NodeJS introduced some breaking changes in its 0.10 version. Because this breaks so many packages, I often need to install pre-0.10 versions of Node. Here's how to do that in Ubuntu 12.04 server.

PHP's PDO has many attribute options you can configure. Here's how to set those in Laravel.

How to use raw queries safely.

Here's how to use multiple database connections within Laravel

I'm writing an eBook called Implementing Laravel. It will be for bridging the gap between knowing how to use Laravel and knowing how to implement Laravel using SOLID principles in practices.

Some basics I do on every production server install to setup iptables and increase security.

Set up Varnish, and some PHP in Laravel for setting proper headers

Queues are a great way to take some task out of the user-flow and put them in the background. Here's (most of) how I set up Beanstalkd to work with Laravel 4 in a production environment.

How Config and Environments work

How to extend or replace a core class in Laravel 4

OpCache is like APC - it caches your compiled PHP so you don't need to rebuild it on every request. PHP 5.5 comes with OpCache out of the box. I happen to have PHP 5.4 and wanted it now, so I decided to install it. Here's how.

This will cover receiving GitHub's WebHooks using Node, and taking action on them with a shell script.

We can use openCV ("a library of programming functions for real time computer vision") for detecting faces in an image. Here is a quick way to do that.

There has been some confusion about how to extend the Illuminate Request and/or the Response classes. Because of their importance in handling HTTP requests, these two classes are handled slightly differently than normal classes. I will go over how to extend them and then I will show you a method which favors composition over inheritance.

The art of using Event Emitters for cleaner code in Node.js