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Survey Edit / Update

In this video, we build the edit/update experience for surveys using RESTful routes in Laravel. We focus on creating a clean, scalable user experience that sets the foundation for managing surveys, sections, and questions—without reaching for Livewire (yet).

You’ll see how to wire up resourceful routes, connect them to controller actions, and design views that support future growth. We’ll also look at how Laravel Breeze uses modal dialogs with Alpine.js, and how those patterns can be reused in real applications.

This is another step in building a practical, real-world Laravel application, emphasizing clarity, maintainability, and thoughtful UX decisions.

What you’ll learn:
- How to implement edit/update flows with RESTful resource routes
- Connecting list views to edit pages cleanly
- Using resource controllers effectively
- Designing views that support future survey management features
- Leveraging Laravel Breeze + Alpine.js modal patterns
- Preparing your application for section and question management

Up Next:
- Managing survey sections
- Managing survey questions
- Continuing to evolve the survey management experience

If you’re looking to move beyond “toy examples” and see how Laravel is used pragmatically, this series is for you.

💥 About the Series:
Pragmatic Laravel focuses on building real applications with Laravel — emphasizing clarity, maintainability, and thoughtful design decisions instead of shortcuts or magic.

#Laravel #PragmaticLaravel #PHP #CleanCode #TekCasts

Survey List

In this episode, we continue building out our survey application using RESTful Routes in Laravel — focusing specifically on the List / Index functionality. This is where your application begins to feel real: retrieving data, showing ownership, and giving users access to CRUD operations.

👉 We walk through:
- Migrating the surveys table to include a user_id owner
- Building a clean, readable table view to list all surveys
- Providing quick access to create, view, update, and delete actions
- Preparing the foundation for the full management workflow

This is a hands-on, practical lesson designed to reinforce core Laravel conventions and REST architecture—no fluff, just real-world application structure.

💥 About the Series:
Pragmatic Laravel focuses on building real applications with Laravel — emphasizing clarity, maintainability, and thoughtful design decisions instead of shortcuts or magic.

#Laravel #PHP #WebDevelopment #CodingTutorial #FullStackDevelopment #BackendDevelopment #LearnLaravel #SoftwareEngineering #Developers #BuildInPublic #TekCasts

Survey Preview

When you’re building and managing surveys, you need a safe way to see exactly what respondents will experience — before you publish anything.

In this episode of Pragmatic Laravel, we add a Survey Preview feature for survey creators and managers. This preview allows the person building the survey to view it exactly as a participant would, without making it publicly accessible.

Rather than creating something new from scratch, we reuse the existing “take survey” view, wire it through proper RESTful routes, and expose it intentionally as a management-only capability.
What you’ll learn in this video:
- How to add a manager-only survey preview
- Designing preview routes that fit RESTful conventions
- Reusing existing Blade views without duplication
- Connecting routes, handlers, and views cleanly
- Adding preview links to survey management screens
- Thinking intentionally about who a feature is for and why

This is a practical example of building real-world management features while keeping your Laravel application clean, readable, and maintainable.

🎥 Watch more at TekCasts: https://tekcasts.com

💥 About the Series:
Pragmatic Laravel focuses on building real applications with Laravel — emphasizing clarity, maintainability, and thoughtful design decisions instead of shortcuts or magic.

#Laravel #PragmaticLaravel #PHP #WebDevelopment #TekCasts

Survey Question Management

Managing questions is the final — and most important — piece of a real-world survey system.

In this video, we complete the survey management workflow by implementing full question management using clean, RESTful Laravel patterns. This includes editing, updating, deleting, and previewing questions — all without relying on Livewire or heavy abstractions.

We focus on clarity, maintainability, and patterns that scale as your application grows.

In this lesson, you’ll learn how to:
- Finish wiring up remaining controller action methods
- Design RESTful routes for nested resources
- Build views for managing survey questions
- Implement edit, update, delete, and preview actions
- Keep controllers focused and views readable
- Complete the full survey management feature set

This video wraps up the management features portion of the series and demonstrates how small, intentional design decisions add up to a clean, professional Laravel application.

💥 About the Series:
Pragmatic Laravel focuses on building real applications with Laravel — emphasizing clarity, maintainability, and thoughtful design decisions instead of shortcuts or magic.

#Laravel #PragmaticLaravel #PHP #CleanCode #TekCasts

Survey Section Management

In this video, we continue building real-world survey management features by implementing edit, update, and delete functionality for survey sections using Laravel’s RESTful routes.

This lesson is intentionally hands-on and framework-light. We focus on clarity, structure, and maintainability — not shortcuts or magic abstractions.

You’ll see how to wire together views, controllers, and routes in a way that scales naturally as your application grows.

