Freek.dev

Our latest addition to the newsletter - a monthly, curated list of developer-focused tools.

Everyone knows the classic decorator pattern—but have you met its duck-typed cousin? Discover how to extend Laravel behavior without interfaces, the clever way.

If you’ve been working with Laravel for a little while, you’ve probably come across observers and event listeners. But what is the difference?

Find out how we can champion PHP as a community and help bring it to the attention of more developers

A short post about my preferences around type safety and static analysis.

A detailed description on how to implement an effective strategy for modernising a legacy system.

If you have to use AWS for hosting, and for whatever reason, you can’t make use of Forge or Vapor, then one potential elastic, scalable solution is AWS Beanstalk. AWS Beanstalk essentially provides you with a number of EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing) servers that sit behind a load balancer. If demand increases then more instances can be created. If demand drops then the number of instances drops down to save you costs.

Stripe metadata is great for config, entitlements, and... DNS? This experiment takes one good API feature and stretches it into the worst possible infrastructure layer.

Learn about covariance and contravariance and how these concepts apply to your PHP code. We'll discuss these concepts in the context of classes, union types, intersection types, parameter types, and return types.

Transforming and serving images from Laravel in a cache-friendly way.

Learn how to convert file sizes in bytes to human-readable file sizes using the "Number::fileSize" method. For example, we'll show how to convert "1024" to "1 KB".

Learn how to convert numbers to ordinal numbers (e.g., "1" to "1st") in PHP and Laravel apps. We'll also discuss how to spell out ordinal numbers (e.g., "1" to "first"), including using the more verbose format used in the UK.

A port of the official Laravel Starter Kit to Blade.

Learn how you can update an Inertia.js page in real-time using client-side visits—without overloading your server, even with many users online. Laravel Echo, Laravel Reverb, and a new Inertia v2 feature make it simple and efficient.

Learn how to use the cpx CLI to run PHP scratch files with superpowers that'll make you way more efficient!

Deploying a Laravel application without downtime is essential for maintaining a seamless user experience. This deployment script achieves exactly that, ensuring a smooth transition between releases. It clones the latest version of your project, sets up environment files, installs dependencies, runs migrations, and links the new release—all while keeping your application live. With built-in clean-up for old releases and error handling, this script is a robust solution for modern Laravel deployments.

This article shares 10 efficient and fun ways to seed your database, from classic PHP arrays to importing CSVs and using AI to generate random, realistic data.

An article explaining PHP's `yield` keyword and how it can be use in place of `return` to easily build iterators.