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Mohcin Bounouara

Thoughts about software engineering and life

15 Jan 2026

Passion in software development

One of the strongest “drugs” consumed by followers of motivational speeches and the myths of personal development is the idea of “follow your passion”.. even in software engineering. The passion is not the problem! The problem is not about passion itself. Passion means following what your desires want and enjoy, not the other way around. Continue reading “Passion in software development”

22 Dec 2025
13 Nov 2025

How to Add UUIDs to an Existing Laravel Database

Introduction UUIDs (Universally Unique Identifiers) are 128-bit identifiers that are globally unique, making them ideal for scenarios where you want to hide sequential ID patterns from your users. This article walks you through converting an existing Laravel application from auto-incrementing integer IDs to UUIDs. Why Use UUIDs? Pros: – Security: Prevents ID enumeration attacks (users Continue reading “How to Add UUIDs to an Existing Laravel Database”

27 Oct 2025
22 Oct 2025
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31 Jul 2025

Use site.local Instead of localhost/mysite on apache without using docker or DDEV

Let’s suppose you’re using Apache on your local machine and you want to visit your PHP project using something like http://site.local instead of http://localhost/mysite. You’re not using Docker, DDEV, or any container tools, just plain XAMPP or Apache on Linux. Here’s how to set it up: Map your custom domain locall Edit your /etc/hosts file: Continue reading “Use site.local Instead of localhost/mysite on apache without using docker or DDEV”

29 Jul 2025

Building a reply system for comments in Laravel -Without a Subcomments Table-

Many developers, when adding a “reply to comment” feature in a Laravel app, often consider creating a separate sub_comments table (I was one of them, based on my lack of experience, I know this later). It sounds intuitive, because a reply is different from a comment, right? logic thinking But there’s a cleaner, more strict Continue reading “Building a reply system for comments in Laravel -Without a Subcomments Table-“

19 May 2025