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Chris Morrell

@cmorrell.com

3.8K followers 360 following 4.4K posts

Philadelphia father of two. Mostly talking about PHP/Laravel/React on here. He/him. On the web @ https://cmorrell.com Podcasting @ https://overengineered.fm/ On mastodon @ https://rtsn.dev/@chris Formerly @ https://twitter.com/inxilpro

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Chris Morrell @cmorrell.com · 16h

Just saw the Twenty Sided Tavern. It was fantastic! Would highly recommend.

thetwentysidedtavern.com

Dungeons & Dragons The Twenty-Sided Tavern

The Official Dungeons & Dragons Live Theatrical Experience. Previews begin April 19th in NYC. Prepare for adventure.

thetwentysidedtavern.com

Reposted by Chris Morrell

Kelsey Hightower @kelseyhightower.com · 20h

🎯

Grady Booch @booch.com · 20h

I’m not anti-AI.

I am, however, anti the rapacious tech bros who selfishly hype AI for the purpose of increasing their wealth and power at the expense of our humanity.

Chris Morrell @cmorrell.com · 20h

Honestly, they tasted great but aren’t very attractive and probably don’t keep very well. The apple chunks shrink inside the candy shell and moisture in the apple eventually causes the candy to soften. They were awesome to eat, but got kinda messy pretty quickly.

Chris Morrell @cmorrell.com · 21h

It's a very different experience, I would say. Dipping slices in caramel is fantastic, though…

Chris Morrell @cmorrell.com · 1d

Update: these are effing delicious.

“Apple cinnamon” in a crunchy, tart, sweet bite.

Chris Morrell @cmorrell.com · 1d

You’ve got approximately 20 mins before I eat every one of these.

Chris Morrell @cmorrell.com · 1d

Oh! I hadn’t planned on it but I don’t think I’ve got anything going on that day so I might register!

Chris Morrell @cmorrell.com · 1d

It’s also an opportunity to make the candy coating extra-delicious. I used cinnamon and vanilla beans to add a fall-inspired flavor to it.

Chris Morrell @cmorrell.com · 1d

So it’s apple season and I’ve been craving a candied/caramel apple. But I don’t want a whole one. So I’m experimenting with candied apple bites…

It’s very hard to wait for these to cool entirely!

Photo of candied apple chunks with tooth picks sticking out of them.

Chris Morrell @cmorrell.com · 1d

Alright. This time I got the candy thermometer out. Took me a whole 12s to find it in the drawer. Really saved a bunch of time by skipping that the first time around…

Photo of sugar mixture boiling in a pan with a candy thermometer sticking out of it.

Chris Morrell @cmorrell.com · 1d

Except that I let the sugar go over 400° F, so it’s just called “really burnt sugar” 😂

Chris Morrell @cmorrell.com · 1d

Ugh. And I burnt the caramel so it’s back to square one 😭

Photo of burnt caramel on parchment paper.

Chris Morrell @cmorrell.com · 1d

Watching a chef split and scrape a vanilla bean: easy, 3 seconds.

Me splitting and scraping a vanilla bean: 10 mins, huge mess, half the precious vanilla is lost.

Chris Morrell @cmorrell.com · 2d

I've seen some of those natural wood ones on Etsy for $200 and I'm very suspicious of how someone could make that and get it to me for that amount of money.

Chris Morrell @cmorrell.com · 2d

Anyone have a cat scratching post that they like that doesn't look like absolute garbage?

Chris Morrell @cmorrell.com · 3d

I haven’t tried the Max, but I’ve tried the Bose ones everyone recommended back in the day, and a pair of beats ones, and the AirPods Pro 2, and a handful of others over the years, and would start feeling almost nauseous within 30-60s.

Chris Morrell @cmorrell.com · 3d

I’m so excited.

Chris Morrell @cmorrell.com · 3d

My vent hood is blasting, and my pan is sizzling, and my convection oven is on high, and I’m just listening to a podcast in peace.

Incredible.

Chris Morrell @cmorrell.com · 3d

OK, the AirPods Pro 3 are the first noise-cancelling headphones that don’t immediately give me a massive headache. And so, in 2025, I get to discover noise cancellation for the first time…

You guys. It’s amazing! You all just got to live like this for years?

Chris Morrell @cmorrell.com · 3d

Oh this is from the AWS console.

Chris Morrell @cmorrell.com · 3d

It's kinda wild what a little DB tuning can do…

On the 6th we launched a new feature that resulted in 100,000's of new DB queries. And because of a single missing index and a few sub-optimal queries, that caused a huge spike in load.

We added the index and fixed the queries, and voila!

Graph showing load vs. bin log usage: on 10/6 a spike in bin log usage triggered a huge spike in load. On 10/7 and 10/8, similar spikes had no noticeable affect on load.

Reposted by Chris Morrell

Bogdan Kharchenko @bogdankharchenko.com · 3d

See ya'll tonight!

www.meetup.com/hack-greenvi...

UpstatePHP - Fall Meetup, Thu, Oct 9, 2025, 6:00 PM | Meetup

Building Access Instructions: https://joinopenworks.com/guest-access ### About the event Join us for our Fall Meetup - an evening of PHP talks, networking, and community

Chris Morrell @cmorrell.com · 4d

I think there should be a .well-known standard for this…

[domain]/.well-known/hard-lessons-learned.md

Chris Morrell @cmorrell.com · 4d

Sort of, but UUIDs come with costs, too. And being able to look at an ID and immediately know “this is from before we migrated” is *really* useful.

We migrated to Laravel ten years ago, and I still use “is the ID below 500K” as a debugging heuristic to this day.

Chris Morrell @cmorrell.com · 4d

This is a technique I've used a bunch of times in the past, and it occurred to me that I've never heard anyone else talk about it, so I thought I'd share…