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

How we created over 200 PHP and Laravel packages original

May 27th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 15 minute read

I work at and co-own a company named Spatie, which specializes in creating large Laravel applications for our clients. Our team is rather small: we consist of only 10 people. At first glance we are a software development company like there are so many others. But there’s one thing that sets our company apart: we have an open source first policy. We try to create and contribute to open source as much as possible.

Currently we have around 200 open source repositories on GitHub. Our packages have been downloaded nearly 75 million times. They are being downloaded 4,5 million times each month. Probably we will hit 100 million downloads by the end of this year.

We've also just released our premium video course, titled Laravel Package Training. In this course, we use our experience to teach you how to build reliable and maintainable packages.

This all did not happen overnight. Read on to learn the story behind our open source efforts.

Avoiding inheritance in Laravel

May 27th 2020 – jasonmccreary.me

Jason McCreary makes the case for using traits over reaching for inheritance.

Builders and architects: two types of programmers

May 26th 2020 – stitcher.io

My colleague Brent wrote an interesting piece on how different people with different personaliteits can work together.

In defence of mocking frameworks

May 26th 2020 – davedevelopment.co.uk

Dave Marshall replies to a blogpost that Frank De Jonge published recently.

Your App is a Package Manager

May 25th 2020 – tighten.co

A nice way of structuring an app and good example of handling multitenancy in a light way by the Tighten team.

PHP Versions Stats - 2020.1 Edition

May 25th 2020 – blog.packagist.com

Jordi Boggiano - also known as Mister Composer - published some fresh stats on PHP version usage.

The Miracle Sudoku

May 24th 2020

In this video you can see an extraordinary Sudoku being solved. It has nothing to do with programming, but it's fun to see how Mitchell Lee thinks while solving this one.

Laravel Pseudo-Daemons

May 22nd 2020 – aaronfrancis.com - submitted by Aaron Francis

A Laravel package to mimic daemons via scheduled commands without having to change server configuration.

The Backend For Frontend Pattern

May 22nd 2020

Mohamed Said explains an interesting pattern for you to consider that can potentially make authenicating from the frontend easier.

An unopinionated package to make Laravel apps tenant aware original

May 20th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 9 minute read

Today we released a package to make Laravel apps tenant aware, called laravel-multitenancy. The philosophy of this package is that it should only provide the bare essentials to enable multitenancy.

The package can determine which tenant should be the current tenant for the request. It also allows you to define what should happen when switching the current tenant to another one.

It works for multitenancy projects that need to use one or multiple databases.

In this blog post, I'd like to introduce the package to you.

Sharing PHP-CS-Fixer rules across projects and teams

May 14th 2020 – laravel-news.com

Tim MacDonald shares a nice way to go about this.

Attributes in PHP 8

May 14th 2020 – stitcher.io

My colleague Brent clearly explains an awesome feature coming in PHP 8.

Grandfathering in legacy

May 14th 2020 – madewithlove.com

Here's a nice technique that you can use in legacy projects.

Complexity Has to Live Somewhere

May 13th 2020 – ferd.ca

What's the ideal amount of abstraction? When does a framework start having "too much magic"? When are there too many languages in an organisation?

Composer 2: Platform Check

May 13th 2020 – php.watch

Composer v2 has a new feature that your server environment is checked at the run-time before the autoloader is even initialized. This is everything you should know about it

Refactoring: Demeter-Wrapping

May 12th 2020 – www.geepawhill.org

Geepaw Hill explains a way to avoid demeter violations.

How Oh Dear identified a certificate problem at a large CDN provider

May 12th 2020 – ohdear.app

Oh Dear performs SSL certificate monitoring in a slightly different than other services, which is why it was able to detect a problem with the SSL certificates of a very large, commercial, CDN provider.

New in PHP 8

May 12th 2020 – stitcher.io

PHP 8, the new major PHP version, is expected to be released by the end of 2020. It's in very active development right now, so things are likely to change a lot in the upcoming months.

Some Relatively Obscure Bash Tips

May 11th 2020 – zwischenzugs.com

Here are some Bash tips that are relatively obscure, or rarely seen, but still worth knowing about.

Tracking Queued Job Chains in Laravel

May 11th 2020 – blog.rafter.app - submitted by Josh Larson

Learn how to track and visualize a chain of queued jobs in Laravel using a custom trait, job middleware, and Laravel Livewire.