04 Blog

Things I'm building,
learning & figuring out.

I write about things I actually work with — PHP, Laravel, APIs, databases, deployment, and the problems that come up while building web applications.

Some posts are technical guides. Others are notes about something I struggled with, a mistake I made, or something that finally started making sense after building it myself. No complicated theory for the sake of it. Just things I've learned while working on real projects.

Deployment 8 min read

From Localhost to a Live Website: Deploying My PHP Portfolio

I recently took my PHP portfolio from my local development environment and put it on a real VPS. Along the way, I worked through Ubuntu, Apache, PHP, DNS, SSL, Git deployment, file permissions, and a few problems that don't show up when everything is running on localhost.

Coming soon

Latest posts

  • Laravel

    Laravel Middleware Finally Made Sense to Me

    Middleware was one of those Laravel concepts I understood from the definition but didn't really understand until I needed it. This is how I came to understand what middleware actually does, where it fits into a request, and how I used it to protect routes.

    Coming soon

  • Deployment

    Why My Git Pull Failed on Production

    I made a change directly on my production server and later tried to pull the latest code from Git. Git wasn't happy. Instead of just fixing the command and moving on, I used the problem to understand what Git was actually protecting me from.

    Coming soon

  • APIs

    Building My First Laravel REST API

    I wanted to understand APIs by actually building one rather than just reading about HTTP methods and JSON responses. This post walks through what I built, how I structured the endpoints, how I handled authentication and validation, and some of the things I would approach differently now.

    Coming soon

  • PHP

    PHP Errors in Production: What Should Actually Be Hidden?

    A warning appearing in development is useful. A PHP warning being printed directly onto your public website is a different story. I ran into this while deploying my own application and learned the difference between hiding errors from users and properly handling them in production.

    Coming soon

  • PHP

    The PHPMailer Reply-To Problem I Didn't Expect

    I had a contact form working on my portfolio, but the email configuration wasn't quite right. The problem turned out to be the value I was passing to Reply-To. A small mistake, but a useful reminder that email headers still have to follow the rules expected by the library.

    Coming soon

Browse by category

  • PHP

    Core PHP, language features, backend development, error handling, security, and things I discover while working with PHP.

  • Laravel

    Laravel concepts, application structure, authentication, middleware, Eloquent, APIs, and lessons from projects I'm building.

  • APIs

    REST APIs, authentication, validation, integrations, HTTP concepts, and connecting applications together.

  • Databases

    MySQL, database design, relationships, queries, and the backend decisions that affect an application's data.

  • Deployment

    Linux, VPS setup, Apache, DNS, SSL, Git deployment, production configuration, and everything involved in getting an application online.

  • Development Notes

    Shorter posts about bugs, mistakes, useful discoveries, and small things that were worth writing down.

Building something?

If you're working on a PHP or Laravel project and need help with the backend, APIs, database work, or deployment, feel free to get in touch.

Let's talk about your project