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

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SQL performance improvements: finding the right queries to fix

Link – Sep 16th 2025 – ohdear.app

At Oh Dear, my colleague Mattias recently vastly increased the performance of our service. Here's how he did it.

Automatically fix production and performance problems in PHP and Laravel projects using AI

Link – Sep 15th 2025 – flareapp.io

You can now use our MCP server to connect your AI agent to Flare. This way your AI has all context it needs to diagnose and fix production and performance problems of your PHP, JavaScript and Laravel projects.

In this blog post I’d like to tell you how you can use it, and how it works under the hood.

Inside the Laravel Service Container

Link – Sep 12th 2025 – wendelladriel.com - submitted by Wendell Adriel

Explore Laravel’s Service Container from the ground up: resolution, binding, scopes, contextual dependencies, auto-wiring, and more, and demystify how your app runs.

Let AI Interact with Your App via MCP

Link – Sep 11th 2025 – tighten.com - submitted by Kayla Helmick

We’ve moved from command lines to GUIs, and now the next shift is here: AI that can actually use your app. This article introduces the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a powerful way to let AI interact directly with your applications—and why it’s more than just another tech acronym.

How the Model Context Protocol works?

Link – Sep 8th 2025 – alexop.dev

MCP is not a hosted service, a replacement for app logic, or a fix for hallucinations. It is a protocol that provides access to real tools and data, and still requires good prompts and UX

Max MRR: Your growth ceiling

Link – Sep 5th 2025 – longform.asmartbear.com

Your company will stop growing sooner than you think. The “Max MRR” metric predicts revenue plateaus based on churn and new revenue.

Creating type-safe configs in Laravel

Link – Sep 4th 2025 – cosmastech.com

This is a great way of handling config values.

Welcome to the State Machine Pattern

Link – Sep 1st 2025 – wendelladriel.com - submitted by Wendell Adriel

Learn what the State Machine Pattern is and how to apply it in your PHP applications with this in-depth article about it

Deferring Events Including Model Events in Laravel

Link – Aug 29th 2025 – nabilhassen.com - submitted by Nabil Hassen

Utilize deferred events in Laravel to delay event dispatching, including model events, ensuring listeners run only after a specific closure has finished running.

Exploring our new PHP SDK, built using Saloon

Link – Aug 28th 2025 – ohdear.app

I've recently rebuilt the SDK for Oh Dear, and thanks to Saloon I had a great time downing so.

Transform your URLs with AI using our new Laravel package

Original – Aug 27th 2025 by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

I'm excited to share that we've released a new package called spatie/laravel-url-ai-transformer. This one can get the content of a webpage and transform it into something else using AI.

In this blog post, I'd like to share why I've created it and how you can use it.

How to update composer.lock without changing any packages

Link – Aug 26th 2025 – masteringlaravel.io

Joel Clermont shares a nice composer knowledge nugget.

The Story of Valkey

Link – Aug 25th 2025 – devdojo.com

Valkey is an interesting fork of Redis.

An engineer's perspective on hiring

Link – Aug 22nd 2025 – jyn.dev

The current hiring process for engineers is flawed, wasting time and failing to differentiate between skilled candidates and those using AI.

Compile time generics: yay or nay?

Link – Aug 21st 2025 – thephp.foundation

One of the most sought-after features for PHP is Generics: The ability to have a type that takes another type as a parameter. It's a feature found in most compiled languages by now, but implementing generics in an interpreted language like PHP, where all the type checking would have to be done at runtime, has always proven Really Really Hard(tm), Really Really Slow(tm), or both.

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