What You’ll Learn:
- How to use resourceful routes for editing, updating, and deleting survey sections
- Building edit views without Livewire (by design)
- Implementing edit, update, and destroy controller actions
- Keeping your RESTful flow clean and predictable
- Laying the groundwork for managing more complex survey data

Why This Matters:
Editing nested data (like survey sections) is where many applications start to feel fragile.
This lesson shows how to structure things so changes are intentional, traceable, and easy to reason about.

What’s Next:
We’re wrapping up survey structure management and moving into:
- Managing survey questions
- More advanced relationships
- Continued focus on pragmatic, real-world Laravel patterns

If you’re building Laravel applications that need to be maintainable, understandable, and production-ready, this lesson is for you.

💥 About the Series:
Pragmatic Laravel focuses on building real applications with Laravel — emphasizing clarity, maintainability, and thoughtful design decisions instead of shortcuts or magic.

#Laravel #PragmaticLaravel #PHP #CleanCode #TekCasts

Survey Simple Create

In this episode of Pragmatic Laravel, we continue building out our survey management features by implementing the Create workflow for a RESTful resource.

This video focuses on wiring together the controller, view, and form handler needed to create new surveys while following Laravel’s RESTful conventions and keeping responsibilities clearly separated.

✅ What You’ll Learn:
- How the create action fits into a RESTful resource controller
- Building the survey.create Blade template
- Handling form submissions with the store action
- Keeping controllers clean and intentional
- Preparing your application for full CRUD workflows

This is a key step toward building real-world admin and management features using Laravel’s conventions—without unnecessary complexity.

💥 About the Series:
Pragmatic Laravel focuses on building real applications with Laravel — emphasizing clarity, maintainability, and thoughtful design decisions instead of shortcuts or magic.

#Laravel #PHP #WebDevelopment #BackendDevelopment #RESTfulAPI #SoftwareEngineering #CodingTutorial #TekCasts

Take Survey Fingerprinting

In this episode of Laravel: The Pragmatic Way, we explore how to generate a unique “fingerprint” for survey participants using a combination of PHP and JavaScript signals.

You’ll learn what fingerprinting is, why it matters, the ethical considerations, and how to integrate a JavaScript fingerprinting library into your Laravel workflow.

🧠 What You’ll Learn
- A method of producing a unique identifier using user “signals.”
- Why fingerprinting must be handled with caution — privacy, consent, regulation concerns.
- Which data you can access server-side vs client-side.
- Including adding routes, generating fingerprints, and pre-filling survey responses.

🪪 Example Signals
- PHP Signals (server-side): IP address, User-Agent, Accept-Language, Accept headers, Referer header, Cookies
- JavaScript Signals (client-side): Everything PHP offers plus installed fonts, plugins/extensions, platform info, screen resolution, OS, touch capabilities, GPU/audio/video data, and more.

🛠️ Survey Workflow Changes
1. Install the JS Fingerprinting Library: https://github.com/jackspirou/clientjs

2. Update the route /s/{survey:hash}
- No longer shows questions directly
- Generates the fingerprint
- Provides a “Take Survey” link: /s/{survey:hash}/{fingerprint}

3. Create the route /s/{survey:hash}/{fingerprint}
- Ensures a SurveyResponse record exists
- Passes SurveyResponse + SurveyResponseAnswers to the view
- Pre-fills previous answers automatically

💥 About the Series:
Pragmatic Laravel focuses on building real applications with Laravel — emphasizing clarity, maintainability, and thoughtful design decisions instead of shortcuts or magic.

#Laravel #PHP #WebDevelopment #Fingerprinting #Security #Controllers #Forms #JavaScript #FullStackDevelopment #TekCasts #LearnLaravel #Routes #SurveyApp

Template Literals

Say goodbye to clunky string concatenation! In this episode, you’ll discover template literals — a modern way to handle strings in JavaScript that makes your code cleaner and easier to read.

🎯 What you’ll learn:

Backtick (`) syntax — the foundation of template literals.
Variable interpolation — insert variables directly into strings.
Multi-line strings — create readable text without messy \n escapes.
Expressions & functions — embed calculations or function calls right inside your strings.


💡 Why it matters:
Template literals are one of those “quality of life” features you’ll use everywhere — from building user messages to formatting HTML templates. Once you start, you’ll never want to go back to + string concatenation.

By the end of this episode, you’ll be writing strings that are not just smarter, but also more expressive. ⚡️

Terminal - Shells, Basics, Help

This video is part of the Linux Crash Course series. This video will introduce the Linux Terminal and how to efficiently navigate command history, cursor position, and how to obtain help on any command.

Github Repo: https://github.com/rcravens/linux-crash-course

Text Editors - Nano, Vim, Emacs

This video is part of the Linux Crash Course series. This video will continue exploring the Linux File System. In this video I will introduce three common text editors found on Linux systems.

