Freek Van der Herten's blog on PHP, Laravel and JavaScript

Mailcoach v2 has been released with support for custom HTML editors and multiple mailers

Original – Mar 12th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 9 minute read

A couple of months ago, my team released Mailcoach, a self-hosted solution to send out newsletters. It sends out mail via services like Amazon SES, Mailgun, Sendgrid, and Postmark. It can optionally track opens and clicks. When your email list grows, this is a much more cost-effective solution when compared to a service like Mailchimp.

Mailcoach can be used as a premium Laravel package or as a stand-alone app. When installed into a Laravel app, it can be greatly customized. The Mailcoach stand alone app can be used without knowing how to program.

Today we're releasing v2 of Mailcoach. It offers support for Laravel 7, html editors, and multiple mailers, together with a bunch of quality of life improvements. In this blog post, I'd like to walk you through these features and show some technical details.

On using arrow functions in PHP 7.4

Original – Mar 10th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

In PHP 7.4 a widely requested feature landed: arrow function. In this blogpost I'd like to show you how I like to use them.

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

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Writing readable PHP: decrease indentation by returning early

Original – Mar 9th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

In this short post, I'd like to give you a tip on writing readable PHP.

Explaining Laravel Queue configuration keys

Link – Mar 9th 2020 – divinglaravel.com

In an awesome series of video tweets, Mohammed Said explains some of the most confusing Queue configuration keys.

Understanding PHP 8's JIT

Link – Mar 6th 2020 – thephp.website

PHP 8’s Just In Time compiler is implemented as part of the Opcache extension and aims to compile some Opcodes into CPU instructions in runtime. Nickolas Da Silva explains how it works.

Hosting daemon apps on Forge

Link – Mar 5th 2020 – assertchris.io

Christopher Pitt guides you can host daemon apps, for example Next apps, on Forge

Pass Typescript-like Typed Objects and Arrays to Your Laravel Functions by Leveraging Data Transfer Objects

Link – Mar 4th 2020 – github.com

Leonel Elimpe explains how you can use our DTO package.

How to use a MySQL database on GitHub Actions

Original – Mar 4th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Recently we started using GitHub Actions to test all our packages. You can read more about our general setup in this blog post.

For most of the packages, this works great. However, some of our packages, such as Laravel Tags, use JSON functions that are not available in SQLite. Luckily it's straightforward to use a database like MySQL in GitHub Actions.

How we identified clients with SSL certificates affected by Let's Encrypt mass-revocation

Link – Mar 4th 2020 – ohdear.app

On the Oh Dear blog, Mattias Geniar shares how he found all certificates that were affected by Let's Encrypt mass revocation of SSL certificates.

Using Custom Eloquent Casts in Laravel 7

Link – Mar 4th 2020 – atymic.dev

Atymic explains a cool new feature in Laravel 7

Lazy Collections in Laravel Excel

Link – Mar 3rd 2020 – stefanzweifel.io - submitted by Stefan Zweifel

Stefan Zweifel recently had to refactor an Excel export which deals with thousands of rows. Lazy Collections helped solve all performance problems.

Building and Deploying with Github Actions

Link – Mar 3rd 2020 – driesvints.com - submitted by Dries Vints

Dries Vints wrote a short piece on setting up a continuous delivery pipeline with Github Actions.

Behind the scenes of Flare (or How to structure big Laravel applications)

Original – Mar 2nd 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

At Laracon AU, I gave a talk on how you can structure a big Laravel application. The codebases of both Flare and Oh Dear served as examples.

By watching this talk you'll gain some valuable insights that could be applicable to your projects as well. Enjoy!

Typescript is changing how I write code

Link – Feb 24th 2020 – evertpot.com

A nice example by Evert Pot on how you can make static analysers do their work better.

How to write exceptionally good exceptions in PHP

Original – Feb 24th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

In this video, which is part of the mailcoach video course, I show how I like to write my exceptions.

At the time of writing this post, we're running a contest where you can win a free mailcoach license.

Adding Commits to Someone Else's Pull Request

Link – Feb 21st 2020 – tighten.co - submitted by Matt Stauffer

When getting an open source pull request, sometimes you'll need to make a change before merging. Here's how to do that.

How to refactor complex if statements

Original – Feb 18th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

Have you every come across confusing if statements with complex conditionals such as this? I bet you did!

// please kill me 🤯 
if (!(($this->shipping_country == "GB" || (strcmp($this-status, "Valid") !== 0)) {

To me, this is completely unreadable.

In the video below I show how I deal with this situation. Spoiler: add some tests around it and break the conditionals apart.

This video is part of the Mailcoach video course. It contains many more videos on how to write clear code. You can use this coupon code to get a nice discount of $10.

YES-I-WANT-TO-WRITE-READABLE-CODE

Laravel Tail can now tail remote logs

Original – Feb 18th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

laravel-tail is one of my favourite packages. When installed in a Laravel app it can be used to tail the log file. To tail a log file locally, you just have to issue this command: php artisan tail and it'll start tailing the latest log file (so it works for both daily and single log files). Any line…

Using BetterTouchTool as a window manager

Original – Feb 17th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

In this short post, I'd like to share how I use BetterTouchTool in my daily work.

Migrating to PHPUnit 9

Link – Feb 13th 2020 – thephp.cc

Sebastian Bergmann, creator of PHPUnit, walks us through some history and design decisions for PHPUnit.