by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read – Edit
I've been writing about There There a lot lately. It's a helpdesk we're building at Spatie, born from two decades of running our own customer support for our open source work and SaaS apps. After all that time being the customer of other helpdesks, we finally started on the one we actually wanted to…
by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read – Edit
Over the past few weeks I've posted a couple of times about There There, the helpdesk we're building at Spatie. After two decades of running our own customer support, we decided to stop compromising on tools and build the one we actually want to use. A lot of the fun is on the AI side. We're not…
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"As a Laravel developer, this is the one newsletter I most look forward to. Freek has a talent for distilling packages or techniques down to something immediately useful - one tip can save you hours and even weeks. It's concise and practical and highly relevant."
by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read – Edit
At Spatie we build SaaS apps with Laravel on the backend and Inertia with React on the frontend. That split means two type systems have to agree about every payload that crosses between them. Laravel data going out, TypeScript picking it up. There There, the helpdesk we're building, is built exactly…
by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read – Edit
There There, the helpdesk we're building at Spatie, is a project of learned habits. Twenty-some years of writing Laravel apps has taught us which patterns pay off and which ones quietly rot. One that keeps earning its keep is a custom exception class for every domain error. This is a small pattern,…
by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read – Edit
A couple of posts back I walked through the agent and tools we built on top of the Laravel AI SDK for There There, the helpdesk we're putting together at Spatie. I ended that post on a small cliffhanger. We hand the agent off to a streaming service that turns the SDK's response stream into events…
A practical post on hardening Laravel projects against destructive AI agent behavior. It walks through the PocketOS incident and shows concrete safeguards like deny rules, credential isolation, and production guardrails.
Read more [hafiz.dev]
– Edit
A video by the Syntax team on why they're using GPUI across more and more of their work. It offers a practical look at what makes GPUI appealing for modern tooling.
– Edit
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.
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]
by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read – Edit
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.
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]
– tighten.com - submitted by Kayla Helmick – Edit
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]
– wendelladriel.com - submitted by Wendell Adriel – Edit
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]
– flareapp.io – Edit
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]
by freekmurze – 8 minute read – Edit
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.
– laravel-news.com – Edit
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]
– gummibeer.dev – Edit
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]
– wendelladriel.com - submitted by Wendell Adriel – Edit
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]
– oussama-mater.tech - submitted by Oussama Mater – Edit
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]
– tighten.com - submitted by Kayla Helmick – Edit
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]
