Laravel and Chirper

Today I used Laravel to code a Twitter clone called Chirper via the tutorial you can find here. The tutorial took about two hours before I got the notifications section of the tutorial. The tutorial is easy to follow and with my contextual knowledge I was able to write most of the code with a minimum of errors. The tutorial follows the CRUD model, Create, read, update delete, and adds in notifications for good measure.

I chose to follow the Blade course rather than the React course because at the moment I feel more at ease with PHP thank JavaScript despite spending months on JS courses. What I like about PHP and Laravel is that when there is an error the code will show you the code with an error and you just need to understand what it is.

With JavaScript and especially with typescript the error message provides you with code that is hundreds of lines away from what is causing the code to fail. It takes seconds or minutes rather than hours to debug an issue.

Although building a twitter clone might not sound exciting, it is worth doing. Creating, reading, updating and deleting are key parts of Content Management systems so if you can do it for content with 255 characters you can easily expand it to blog posts, articles and more. It also means that you have a chat app to use within a small group of friends.

The next step, once I finish the course, is to adapt the code to get the content from my website to work via the Laravel framework. For the next step I want to read documentation. Watching video tutotirals is great sometimes, but it’s time consuming. The next step is to read documentation, and understand it. I have spent enough time building context. Now is the time to put this knowledge into practice.