All Posts

This post explains a common MongoDB authentication mistake: using the wrong authSource in your connection string. It shows why your CLI login may work while your app fails, how to properly set authSource, whether you need the /database path in the URI, and how to avoid hidden auth errors in PHP, Node.js, or any MongoDB client.

This post explains why Nginx PHP rewrites using regex-based location ~ blocks often fail — causing .php files to download instead of execute. It walks through a reliable no-regex solution using prefix-based locations and shows how to fix the regex approach by adding folder-specific .php handlers. Ideal for anyone implementing clean URLs in PHP with Nginx.

This post explains why we dropped support for mongodb/mongodb 1.x in favor of ^2.0, and the challenges of supporting multiple versions in an open-source PHP library. It highlights a key limitation of Composer: even if your composer.json allows multiple versions, composer.lock can only lock one. We walk through the trade-offs, the reasoning behind our decision, and best practices for maintaining compatibility across environments.

A scheduled launchd job using scp failed to complete because macOS went to sleep mid-transfer, interrupting the connection. Adding caffeinate -s to the job prevented system sleep during execution, resolving the issue and ensuring all files transferred reliably.

When working with Git, merging branches is a fundamental part of collaboration. But not all merges are the same. There are three main merge strategies you can use, and each one impacts your repository history differently.

When working in a Git-based development team, especially in real-world projects, understanding how to manage branches and history is essential. This post explains the practical use of merge, rebase, and squash, as well as how to use demo or staging branches for safer and more flexible workflows.

Working with interactive data visualizations in React is incredibly powerful, especially when using Chart.js via react-chartjs-2. But it can also be tricky—especially when performance and usability are key. In this post, we’ll break down how to build a performant and maintainable chart component with features like: Zooming and panning Data point navigation Tooltips and highlight syncing Let’s walk through how we solved performance issues, structured custom hooks, and handled state transitions cleanly.

If you've ever seen this ESLint warning: React Hook useEffect has a missing dependency: 'yourFunction'. Either include it or remove the dependency array. You're not alone — and you're probably asking: Why is this happening? Why does it behave differently in a component vs. a custom hook? And do I really need to use useCallback() here? Let’s break this down clearly.

If you need to run a scheduled task on your Mac—even when it’s asleep—you’ll quickly find that cron doesn’t wake up the computer by itself. This post covers how to schedule a cron job at 7 AM on macOS and ensure it runs reliably, even if the Mac is sleeping.

Server performance is critical for any web application, but it’s common to encounter issues caused by factors like excessive log growth, abusive IP traffic, or internal requests. In this blog post, we’ll walk through a real-world example of addressing these issues and optimizing server performance.

MongoDB's find() method is a powerful way to query multiple documents in PHP. However, the way you process the results can significantly impact the efficiency and readability of your code. This blog post explores two common approaches to handling the results of find() in PHP: using toArray() and iterating directly with foreach.

Working with MongoDB in PHP can be confusing, especially when it comes to the behavior of findOne() and how the results can be accessed. This blog post aims to clarify the nuances and help you avoid common pitfalls.

For a long time, I’ve been naming my shell scripts with the .sh extension and assuming they’d run just fine in any shell. Most of the time, they worked perfectly—but every now and then, I’d hit unexpected issues, especially when running them with sh scriptName.sh.

Managing sitemaps is a critical component of ensuring that your website is crawled and indexed effectively by Google. However, submitting too many sitemaps or overwhelming Google’s crawlers can lead to delays, poor user experience, and frustrating errors like “Could not be fetched.” In this post, we'll explore best practices for optimizing sitemap submissions, managing Google’s crawl budget, and keeping your content indexed efficiently.

In Next.js, hydration errors are a common issue when using browser-specific APIs, such as sessionStorage or localStorage. This error occurs because Next.js renders content on both the server and the client. When the server renders the content, it doesn’t have access to the browser-specific APIs, so it may use default values. However, once the content is hydrated on the client side, these browser APIs become available, and the content may change, leading to a mismatch between the server-rendered and client-rendered HTML.

Prefetching is one of the most powerful features of Next.js, designed to make navigation between pages incredibly fast. By preloading essential resources in the background, Next.js can provide a seamless user experience, reducing the time it takes to load new pages. But how exactly does prefetching work, and how does it handle dynamic data? Let’s dive into it.

Pagination is a critical aspect of any application that handles large datasets. It affects both the user experience and the performance of the app, especially when dealing with significant amounts of data.

In many web applications, you often need to scroll to specific elements dynamically based on partial or unknown IDs. This can be especially useful when elements are generated dynamically, and you only know a portion of the ID, such as a prefix or suffix.

When implementing search functionality on a website using Semantic UI React, you might come across a situation where the message "No results found" is displayed when no search results match the user’s query. While this message is helpful from a user interface perspective, it can create SEO issues when crawlers, like Google’s, index the page.

MongoDB’s aggregation framework made it possible to run dynamic queries and efficiently calculate these rankings, all while handling a variety of filters such as gender, age group, and event type. In this post, I'll walk through how I used MongoDB's $lookup feature within an aggregation pipeline to create these rankings.