Introducing Ray 3.0 original
Ray 3.0 is here! Completely rebuilt for better performance (60% less memory), a fresh new look, message archiving, and MCP support so AI agents can interact with Ray directly.
Read more [myray.app]
Personal AI Assistants Changed Everything For Me
Christoph reflects on how personal AI assistants have changed his daily workflow — from calendar updates to searching the web less. An interesting take on where this technology is heading.
Read more [christoph-rumpel.com]
Join 9,500+ smart developers
Get my monthly newsletter with what I learn from running Spatie, building Oh Dear, and maintaining 300+ open source packages. Practical takes on Laravel, PHP, and AI that you can actually use.
"Freek publishes a super resourceful and practical newsletter. A must for anyone in the Laravel space"
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. You can also follow me on X.
Partial function application in PHP 8.6
PHP 8.6 will introduce partial function application, allowing you to pre-fill some arguments while leaving others for later. Brent explains this new language feature with practical examples.
Read more [stitcher.io]
I built a native mobile word game in two weeks original
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.
Once again processing 11 million rows, now in seconds
Brent continues his optimization journey processing 11 million database events. Starting from 50k events per second, he implements combined inserts, skips unnecessary deserialization, and reaches 400k events per second. A great deep dive into PHP performance optimization.
Read more [stitcher.io]
Semantic Diffusion
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]
SQL performance improvements: automatic detection & regression testing
The final part of Oh Dear's series on SQL performance. Mattias introduces phpunit-query-count-assertions, a package that catches N+1 queries, duplicate queries, and missing indexes in your test suite. Since implementing this at Oh Dear, they've eliminated 15% of their SELECT queries.
Read more [ohdear.app]
Introducing Spatie Guidelines for Laravel Boost original
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…
How to automatically generate a commit message using Claude original
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.
New in Parental v1.5.0: Becoming, Integers, and Eager-Loading
– tighten.com - submitted by Kayla Helmick
We released version v1.5.0 of Parental, our package that adds support for Single Table Inheritance (STI) in Laravel. This new version allows types to become other types and use numeric type columns instead of strings. It also adds new helper methods for eager-loading.
Read more [tighten.com]
Running PHP 8.5 with Laravel Octane and FrankenPHP: The Missing Manual (Fix the 8.4 binary trap)
– danielpetrica.com - submitted by Andrei-Daniel Petrica
A quick but essential fix for anyone pushing the edges of the Laravel ecosystem. The default FrankenPHP binary provided by artisan octane:install is static and locked to PHP 8.4, which causes major headaches if your application relies on PHP 8.5 features or specific system extensions.
Read more [danielpetrica.com]
From dd() to Ray: A Debugging Workflow That Doesn't Break Your Flow
– tnakov.dev - submitted by Trajche Nakov
Evolving from dd() to Ray for a smoother workflow. Explore how Ray can boost your debugging game without stopping your code!
Read more [tnakov.dev]
From dd() to Ray: A Debugging Workflow That Doesn't Break Your Flow
I fully agree (but I might not be totally objective here 🙂)
Read more [tnakov.dev]
Livewire 4 Deep Dive: Components, Performance & New Directives
– youtu.be - submitted by Bert De Swaef
Livewire 4 introduces powerful new features that make building Laravel applications even better.
Read more [youtu.be]
Behind the Terminal
– gusk.ca - submitted by Gustavo Karkow
Why I made my portfolio feel like a terminal, and how it works
Read more [gusk.ca]
What gets lost when everything is effortless?
Not all friction is bad.
Read more [carlbarenbrug.com]
The Truth Behind Tech AI Layoffs
– youtu.be - submitted by Nuno Maduro
Read more [youtu.be]
Symfony 20 year!
This year, Symfony celebrates its 20 year anniversary. Let’s dive into some statistics of years of making web development history.
Read more [wouterj.nl]
The rise of industrial software
The open question, then, is not whether industrial software will dominate, but what that dominance does to the surrounding ecosystem.
Read more [chrisloy.dev]
Party of One for Code Review
Some good thoughts on code reviews in the emerging age of AI.
Read more [tidyfirst.substack.com]
