Blog – Page 8 – David Peach

16th April 2025

The Last of Us series 2 episode 1

On the whole it was great to see the series back.

I’ve played through part 2, the game on which this series is based, five or six times through. So seeing certain scenes happen in this episode that were towards the end of the game was very strange for me.

But I get it from a storytelling perspective. Games are just completely different beasts to TV shows. Certain reveals and motivations need to be shown earlier.

Dina and Ellie at the Jackson New Years Dance

I just have to mention though. The Jackson dance scene was just incredible. I’m not 100% sure, but it seemed to be a shot for shot remake of the same scene from the game. And it hit just as well.

In fact, dare I say it hit slightly harder — mainly due to Joel seeming to have slightly more of a temper against Seth.

The shots, the dialogue, the chemistry between Dina and Ellie, and the music just fell right into place here.

Beautiful.

I’m looking forward to the rest of the series.

My prediction is that the series will end at the closing of the third day at the pinnacle theatre. It just seems like the most logical place for me for it to cliffhanger.

But who knows what changes they will make.

15th April 2025

What the hell was I thinking

“What the hell was I thinking?”; “Huh?”; “Who’s the fucking idiot who did this?.. oh. It was me…”.

Three questions every developer / coder / programmer / whatever-er asks themselves from time to time.

And I am definitely no different.

I built an initial version of a web-based tool for work some time ago. I built it with some speed to get it done as quickly as possible. But I should have taken longer and focused in more on the ongoing code quality.

I wrote tests from the get-go, but I let it slip a little when I would dip back into the project for little updates and tweaks across the last twelve months.

The other day I ran a static analysis tool over the project for the first time.

Christ on a bike.

So for the past day or so I’ve been battling hard to climb up the 9 rung ladder to the highly sought after status of level 9 all green. (Larastan/phpstan this is).

I’m currently on level 7 with about 15 errors to fix.

I have found that from implementing the fixes — many of which have been type hinting and generics-related — I am understanding the code — and the underlying framework Laravel — much better.

I’ve even found a very odd design decision in Laravel. The `auth()->id()` method can return either of the following: