Mehdi’s articles (excerpts only)

Seeding a MySQL 8 table with geographic coordinates using Laravel

hi@mehdi.cc (Mehdi Merah) — Fri, 10 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Today I learned that MySQL 8 has column types to store geographic coordinates, the simplest of them probably being POINT. It’s less straightforward than what I expected, so here’s how I managed to seed my database using Laravel.

GitHub Markdown syntax for alerts considered harmful

hi@mehdi.cc (Mehdi Merah) — Sat, 03 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Article updated on

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I had multiple options for the title of this note, from being neutral to opinionated, or even pedantic. I deliberately kept the worst.

The rant has been written before having discovered this comment and its answers on the related GitHub community discussion. If you’ve already read what’s there, you won’t learn anything new here. (I am actually glad my observations were all backed by others before I even published them.)

Downloading Xcode Simulators on macOS Sonoma when the bandwidth is slow

hi@mehdi.cc (Mehdi Merah) — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Article updated on

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Since macOS Sonoma (macOS 14), Xcode doesn’t include any iOS Simulator anymore, so it’s now 50% lighter to download (3.2 GB instead of 7 GB), which is nice… except that downloading the Simulator separately sucks ~~if your bandwidth is slow~~ and will peak below 5 MB/s no matter your bandwidth.

Recover a lost Git stash in two steps

hi@mehdi.cc (Mehdi Merah) — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Losing in-progress work is one of the fastest ways to feel helpless in front of a computer. This article about recovering lost git stashes was initially published 5 years ago on Dev.to and has a steady 10000 views per year, so I guess it happens to a lot of persons.

Using Vitepress `cleanUrls` option on a Nginx server

hi@mehdi.cc (Mehdi Merah) — Fri, 10 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT

We share, receive and see URLs all the time, so it’s nice to have human-readable URLs like example.tld/yeah instead of example.tld/yeah.html.

On this blog using Vitepress on a Nginx environment, it works rather well (with a minor trade-off).