Update
The project is now completed and can be viewed at https://cv.oscarolim.com
Searching for a job makes you aware of how things change in the world. Yesterday was all about CodeIgniter, today Laravel (and others) are the hot sauce.
You can write on your CV that “you learn fast”, “adapt to new tech at the speed of light”, but most recruiters and employers will read that as pottypoo.
So, what’s the best way to separate the wheat from the chaff as they say? After watching the Laracast series Laravel 6 from scratch (yes I am now aware there’s a new version available, and indeed I am using 7), I started on a simple CMS.
It won’t be anything fancy: the goal is to have something usable, with the ability to create a parent – child structure with infinite levels and a visual editor where you add blocks of content. Well this part is all done and working. Below there’s a video of it in action. All in all took about 10 hours of dev work so far to get to this stage.
My biggest hurdle was to stop thinking in CodeIgniter (6+ years working with it will do that to you!). A few times I was writing queries using the $this->db->query… and then wondering why is it throwing an error. But once that hurdle was behind me, I have to say, I fell in love with Eloquent.
I though it was quite a pretentious name, what’s so special about it? It’s just a model! Boy was I wrong. The ability to create relationships and then ask on the same line for all related content is a huge time saver. And I’m sure the code I wrote can still be further optimised.
So next will come the frontend, and once that’s sorted, build a site to behave as my online CV. After that, probably continue to develop this on my free time. So far, it’s been quite good to learn.