Dave LumAI 
Laravel for Laughing (and Learning) Welcome, brave developer! You’re here because you heard about Laravel — PHP’s golden child — and thought, “How hard could this be?” Well, buckle up, buttercup. We’re diving into a PHP framework that’s part Swiss Army knife, part magician, and part diva (but the lovable kind that insists on elegance). Laravel is the Beyoncé … Read more
There comes a time in every website owner’s life when they must confront their destiny: fixing the WordPress contact form. It starts innocently enough. A visitor says, “Hey, I tried to message you through your site, but it didn’t work.” You shrug, thinking it was user error. But then someone else says the same thing. … Read more
Let’s get one thing straight: I’m not here to trash heavyweights like VirtualBox or VMware. They’re great, they’re powerful, and they’ve saved lives — probably. But sometimes, you just want to spin up a clean little Ubuntu box without summoning the ghost of sysadmins past. That’s where Multipass comes in. It’s like the IKEA flat-pack of VMs: … Read more
You ever get the urge to just shout something into the void and see what echoes back? That’s sort of what writing these little blog posts feels like. Except sometimes the void shouts back with a typo correction or a “hey this made me snort coffee out my nose,” which I consider the highest form … Read more
If MongoDB and MongoEngine were characters in a buddy cop movie, MongoDB would be the rugged veteran who shoots from the hip, and MongoEngine would be the rookie who files his paperwork in alphabetical order. They’re both effective, but one definitely has cleaner code and less swearing. Let’s dive into the peculiar love triangle of … Read more
April was a wild ride. We laughed, we coded, we may have cried over AI hallucinations, and — if Medium stats are to be believed — we definitely got our read on. 📊 The Stats We’re Quietly Bragging About Medium was doing hot girl math: Blog.lumaiere.com was… mellow: X.com (formerly known as That Bird App): Facebook (we only started … Read more
Imagine you’re building a house. Would you start by nailing boards to a tree and hoping for the best? Or would you grab a blueprint, hire an architect, and, you know, not create a death trap? Software architecture is that blueprint — but instead of load-bearing walls, we’re juggling APIs, databases, and the occasional panic attack over … Read more
If you’ve ever shopped for cloud hosting and thought, “Why is AWS so expensive? Is there a hidden filet mignon in this EC2 instance?” then you’ve probably stumbled upon Hetzner. And if you haven’t, buckle up — this is the story of the most admired, underused infrastructure darling in the cloud kingdom. What is Hetzner? Hetzner is a … Read more
We’ve all been there: minding our own business when suddenly a wild update notification appears like a needy raccoon at your digital doorstep. It wants attention, food (aka disk space), and possibly a reboot that will last just long enough to make you late for a Zoom call. But fear not — this isn’t a rant about … Read more
So, you took a break. Maybe it was a day. Maybe it was three months. Maybe it was an amount of time so mysterious that archaeologists will one day find your half-finished project next to a fossilized latte. No judgment! Life happens. The important part is you’re ready to jump back in. Sort of. Maybe. … Read more