Do I want it the most?
A short video by Justin Jackson on ambition, motivation, and the question of how much you really want something. It looks like a thoughtful prompt for anyone building or creating over the long term.
15 years of Packagist: Over 200 billion package installs
A look back at Packagist's first 15 years, from the first Composer experiments to more than 200 billion package installs. It also covers the team's recent supply chain security work and what they're building next.
Read more [blog.packagist.com]
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More Jev in There There: smart conditions and AI assignment original
Recently I wrote about how we use Jev in There There to detect spam, bounces, and automatic replies. Jev reads an incoming email and answers questions we define up front. We keep the probabilities and decide in our own code what counts as a match. The cheap checks on mail headers still run first.
That post ended with a promise that we'd find more uses for Jev. Here are two we have since added to There There: smart conditions for workflows, and automatic assignment to a team or person.
Ruthless prioritization while the dog pees on the floor
Jason Cohen shares a blunt framework for separating the rare 10x opportunities from the many 0.1x tasks that quietly consume time. It is a strong piece on ruthless prioritization, delegation, and why most backlogs should be archived instead of endlessly maintained.
Read more [longform.asmartbear.com]
Web Workers: A Second Thread for Your JavaScript
– tighten.com - submitted by Kayla Helmick
Large photo uploads can be slow, but resizing and compressing images in the browser can freeze the page if the work runs on the main thread. This article shows how to use a Web Worker to process images before uploading them without interrupting the app.
Read more [tighten.com]
Agent Experience Engineering: Designing Software Agents Can Work With
– wendelladriel.com - submitted by Wendell Adriel
What Agent Experience engineering means in practice: discoverable code paths, scoped agent instructions, useful feedback, and human ownership of risky decisions.
Read more [wendelladriel.com]
Introducing: Dark mode for Flare
Flare now has a dark mode, and this post walks through the design work needed to make it feel right and stay accessible. Nice details on semantic color tokens, fixing gradients and shadows, and using screenshot comparisons to keep the light theme intact.
Read more [flareapp.io]
Detecting spam and auto-replies with Jev and the Laravel AI SDK original
Yesterday Taylor announced that Jev support landed in the 1.x branch of the Laravel AI SDK. We started using it that same day for spam detection in There There. Let's take a look at what Jev is and how you can use it.
What's New in PHP 8.6
A concise overview of what's coming in PHP 8.6, including partial function application, clamp(), the new Duration class, and several smaller language and standard library improvements.
Read more [laravel-news.com]
Logarithmic auto-scaling for Laravel Horizon
A thoughtful write-up on adding logarithmic auto-scaling to Laravel Horizon. It shows how log-based weighting keeps huge queue spikes from starving smaller realtime queues while still giving large backlogs enough workers.
Read more [gummibeer.dev]
Eloquent Performance and Database Design: Evidence Before Eager Loading
– wendelladriel.com - submitted by Wendell Adriel
A deep dive into Eloquent performance, from detecting N+1 queries to choosing aggregates, indexes, query plans, pagination, chunking, and transaction boundaries for a growing team dashboard.
Read more [wendelladriel.com]
A Series of Unfortunate Jobs
– oussama-mater.tech - submitted by Oussama Mater
Laravel queues are great out of the box, until they bite. Over the years I’ve collected a few gotchas the hard way. Let me save you the headache.
Read more [oussama-mater.tech]
Run AI in the Browser: A Practical Guide to Transformers.js
– tighten.com - submitted by Kayla Helmick
Transformers.js lets you run AI models directly in the browser without a backend, API keys, or an internet connection after the model is cached. The article explores how it works, which models are available, and the trade-offs of client-side AI compared to traditional AI providers.
Read more [tighten.com]
Using AI as a deterministic translation tool in Laravel
– koomai.net - submitted by Sid
Split a task into reasoning and execution to get deterministic behaviour out of a non-deterministic model.
Read more [koomai.net]
Digital Sovereignty Is Written in PHP
An interesting article on how PHP is used by the government.
Read more [thephp.foundation]
Build Your Own AI-Powered Slack Bot with the Laravel AI SDK
– tighten.com - submitted by Kayla Helmick
In this article, we’ll build an AI-powered Slack bot with the Laravel AI SDK. Unlike tools such as Claude Tag, it can switch AI providers, answer questions, execute tasks, and retrieve information from a knowledge base you control.
Read more [tighten.com]
Is AI going to steal my job as a design engineer?
Tom Wilson reflects on what AI is changing for design engineers, and where human judgment still matters. He argues that agents can take over more of the scaffolding work, while product taste, restraint, and polished visual craft remain the real edge.
Read more [twilson.net]
Modular Monoliths: Creating Real Boundaries Before Reaching for Microservices
– wendelladriel.com - submitted by Wendell Adriel
A deep dive into modular monoliths, from module APIs and database ownership to cross-module communication, architecture tests, incremental migration, and the signals that justify microservices.
Read more [wendelladriel.com]
Immutability in PHP Beyond readonly
– wendelladriel.com - submitted by Wendell Adriel
A deep dive into immutability in PHP, from readonly properties and interior mutability to immutable value objects, collections, dates, cloning, boundaries, and testing.
Read more [wendelladriel.com]
Flare now uses OAuth for MCP, the CLI, and API
We explain how Flare now uses OAuth to connect MCP clients, the CLI, and the API with scoped permissions instead of broad long-lived tokens. The new flow makes setup faster, adds read-only and project-level access control, and gives you one place to manage every connection.
Read more [flareapp.io]
