Hi! I'm James, a former Hospital Laboratory supervisor who traded microscopes and test tubes for PHP and the TALL stack. Since 2021, I’ve been diving into the world of web development with the same passion I once used to analyze lab results. Today, I work with PHP, Laravel, and the TALL stack, crafting clean, functional code.https://jamesdallen.me/https://jamesdallen.me/blog/it-could-be-a-system-problem/https://jamesdallen.me/blog/it-could-be-a-system-problem/People make mistakes. It happens. I still think its odd how we consistently seem surprised about this. We aren't perfect. Things will happen. The real question is why did they happen.Sat, 16 Nov 2024 12:00:00 GMThttps://jamesdallen.me/blog/rails-with-laravel-breeze-next/https://jamesdallen.me/blog/rails-with-laravel-breeze-next/I did something weird. You probably shouldn't use this in production but it was fun: I made a video where I used laravel's breeze and hooked it to a Rails backend.Mon, 25 Sep 2023 15:00:00 GMThttps://jamesdallen.me/blog/shadcn-laravel-and-client-side-form-validation/https://jamesdallen.me/blog/shadcn-laravel-and-client-side-form-validation/Here is another video I made where I talk about the shadcn/ui library, how you can use it with laravel and I go into more details about setting up form validation on the client.Sat, 22 Jun 2024 15:00:00 GMThttps://jamesdallen.me/blog/using-clerk-with-laravel-backend-pt-1/https://jamesdallen.me/blog/using-clerk-with-laravel-backend-pt-1/In this video I'm going to show you how to use laravel as a backend on a frontend set up with Clerk authentication. We will be using Remix on the frontend. We will set up clerk auth, then start the process of packaging up the jwt to send to our Laravel backend. In part 2 we will discuss how you can decode the jwt, verify it and use Laravel in a stateless manner.Fri, 02 Aug 2024 19:00:00 GMThttps://jamesdallen.me/blog/using-clerk-with-laravel-backend-pt-2/https://jamesdallen.me/blog/using-clerk-with-laravel-backend-pt-2/In this video we are going to be adding on a laravel backend and decoding the jwt that we passed from our frontend in the previous video.Sat, 03 Aug 2024 19:00:00 GMThttps://jamesdallen.me/blog/background-images/https://jamesdallen.me/blog/background-images/For some reason, I feel like I always have to rediscover the best way to place that background image and overlay so I decided I'm just going to write it down.Sat, 06 Jul 2024 15:00:00 GMThttps://jamesdallen.me/blog/cloudways-deploy/https://jamesdallen.me/blog/cloudways-deploy/I recently had to deploy a laravel project to Cloudways. Cloudways is a good option for projects that might be transfered over to people with less experience working with servers. They handle the infrustructure so you don't have to.Sat, 25 Jan 2025 07:00:00 GMThttps://jamesdallen.me/blog/array-walk-adventures/https://jamesdallen.me/blog/array-walk-adventures/This is less a blog post and more a, 'huh, why did that happen' post.Sat, 09 Nov 2024 12:00:00 GMThttps://jamesdallen.me/blog/carrots/https://jamesdallen.me/blog/carrots/Laravel's tagline is "The PHP Framework for Web Artisans." It's aptly named, if a little pretentious. You can create really beautiful code with laravel. You can create beautiful code with Ruby on Rails, or nodejs. And then there is wordpress.Mon, 22 Jun 2020 20:08:00 GMThttps://jamesdallen.me/blog/old-is-new-again/https://jamesdallen.me/blog/old-is-new-again/You may have heard about the latest and greatest new piece of front-end tech : Hotwire. Hotwire literally stands for HTML over the wire.Tue, 12 Jan 2021 20:02:00 GMThttps://jamesdallen.me/blog/iframe-problems/https://jamesdallen.me/blog/iframe-problems/Learn how to safely embed content in iframes by customizing Laravel Forge's Nginx config and managing X-Frame-Options for secure embedding.Mon, 12 May 2025 12:00:00 GMT