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

Getting started with GitHub Actions and Laravel

Dec 10th 2019 – rubenvanassche.com

My colleague Ruben explores the wonderful world of GitHub actions.

You can write workflows in YAML, which makes them easy to write and read. In the beta version of GitHub Actions you had to use Ocaml, which was quite hard to comprehend, and there was almost no documentation. If you were a bit frightened by the beta version, like me, then rest assured: the YAML version is easier to use, and the documentation is well written.

Streamlining Laravel

Dec 9th 2019 – jasonmccreary.me

JMac, the creator of Laravel Shift, has a few interesting ideas on how to make the framework better.

Every so often a revolutionary change is required. This provides a chance to revisit goals. One of the primary goals of Laravel is developer experience. And maintainability, freshness, and approachability all improve developer experience. So, with all this in mind here are the top five things I would change in Laravel.

Building Mailcoach: deleting unconfirmed users automatically original

Dec 9th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

My team and I are currently building Mailcoach, a self-hosted solution to easily send out newsletters and email campaigns. In this video, I live code a new small feature.

This video was created unrehearsed and I didn't make any edits. So you can see every mistake that I made along the way.

A recap of 2019 original

Dec 8th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 17 minute read

A year ago, I wrote a recap of 2018. Now that 2019 is coming to a close, I thought it might be fun to write a similar post on what I did this year.

Find outdated PHP dependencies

Dec 5th 2019 – twitter.com

Not sure if your dependencies are up-to-date? Run `composer outdated` and find out. ⚡️ pic.twitter.com/6ZShopPapn
— NUNO MADURO ➕ (@enunomaduro) December 3, 2019

Using the `self` return type got better in PHP 7.4

Dec 4th 2019 – twitter.com

Thanks to the improved type variance in PHP 7.4, the `self` return type hint is now safe to use in a class that you expect to be overridden (happens a lot in the packages we create)

Demo: https://t.co/7vRTaOwRhD

RFC: https://t.co/1RpnFIjlKC #php pic.twitter.com/SfAaxRDt4m
— Freek Van der Herten (@freekmurze) December 3, 2019

Upgrade to PHP 7.4 with Homebrew on Mac

Dec 3rd 2019 – stitcher.io

As usual, my colleague Brent wrote a post with clear instructions on how to upgrade. As a bonus he also provides some necessary steps to get PHP 7.4 to work in Valet.

Automatically convert your code to PHP 7.4 syntax using Rector original

Dec 3rd 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

In PHP 7.4, two new features were introduced that I'd like to use in my packages and projects: short closures and typed properties. Even though an IDE can help with converting to the new syntax, I'd don't want to manually hunt down all the places where the new syntax can be used. Lucky there's a tool that can do this work automatically.

Mutate data using form requests

Nov 29th 2019 – twitter.com

?You can mutate request data using @laravelphp 's form requests instead of doing it in the controller. By overwriting the validationData() method, you can mutate data BEFORE validation. Overwrite the validated() method to mutate AFTER validation. #Laravel #php pic.twitter.com/VAVXYAHCFC
— Neil Keena (@neilkeena) November 4, 2019

Streaming a large export as a CSV file to the browser original

Nov 29th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

A while ago, I created an easy to use framework agnostic PHP package to read and write CSV and Excel files called spatie/simple-excel. Behind the scenes, generators are used to ensure low memory usage, even when working with large files. Today I added a method that allows you to stream CSV files to the browser. In this small blog post, I'd like to demonstrate how you can use it.

Video: a first look at the alpha version of Mailcoach original

Nov 28th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

My team and I are currently working on Mailcoach, a self-hosted solution to easily send out newsletters and e-mail campaigns. In this video you'll get a preview of an alpha version of the package.

PHP 7.4 FFI: What you need to know

Nov 28th 2019 – jolicode.com

FFI lets you include external libraries written in other programming languagues in your PHP code.

PHP Foreign Function Interface, or FFI for fans, is a PHP extension that allows you to include with ease some externals libraries into your PHP code. That means it’s possible to use C, Go, Rust, etc. shared library directly in PHP without writing a PHP Extension in C. This concept exists for years in other languages like Python or Go.

Name the Date

Nov 28th 2019 – medium.com

Kevlin Henney wrote a good post on the importance of naming things well.

Good naming is part of design. It sets expectations and communicates a model, showing how something should be understood and used. If you mean to tell the reader getMillisSince1970, don’t say getTime.

Laravel Form Requests - more than validation

Nov 28th 2019 – pociot.dev

I'm a big fan of this approach and use Form Request like this quite often.

Let me show you what form requests can do for you - and how you can make use of them to write beautiful, expressive APIs.

freek.dev turns five! original

Nov 26th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 6 minute read

How time flies. My blog is again one year older. I've been running it now for five years. Like all the previous years, I'd like to give an overview of everything that's happened on this blog in the past year.

What's new in PHP 7.4

Nov 25th 2019 – stitcher.io

PHP 7.4 will probably be released this week. My colleague Brent wrote a good post on all the shiney new things this release brings.

PHP 7.4, the latest version before PHP 8, brings lots of new features, syntax additions and fixes. We need to wait a little longer though: PHP 7.4 will be released on November 28, 2019. In this post you'll find a list with everything that's new and changed to help you prepare for the upgrade.

Extreme Object-Oriented Ruby

Nov 25th 2019

A cool talk by John Cinnamond, on how you can create a pure OO language and why you shouldn't do that.

Exciting new features in Vue 3

Nov 24th 2019 – vueschool.io

Filip Rakowski goes over all the shiney new feature that are coming in Vue 3

As you could expect, Vue 3 brings a lot of new exciting features. Thankfully Vue team mostly introduced additions and improvements over current APIs rather than major changes so people that already know Vue 2 should quickly feel comfortable with new syntaxes.

My Alfred workflows original

Nov 22nd 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Alfred is a fantastic tool for macOS that allows you to be more productive. The app allows you to install workflows to make it more powerful. In this short blog post, I'd like to share the workflows that I have installed.

Thoughts on pricing for Mailcoach

Nov 21st 2019 – www.sigerr.org

At Spatie we currently building Mailcoach: a solution to self-host newsletters and email campaigns. It can be used a stand alone app or as a laravel package. We'll also create a video course that explains the internals of the package. We're not going to make this software open source, but sell it. We're still are deciding on our pricing model.

Julien Bourdeau, engineer at Algolia, shares his thoughts on how it should be priced.

Today, Freek announced that they're going to release the pricing model soon and opened a conversation about what it could be. It got me thinking, and unfortunately, I couldn't fit my thought in 280 characters. First, it's important to understand that MailCoach will be 2 main things: a full-fledged app and a Laravel package.