Github Repo: https://github.com/rcravens/linux-crash-course

The Event Loop

JavaScript may look simple, but under the hood it’s powered by the Event Loop — the secret sauce that lets your code juggle tasks, handle async operations, and keep your apps responsive. In this video, we’ll break down exactly how it works (without frying your brain 🥓).

Here’s what you’ll learn:
📚 Call stack basics – how functions get pushed, popped, and executed
⏱️ Synchronous vs asynchronous execution – what runs now vs what runs later
🕒 Macrotasks – like setTimeout and setInterval
⚡ Microtasks – like Promises and queueMicrotask
🧪 A hands-on demo where we predict and then prove the order of console logs using timers & promises

You’ll finally understand:
✅ Why some logs show up before you expect them
✅ Why promises are “faster” than timeouts
✅ How the browser keeps things efficient, even when you’re spamming microtasks

By the end, you’ll see the Event Loop not as magic, but as your best friend in building smooth, non-blocking web apps 🚀

👉 Watch now and unlock the inner workings of JavaScript’s brain 🧠⚡

The HTTP Module

Every web app starts with a server — and in Node.js, that journey begins with the HTTP module. In this episode of JavaScript on the Server, we’ll peel back the curtain on how requests and responses actually flow between the browser and your app.

✨ What you’ll learn:
- Why the HTTP module is the core engine of Node.js servers
- How the client-server request/response cycle really works
- Building a minimal web server from scratch (no frameworks required!)
- Getting hands-on with the req (IncomingMessage) and res (ServerResponse) objects
- Key concepts to set you up for routing, APIs, and beyond


Whether you’re new to backend dev or just curious how Node powers the web, this episode will give you the foundation you need to level up.

📚 Helpful Links
- Node.js HTTP Module: https://nodejs.org/api/http.html
- Request/Response Cycle Overview: https://backend.turing.edu/module2/lessons/how_the_web_works_http
- Node.js HTTP Request Object: https://www.w3schools.com/nodejs/nodejs_http.asp
- Node.js HTTP Response Object: https://www.w3schools.com/nodejs/obj_http_serverresponse.asp

🔗 More TekCasts Learning
- JavaScript for Beginners: https://tekcasts.com/play/javascript-for-beginners-what-is-javascript
- JavaScript in the Browser: https://tekcasts.com/play/javascript-in-the-browser-browser-runtime-environment

Timers and Intervals

Timers are everywhere in JavaScript: countdowns, clocks, animations, polling APIs… but they don’t always behave the way you expect. In this video, we break them down so you can use them with confidence.

You’ll learn:
⏳ setTimeout – schedule code to run later
🔁 setInterval – repeat actions at intervals
❌ Canceling timers – clearTimeout, clearInterval
🧑‍💻 Real-world use cases – clocks, countdowns, polling APIs
⚠️ Pitfalls – interval drift, blocked UI, when not to rely on timers

We’ll demo:

- Building a start/pause digital clock
- Defusing a “time bomb” ⏱💣 with clearTimeout
- Seeing timer drift in action when the event loop is overloaded


By the end, you’ll know not just how to use timers—but how to spot when they lie to you 🕵️‍♂️

Traits

Ever struggled with duplicate code across multiple classes? What if you can’t put it in a base class? 🤔 PHP doesn’t support multiple inheritance, but fear not—Traits come to the rescue! 🦸‍♂️

In this video, we’ll identify duplicate logic, discuss why it doesn’t belong in the base class, and then refactor using a Trait to keep our code clean, reusable, and DRY! 💡✨

By the end, you’ll be wielding Traits like a pro! 🏆 Let’s dive in! 🎥

Uploading Photos

🔒 UI Adjustments Based on Auth State
• Hide the notification bell in the top nav if the user isn’t logged in

🧭 Routing & Form Setup
• Create an /upload route
• Set the form’s action and stub in the store() method with a dd($_POST) to start
• Remove the unused “title” field from the upload form

🧪 Validation Process
• Define validation for the uploaded photo:
$file = validate('photo')->file($allowed_mimes)->max(4016053)->required();
• Add $allowed_mimes and $max_file_size constants to the Photo model
• Implement file() and update the max() method in the Validation class
• Fix Validation::clean_value() to properly handle file inputs

⚠️ Missing Validation Messages
• Ensure validation errors are displayed in these views:
• registration.index
• auth.index
• upload.index

💾 File Storage & DB Entry
• Save the uploaded file to the appropriate location
• Create a new photo record in the database

🚫 .gitignore Update
• Add public/photos to the .gitignore file to prevent uploaded files from being committed

⸻

📌 And that completes the upload feature, bringing us to v25-upload-photos. Ready to show off some pictures!