Javascript: Calculate Characters Remaining In A TextArea

In this post, we'll create a Javascript event listener that calculates the number of characters that have been entered in a TextArea. The purpose here is not to demonstrate the quick and dirty solution, but rather to fully understand how the code actually works. This functionality is helpful for inline form validation and preventing users from hitting the server-side with invalid data. 

Understand and Implement Laravel Model Events

One of the most powerful functionalities in Laravel is the event. This feature enables all the triggers of various tangentially related functionality to occur throughout the life cycle of a model instance. Plus, events are always listening – meaning you don’t have to explicitly call them in the code to harness their powers. In this post, we’ll implement a sample Laravel model event listener.

Extracting Eloquent Queries to View Composers in Laravel

Whenever working with data using Laravel, it can be easy to write a few small Eloquent queries within your blade files to access the database. However, this practice can quickly spiral out of control if you're not careful, increasing query load time and destroying the performance of your application. In this post, I'll explain how to extract commonly used queries to a view composer so that they can be shared across multiple views that use different blade files.

Getting Started with HAML on Rails

The HAML syntax is like installing all the software updates on your computer: at first it seems like upgrading is going to take forever and it's not worth it, but once you're up to date the time saved pays for itself and you could never imagine going back to your old ways. You can also learn a ton from the official HAML reference, but consider this a cheatsheet to bootstrap your proficiency and get started with some of the major use cases.