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

Databases: how they work, and a brief history

Nov 21st 2019 – seldo.com

Laurie Voss, co-founder of npm, explains how databases work, what the difference is between MySQL and something like Redis, why MySQL is popular and much more!

My twitter-friend Simon had a simple question that contained much complexity: how do databases work? The result was an absurdly long thread of 70+ tweets, in which I expounded on the workings and history of databases as used by modern web developers, and Simon chimed in on each tweet with further questions and requests for clarification. The result of this collaboration was a super fun tiny explanation of databases which many people said they liked, so here it is, lightly edited for clarity.

Happy Dev: a podcast on mental health

Nov 21st 2019 – happy-dev.transistor.fm

James Brooks recently started a podcast on mental health. In the second episode Matt Stauffer was interviewed.

This week I’m speaking to Matt Stauffer. Matt is a partner at the web agency Tighten, developer, teacher, podcaster and author. Matt and I speak about his experiences with anxiety and depression, being a great employer and other things!

A visual introduction to machine learning

Nov 20th 2019 – www.r2d3.us

A cool visualization of the basic concepts of machine learning.

In machine learning, computers apply statistical learning techniques to automatically identify patterns in data. These techniques can be used to make highly accurate predictions.

Disable HTTP sessions in Laravel to speed up your API

Nov 19th 2019 – ma.ttias.be

My buddy Mattias recently improved the performance of the Oh Dear uptime checker servers by disabling the HTTP sessions.

If you run a Laravel application purely as a headless API, you can benefit from disabling the HTTP sessions. We use this setup for our Oh Dear monitoring service, where the remote servers that check for uptime are all headless Laravel setups.

Sending a welcome notification to new users of a Laravel app original

Nov 15th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 7 minute read

My team and I currently building Mailcoach, a solution to self-host newsletters and email campaigns. In Mailcoach you can create new users to use the app.

How should these new users be onboarded? The easy way out would be to send these new users a default password reset notification to those users, but that isn't a good first experience. The default auth scaffold by Laravel doesn't help us here: it only contains functionality to log in and to let users register themselves.

To onboard new users created by other users, I've created a package called laravel-welcome-notification which can send a welcome notification to new users that allows them to set an initial password.

In this blogpost I'd like to explain how you can use the package).

Cherry pick the keys for JSON.stringify to serialize

Nov 14th 2019 – twitter.com

? In case you haven’t used it yet, the second argument of JSON.stringify lets you cherry-pick ? keys to serialize. ? pic.twitter.com/bBgYKSne4S
— Tejas Kumar (@TejasKumar_) November 12, 2019

Build your own React

Nov 14th 2019 – pomb.us

In a very cool post, Rodrigo Pombo explains the internals of React by rewriting it's core from scratch.

We are going to rewrite React from scratch. Step by step. Following the architecture from the real React code but without all the optimizations and non-essential features.

Closing Modals with the Back Button in a Vue SPA

Nov 12th 2019 – jessarcher.com

Jess Archer recently gave an excellent talk at Laracon AU. In a new blogpost she explains one one tips given during her talk: how to close modals in a Vue app by using the back button.

On most web apps, pressing the back button while a modal dialog is open will navigate to the previous page, rather than closing the modal. This can be very frustrating! It might not seem like a huge deal on a desktop app, but on a mobile, where a modal like this will often be full-screen, and with phones having back buttons and back gestures, I believe it's a huge user experience improvement.

Creating custom relations in Laravel

Nov 12th 2019 – stitcher.io

My colleague Brent solved a performance by creating a custom relation

One last solution that came to mind was to load all people, all contracts, and map them together manually. In the end that's exactly what I ended up doing, though I did it in the cleanest possible way: using custom relations.

Add query-constraints when eager loading relationships

Nov 12th 2019 – twitter.com

? Did you know you can add query-constraints when eager loading relationships in Laravel?
Perfect opportunity to improve query performance when your relationships return thousands of models.

↳ Full example: https://t.co/RsezzpkWoC pic.twitter.com/nwjC7U8Oqa
— Stefan Zweifel (@_stefanzweifel) November 12, 2019

Improving Artisan commands original

Nov 7th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

In this small blog post, I'd like to give you a couple of tips to make your Artisan commands better.

What Is Garbage Collection in PHP And How Do You Make The Most Of It?

Nov 7th 2019 – tideways.com

On the Tideways blog, Benjamin Eberlei explains PHPs garbage collection internals.

It's helpful to have a broad understanding of how garbage collection works in PHP, along with how you can interact with it so that you can create high performing applications.

Crafting maintainable Laravel applications

Nov 7th 2019 – jasonmccreary.me

At Laracon AU, Jason McCreary gave an excellen talk on how to create maintainable Laravel apps. On his blog he published a written down version of the talk.

Being the author of BaseCode and creator of Shift gives me a unique insight into writing Laravel applications. I combined 20 years of writing code with supporting over 20,000 Laravel upgrades into 10 tips for crafting maintainable Laravel applications.

Writing open source software, and staying sane while at it

Oct 31st 2019 – sebastiandedeyne.com

My colleague Seb lists a few very good actionale tips that help you maintaining open source software.

In the 4.5 years I’ve been a developer at Spatie, over 200 packages have been built and released by our team. I’ve done quite some authoring and maintenance over the years, and I’d like to share 8 actionable tips on writing and maintaining open source software without going insane.

A DNS record crash course for web developers

Oct 31st 2019 – twitter.com

Confused by DNS Records? A, CNAME, ALIAS...

Me too ?

Let's change that! (cheatsheet at the end)

? DNS Record crash course for web developers ?
— Chris Achard (@chrisachard) October 28, 2019

A PHP package to read and write simple Excel or CSV files original

Oct 28th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

For a couple of projects I needed to read and write a couple of very large Excel and CSV files. I didn't find a good package that does this so I decided to create one myself. Under the hood it uses generators, so memory usage will remain low, even when working with large files.

In this blogpost I'd like to walk you through spatie/simple-excel.

Getting started with Domain Oriented Laravel original

Oct 22nd 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

A couple of days ago my colleague Brent published a blogpost on Domain Oriented Laravel. In short, he makes the case for organising your code around business concepts or features. That might sound very "heavy" or daunting, but it's actually for easy to get started with.

In this short video I explain how you can use PhpStorm to refactor your code. Make up your own mind if you need this in your projects.

Persistent Layout Patterns in Next.js

Oct 22nd 2019 – adamwathan.me

Adam Wathan explain how can avoid re-rendering the entire UI everytime you click a link in Next.js

Next.js is such a wonderfully productive development experience and produces such incredibly fast websites that I just refused to believe it had to be this way. So I spent a few weeks researching, asking questions, and experimenting, and came up with these four patterns for persistent layouts in Next.js applications.

My current setup (2019 edition) original

Oct 19th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 8 minute read

After tweeting out a screenshot, it often get questions around which editor, font or color scheme I'm using. Instead of replying to those questions individually I've decided to just write down the settings and apps that I'm using.

Query scopes, meet action scopes

Oct 17th 2019 – timacdonald.me

Tim MacDonald shares an interesting technique.

Action scopes are...well...just query scopes really, but instead of filtering they take an action. It's just a random name I've given them to differentiate them from regular filtering based query scopes in my projects.