Posts - Lostdomain

Using Laravel Dusk to download Paddle payout PDFs

January 13, 2025 / Martijn / 0 Comments

When you have multiple Paddle accounts for different products—monthly accounting tasks end up consuming more time than you’d like. For each payout, I’d log into all my accounts, download the payout PDFs split up between the US and RoW (rest of world) regions, and import them into my accounting software. After a few times, I decided to automate it using Laravel Dusk and I figured I’d share the solution here.

This blog post introduces a new GitHub repository that uses Laravel Dusk to log into Paddle’s web interface, navigate to the payouts page, and download payout PDFs. If you find … Read more

My first PHP package: the Discord Table Builder

September 13, 2024 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Something has been bothering me for a long time. I’ve got a ton of good, kind of modular PHP code, and I’ve failed to make time to publish any of it for a long time. But today, I published my first PHP package on Packagist. 😊

Discord Table Builder

For WhatPulse, we wanted to publish the weekly leaderboard on our Discord server for some community rivalry. But, the Discord API doesn’t have built-in support for tables or any easy way to format tabular data. I wanted something like this:

After searching for an existing solution and coming up empty, … Read more

Cloudflare: Deploying a blog in a subdirectory of an existing site

January 24, 2024 / Martijn / 0 Comments

Let’s say you have an existing website or web application where you’d like to add a blog or documentation site like VuePress or Docusaurus. While keeping it separate from the existing site’s codebase, but still using the same domain name.

When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), there’s evidence that sub domains don’t benefit from the backlinks your main domain has, thus ranking sub domains lower.

Background

In this case, I have a typing test app called TypeTest.io and I wanted to add a blog to optimize for SEO. I did not want to add it to the NuxtJS … Read more

VMware Fusion: Direct USB Keyboard & Mouse

October 10, 2023 / Martijn / 2 Comments

I’ve been using a Mac for forever. It’s just the right level of ultimate control over the system, with a graphical user interface that just works ™.

But, I develop cross-platform apps (i.e., WhatPulse, MuteDeck) which need to work on both macOS and Windows. For that, I run Windows inside a VM on VMware Fusion.

This is a quick article on how to directly connect a keyboard and/or mouse to that VM, instead of using the input device sharing that’s built in.

The Need for a Keyboard & Mouse

WhatPulse is a computing activity tracker, which keeps … Read more

Learnings from a new manager

June 26, 2023 / Martijn / 0 Comments

It’s been ~12 months since I started managing an engineering team, and I’ve learned so much from them. Here are 9 things I wished my previous managers did (or didn’t do).

No scheduled 1-on-1’s

Make it clear that you don’t have to wait until a recurring touchpoint to bring up issues. Always be available for chats; enabling them is your primary job. Also, translates to: don’t be so busy it deters people from reaching out. Having them think, “He’s probably not busy; I can give him a call,” is a good thing.

Goals

Please don’t ask them to translate company … Read more

Introducing AI Spend: AI API Usage Monitoring Made Easy

June 10, 2023 / Martijn / 0 Comments

As an AI enthusiast who has built multiple AI products, I know the importance of tracking OpenAI API costs, identifying abuse instances and preventing runaway apps. While there are several tools available that enable you to see your API usage by entering the API key, I wanted an effortless and passive monitoring tool to keep track of my API usage.

Keeping this in mind, I developed AI Spend – an intelligent monitoring tool that synchronises your API usage per model in cost, tokens, and requests in an encrypted database. With this tool, you can effortlessly control the costs and … Read more

Using OpenAI’s [free] Content Moderation API

March 29, 2023 / Martijn / 0 Comments

By now, everyone knows about ChatGPT, GPT itself, and OpenAI. However, OpenAI is more than GPT: you can use their API to do image generation, speech to text, and text moderation assessments. This post is about their text moderation API, as I’ve recently discovered it’s free.

The idea is to use the moderation API to decide whether the rest of OpenAI’s models would accept the input text, but it can be used on its own as well. It might change in the future, but moderation API calls are not metered against your bill.

Why would you want to … Read more


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Tagcloud

Discord Table Builder

Background

The Need for a Keyboard & Mouse

No scheduled 1-on-1’s

Goals