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

Develop faster by adding dev routes file in a Laravel app original

May 5th 2021 by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

Laravel's awesome closure based routing was probably one of the first features I fell in love with. I take it for granted now, but back in the days, such a simple way of adding a route felt like a glass of water in hell compared to the other frameworks.

Typically, you would only add routes that are necessary for the users of your app. Something that I have been doing for a long time is to create a routes file, called dev.php, with routes that can help with app development.

PHP's bus factor

May 4th 2021 – blog.krakjoe.ninja

PHP is a fantastic language that has seen many cool improvements over the past few years. What you may not be aware of is that only a very few people can work on the language itself. This is obviously not healthy and hopefully this situation will improve in the future.

Keep controllers clean by using form requests in Laravel original

May 3rd 2021 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

Most people use form requests solely for validation, but they can also help to keep your controllers clean. Here's how we use them in Mailcoach

Exploring Event Sourcing (part 2) original

May 3rd 2021 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

In this stream my colleague Brent and I continued our conversation about the foundations of event sourcing. This time we showed a shopping cart that we've built using Laravel and event sourcing.

If you're interested in learning more about event sourcing, be sure to check out our upcoming course on using event sourcing in Laravel.

A lightweight solution for running PHP code concurrently original

May 3rd 2021 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

Our team released a new package called spatie/fork. Using this package you can easily execute multiple pieces of code concurrently.

Authoring Great Pull Requests

May 2nd 2021 – dev.to - submitted by Patrick

Some best practices and tips for composing high quality pull requests when contributing to open source projects.

Back the func off, this is my abstraction!

May 2nd 2021 – blog.frankdejonge.nl

Let's dive into some of the design considerations you might make when designing abstractions that reach over a network.

Simple Models, Scaffolding, Enabling Constraints

Apr 30th 2021 – verraes.net

All models are wrong but simple models are more wrong than complex ones. Simple models are more appealing, easier to teach and spread and apply. Because of that, they can bring value faster, and they can cause harm faster.

File watching with chokidar

Apr 29th 2021 – sebastiandedeyne.com

My colleague Seb quickly explains how to use chokidar

Modelling time

Apr 29th 2021

This is a very nice talk given by Eric Evans at DDD Europe 2018. He argues that sometimes try to solve a problem, without reaching to existing solutions, might provide good insights.

Function Inlining in PHP's Zend Engine

Apr 29th 2021 – php.watch

PHP has several over 30 functions at the moment that make use of special OPCodes or otherwise inlined to improve performance.

Auto Merge Dependabot Pull Requests

Apr 29th 2021 – stefanzweifel.io

Stefan Zweifel created a nice workflow to automatically merge dependabot PRs when all tests pass

Laravel Worldwide Meetup #8: Using Vite in Laravel & How to optimize your DB indexes original

Apr 28th 2021 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

Here's the recording of Laravel Wordwide Meetup #8. My guests for this edition were Kai Sassnowski talking on the importance of DB indexes, and Sebastian De Deyne on how to use Vite in Laravel.

How Flare's GitHub integration works under the hood original

Apr 28th 2021 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

Last week, my colleague Ruben and I launched a major new feature at Flare: there's a new integration with GitHub that makes it possible to:

create a GitHub issue directly on a Flare error
associate a GitHub issue with a Flare error by mentioning a Flare URL in the GitHub issue
automatically resolve an error on Flare when you close the GitHub issue
automatically close a GitHub issue when you resolve an error in Flare

In this stream, Ruben and I will show you how you can use this integration and how it works under the hood.

Refactoring to Inertia Forms

Apr 27th 2021 – engineering.aryeo.com

With the launch of the Inertia Vue 3 0.3.0 release, however, the boilerplate required to create forms was drastically reduced.

Queuing up in meetings

Apr 26th 2021 – hiddedevries.nl

Distributing speaking time can be tricky when meeting face to face, but it is usuallly worse in virtual meetings. Especially those spanning long distances.

The unreasonable effectiveness of print debugging

Apr 26th 2021 – buttondown.email

I do want to point out that print debugging has one critical feature that most step-based debuggers don't have: you can see program state from multiple time steps all at once.

Easily test large chunks of output using snapshots original

Apr 26th 2021 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

In this video we'll take a look at how large chunks of output can be tested in Mailcoach using snapshots.

Injecting extra data in the payload of queued jobs in Laravel original

Apr 20th 2021 by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

I'm proud to announce yet another package by our team: spatie/laravel-interacts-with-payload. This one, which was inspired by a blog post by James Brooks, can inject data in all your jobs with just one line of code.

In this video, you'll see the package in action, I explain the internals and the tests. If you prefer reading, continue below the video.

Controlling the flow of time in your tests original

Apr 19th 2021 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

Our test-time package makes writing tests, for code that makes its decisions based on the current time, very easy.

Here's how we use the package for some tests in Mailcoach.