GoDaddy have an API that allows one to perform different actions on their platform.

Redigo is a Go client for the Redis database.

I’ve been using Scala Play! Framework for a little over a year now, and I’ve come to favor the SBT layout over the default layout.

I’ve been using Laravel Backpack CRUD to build the backend for a personal application, and I must say - great tool! Generation of the CRUD part of the application is only an artisan command away! Reminds me of the Yii Auto generator.

Based on all the questions I’ve been getting from fellow developers about how to work with the MPESA API, I thought it may be a good idea to write something on how to get started with it.

I came across a weird issue when working with the Laravel Storage module. I’d uploaded some files to S3, but for some reason when I used the exists() method to check if the file exists, it kept returning false.

I’m putting this here for my future self more than anything else (I know, I’m selfish 😉).

If you have 2FA enabled on Github (which you should have), you have to use the SSH method to do git operations related to your repo. This becomes a pain when you’re doing a lot of remote work (that you haven’t yet automated); because you either have to generate a unique password that you can use during the deploy, or switch off 2FA.

Last weekend, Gro Intelligence hosted their first hackathon in Nairobi at their office space.

Faker is an amazing PHP library you can use to generate fake data, e.g names, addresses, etc.

If you’ve been having problems with using chrisbjr’s ApiGuard library in your project after upgrading to Laravel 5.2, I’ve outlined the steps to take in order to have it working; particularly if you are getting the error below:

I’ve recently been working on integrating to the BitStamp API from a Laravel application, and I was having some problems calling it using the Guzzle PHP HTTP Client.

This post will describe how to create the signature required by the BitStamp API for private calls to the API.

At times you may want to have multiple loggers in your application, e.g. one for a payments module and another for a messaging module. I’m going to explain how to set this up in your application, as well as show some examples for usage.

I recently started working on a Laravel 5 project, and I’d like to share how I set up my custom file logging.

We all know what a joy it is working with different timezones in our applications, especially when we need to convert different times between them.

Every time I open a new shell prompt, a message similar to the one below greets me:

Weekends were made for programming.
- Karl Lehenbauer
muya@ENCORE ~ 00:27:16 $

date_created and date_updated (or variations of the same) are important fields for any table. date_created to show when a record was created, date_updated to show when it was last updated. They are invaluable, especially for audit logs.

When doing integration to the Safaricom MPESA B2C API, the most difficult (or rather least understood) part of the process is the SSL integration. Mutual authentication, certificates, etc.

If you are using AWS for your deployment, you may come across a scenario whereby you have to allow access to your server via non-standard ports.

My blog has been on Github Pages for about a week now. So far, so good. I’ll say this again, Jekyll + Github Pages, a dev’s dream! I especially like the syntax highlighting provided by the Pygments plugin. So sweet, so simple.

I was migrating my blog posts from Blogger to Github Pages today. Not the most interesting thing to be doing on a Sunday (Blogger exporter, y u export to HTML? I WANT MARKDOWN!)

I started my first blog in August 2012. My first post, Creating Users & Grants in MySQL, was as a result of learning how to do just that. I was a newbie at the time, it was all very fascinating.

There comes a time in life when one has to…

We all know the advantages of using minified files in your web apps, i.e. faster loading, smaller payload, etc, it would make sense if all editors that we use have the feature built in, so that we don’t have to worry about it.

Repetitive tasks… I don’t like them. They get monotonous.That’s what was happening a few days ago, when I was required to create some daily reports on our systems’ health, and upload them to a Google Drive Spreadsheet, i.e., run a few queries on the db, copy the data to the Spreadsheet (probably via a text editor, because Drive doesn’t know any other delimiters other than the tab :-(

In this post, we discuss the views auto-generated by Gii.

In part 3 of the Yii tutorial, we’ll go through the auto-generated Controller code.

In this section, we’ll be going through our automatically generated code for the Model, Controller and Views. In our case, it’s the Users model, controller and views. First off…The Model

This tutorial will explain how to modify the slideshow background in Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) to have your own pictures.

In this section, we are going to use the tool that comes with Yii to enable us to generate Models, Views and Controllers for our project. You can learn more about MVC frameworks on Wikipedia.

This blog post provides instructions on how to set up multiple users on MySQL. This is an advisable practice since it allows you to restrict access to certain databases to certain users only.

In this section, we’re going to set up our Yii application. The examples given refer to a Linux environment, however, it shouldn’t be too different for Windows and MacOS environments. Feel free to ask in case of any questions.

This is the second part of the Yii tutorial. It covers the database design as well as the ERD for the project we are going to embark on.

This multi-part tutorial aims to show basic use of the Yii framework for basic tasks. Yii is a powerful PHP framework for building web applications.