Hi, I'm Brian. Welcome to my blog. Here I write about the things I've learned whilst creating stuff on the web.
I hope that you will find something noteworthy here, that will pique your interest, and that you will visit again soon.
I'm working on a website that functions as an index of trades people in Ireland. It allows users to register a trade profile detailing their services. This trade profile can then be reviewed by other users. I have this functionality pretty much built out. But until recently I had very little test data, which lead me on a journey into the world of database seeding. Which is the generation of test data that mimics real world data. Here's how I got on.
I'm working on an app that requires a large amount of seed data. In order to achieve this I created a factory pattern that mimics Laravel's approach. This allows objects to be generated with ease and uses Faker to supply test data. I have extracted it into a package and uploaded it to Maven Central. I plan to use this approach in future projects. Details of the library are below.
I've recently had the need to generate placeholder images for a webapp. User's of this app are not required to upload a profile image, even though they can. This means that a fallback or "placeholder" image is required for those that choose not to upload a profile image. To facilitate this I developed a neat little package that can be reused in any app. The details of which are below.
