that became the thruline for the entire conference.

So many of the talks were great, and while I usually have a hard time staying focused during online conferences, this one had my full attention the entire two days.

I can’t wait to see where Laracon US is next year so I can start making plans to attend in person for the first time.

Updating My Personal Dashboard App

Now on to the coding things.

First off, the biggest win I’ve had this summer was finishing version 2.0 of my personal dashboard app.

I created this app for myself back at the end of last year and the beginning of this year, and I originally built it with Laravel and React because a) I had shiny object syndrome with React and b) I hadn’t discovered Livewire and Alpine JS yet.

While it had been quite serviceable to me for most of this year, I started to run into some of the rigidity of the app that I needed to be more flexible, so with half a year more knowledge, now seemed like the perfect time to rebuild it from the ground up.

I used what I had built with ArtisanPack UI (more on that in the next section) and was able to create a much better version of the dashboard app that’s more future-proof and works better as a way to keep me organized and on top of things.

I’ll also admit that I used this as an opportunity to try out “vibe coding” with PHPStorm’s Junie, and it was okay. It’s not great but also not terrible. And I’m not worried about AI taking over my job either. Though now that Laravel Boost is out, I would love to give it another spin with something else.

All in all, I’ve been using the new version for about a couple of weeks now, and it’s great. I’m happy I took the time now to get that up and running to help me in the long run.

Introducing ArtisanPack UI

The next biggest thing I’ve been pouring my time into is a new project I’m excited about: ArtisanPack UI.

At its core, ArtisanPack UI is a suite of open-source packages for Laravel developers. The idea for this grew organically from my work on the Digital Shopfront CMS. As I was building it, I realized that I was creating a lot of components and tools that I would want to use again in other projects. It felt like a really bad idea to keep all of that useful code confined to just one application.

So, I decided to pivot. I broke out all of those reusable components and created ArtisanPack UI. This way, they can be easily dropped into any project I want, and hopefully, they can be helpful for other developers as well. It’s all about creating tools that empower us to build better, faster.

I’m planning a more formal, in-depth introduction to ArtisanPack UI and all of the individual packages soon. But for now, you can check out the GitLab group to learn more about the packages.

Update on Digital Shopfront CMS

So … what about Digital Shopfront CMS?

Well, to be honest, I haven’t worked on it much this summer. Most of my focus has been on ArtisanPack UI and getting that up and running with the assortment of packages.

But Digital Shopfront isn’t going anywhere.

This is still my overall primary focus and sort of a capstone-type project for me.

Everything that I’ve built with ArtisanPack is for Digital Shopfront, primarily. I’m going to rebuild Digital Shopfront from the ground up, but because of the work I’ve done this summer with ArtisanPack, my starting point is much further along than it was when I started back in February.

Ideally, I would like a beta test ready by the end of the year, but we’ll just have to wait and see. And I will have regular updates on this as I continue to build it out … hopefully.