Weekly Pull Request: January 17th, 2025

Welcome to the Weekly Pull Request, a place where I share cool music, tech, and things I’ve been working on throughout the week.

If you’re new here:

👋 Hey! My name is Shawn aka Paps

💻 Lead Developer & Founder @ SPAP Technology Solutions

📈 I build high-impact web solutions for small businesses.

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Table of Contents

• Riffs

• Apple Music

• Short n’ Sweet - Sabrina Carpenter

• The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess - Chappell …

• The Father of Make Believe - Coheed and Cambria

• Code

• Laravel

• Coffee

• Let’s Work Together!

Riffs

Apple Music

With Spotify making headlines (again) in late 2024, I have made the decision to stop using Spotify. Moving forward, all music links provided will be for Apple Music. 🙂 

Short n’ Sweet - Sabrina Carpenter

Starting off 2025 with something a little bit different! If you know me, you know I’m a sucker for good pop music. I’ve been seeing Sabrina content absolutely everywhere and noticed she recently did a Tiny Desk Concert.

If you’re unfamiliar, Tiny Desk Concert is hosted by NPR, where they have an artist come in and play an intimate show, as if seeing your favorite artist at your local library.

After watching Sabrina’s set, I was impressed with her voice for one. But what caught me off guard was that she used a full band including backup singers and all for her performance.

This record has a really cool vibe. Yes, it’s extremely radio friendly sonically, but Sabrina’s tongue-in-cheek songwriting makes it stand out in comparison. If you’re looking for something a bit different, check this one out.

The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess - Chappell Roan

I remember sitting down with my fiance to watch Saturday Night Live last year and being blown away by Chappell Roan’s performance that night. The drag, the music, the songwriting— all of it is just fantastic.

To me, her music is pop, but her lyrics and vocals are reminiscent of bands like the Runaways. It’s a refreshing take on pop music, and hope that this “old school cool” trend continues going into 2025.

The Father of Make Believe - Coheed and Cambria

Coheed is back!!! I’m so excited that they have another record coming out and from the sounds of the singles, they’re coming back swinging! ‘Searching for Tomorrow’ will bring you right back to ‘Good Apollo I’m Burning Star IV, Vol I’. I think it’s safe to say that this is going to be an awesome rock record and I’m here for it.

Code

Laravel

With 2025 brings new opportunities and new technologies to learn. One of those technologies is Laravel, a fast, scalable PHP framework. I’m always trying to expand my offerings as a freelance developer, and Laravel provides a solid solution, especially for those migrating from platforms like Wordpress that already use PHP.

→ Btw, did I mention I can’t stand Wordpress? I wrote an article about it. I’ll link it below. 😆

Laravel is by no means the new kid on the block. In fact, it’s almost 14 years old at this point, but make no mistake, it is still extremely supported, and even has frameworks like Inertia to build on top of it with your favorite frontend tooling like Vue or React.

The Dev experience is top notch. The developers really put DX first when building this framework, and it has been enjoyable to learn to build with it.

Coffee

Let’s Work Together!

In case you didn’t know, I am a freelance developer that strives to help creative small businesses thrive on the modern web. I am looking for new clients to work with in 2025, so if you or someone you know is a business owner looking for a website refresh, custom tech integrations, data management and cloud support, or some help bringing their software startup to life, simply click this link to get in touch with me.

That’s all for this week’s pull request. Let’s go ahead and merge this to main. I hope you have an amazing weekend!

Build Fast. Break Stuff. Have Fun.

Paps