TravisCI is a great service for running your continuous integration scripts, but when something isn’t working it can be a pain to resolve. One way of testing your script in order to fix it is to install Travis locally using Docker.

Have you ever found yourself stuck with gibberish characters in a database that you’ve just imported? Is your data looking like someone’s tried to mask expletives? Then perhaps you’ve found yourself exporting a latin1 encoded database containing UTF-8 characters.

A look at using PHP traits with Laravel’s Eloquent models, hooking them up with events and making them configurable.

I’ve released the latest version of my Social Share plugin for CakePHP today.

Last week I found myself needing to quickly seed a column in a database with incremental datetime values. This is not something I’d ever needed to do before in MySQL, but the solution I found was beautifully simple. So I am going to share here how I did this and show you how you can easily populate a column for existing records with an incremental value.