Practically Academy

The Practically Academy is what we used to call Show and Tell and it has evolved into so much more. Not only is this the place for our Heather Smalls moments but it is also where the team learns and shows what can be done.

The Last Show and Tell: Ade Attwood

The Last Show and Tell: Ade Attwood

Lead developer Ade Attwood has moved on to pastures new after 6 years with us. As has now become tradition and as it is a rare event, one last show and tell from Ade. Enjoy!

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Start a new development project on the right foot

Start a new development project on the right foot

Multiple times in Web Development you will go through the process of creating a new repository for a new application or project that you are tasked to build. We think it is really important to get the order of tasks correct at the start of a new application…

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Accessibility Web Design Rules – Our upgraded website for NHS

Accessibility Web Design Rules – Our upgraded website for NHS

Things we learnt by creating highly accessible website designs for the NHS & university sectors. Recent pitches and web briefs have put accessibility high on their list of needs, which is a great sign. However accessibility, just like GDPR, needs to be taken in context…

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PRACTICALLY A YEAR?

PRACTICALLY A YEAR?

So here it is – 2021. A year of lockdowns, mockdowns and a really big one in terms of workload, projects and dare we say success.

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The Last Show and Tell: Anna Peskova

The Last Show and Tell: Anna Peskova

It is our designer Anna’s last week here at Practically, and she was made to do a show and tell of her time with us. We thought it was rather cool that, firstly, she created it as a web page, and secondly the way she represented her time here. Enjoy!

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Service Broker Introduction

Service Broker Introduction

A service broker is a way of provisioning services and binding them to applications. With a service broker you can provision a database and bind it to a deployment.

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Mkcert all the things

Mkcert all the things

After Ade Attwood’s recent dive into TLS and creating server certificates with a root ca. This is a much simpler way with mkcert…

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Future Web Design Skills

Future Web Design Skills

This post is a version of a recent lecture. The question is “What skills and knowledge might future designers be expected to know”.

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Yii2 stream responses

Yii2 stream responses

In your Yii2 controller, it is quite common practice to return the stream of a file to the browser for your user to download. However, it’s not so well documented you can set any stream reference as the content of your response.

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Named regex matches in php

Named regex matches in php

When dealing with those pesky regular expressions trying to get our matches by their index, making your code that little less readable.

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Lockdown Quizzes

Lockdown Quizzes

Our Practically bi-weekly quizzes. So why not get some inspiration or even borrow from us. Here are some highlights of our quiz rounds.

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A Lazy Canoe Trip Down the River

A Lazy Canoe Trip Down the River

A wonderful day canoeing and larking about on the beautiful river Wye. Photos from the day of all the team, though none of the kingfisher that we all saw…

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Git Repository Clean Up

Git Repository Clean Up

After you have been developing a project for some time your local git repo can become detached from the repository on ‘origin’. Here are a few commands you can run to clean things up a bit when you feel things are getting cluttered.

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