Freek.dev logotype

Freek.dev

Laravel / PHP / JavaScript

Sevalla is the all-in-one PaaS for your web projects. Host and deploy your applications, databases, object storage, and static sites. Enjoy advanced deployment pipelines, a complete database studio, instant preview apps, and one-click templates. The pricing is simple: no hidden fees, no seat-based pricing, and you pay only for what you use. Get real human support from developers.

Get started now with a $50 credit at Sevalla.com.

Stay up to date with all things Laravel, PHP, and JavaScript.

You can follow me on these platforms:

On all these platforms, regularly share programming tips, and what I myself have learned in ongoing projects.

Every month I send out a newsletter containing lots of interesting stuff for the modern PHP developer.

Expect quick tips & tricks, interesting tutorials, opinions and packages. Because I work with Laravel every day there is an emphasis on that framework.

Rest assured that I will only use your email address to send you the newsletter and will not use it for any other purposes.

I built a native mobile word game in two weeks

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 6 minute read

At Laracon India, I launched a major update of Ray. For that talk, I needed a little demo project to showcase Ray. I built a simple website about a then-fictional mobile app to play a Scrabble-like word game called WordStockt.

But then I got curious: how far could I push AI-assisted development? Could I actually just create the whole game? After about 10 days, WordStockt is a fully functional word game that's 98% vibe-coded. It's available for iOS and Android. In this post, I'd like to tell you more about it.

Read more

Semantic Diffusion

Link – – martinfowler.com

Martin Fowler on how technical terms lose their meaning as they spread. When a useful concept becomes popular, it passes through a "telephone game" of explanations until the original definition gets diluted or even inverted. Think of how "agile" or "DevOps" are used today versus their original intent.

Read more [martinfowler.com]

Introducing Spatie Guidelines for Laravel Boost

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

If you're using AI tools like Claude Code to help write code, you've probably noticed they don't automatically know your team's coding conventions. The AI might write perfectly valid PHP, but it won't follow your specific style guide unless you tell it to. That's the problem Laravel Boost solves. It…

Read more

How to automatically generate a commit message using Claude

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

For years, my git history contains "wip" commit messages. I don't really often use git history myself, but my colleagues do. And when they're trying to understand a change I made six months ago, "wip" tells them absolutely nothing. Might as well not have commit messages at all.

I knew I should write better commit messages, but the friction was real. Stopping to think about how to summarize my changes felt like it broke my flow. So I kept typing "wip".

Now, I have a bash function in my dotfiles that uses Claude to generate commit messages for me.

Read more