Freek.dev

Building laravel-ish service container from scratch to better understand how it works under the hood. Explanation + code snippets + link to the full code

Below MySQL 8.0.1, or on a server Laravel misreads, workers reserve jobs with a plain FOR UPDATE and can deadlock on the DELETE. One tinker line shows which lock yours use.

Matt Stauffer is excited to share that he's partnered with his friend Eric Barnes to launch PHP News, a new site covering the whole PHP ecosystem.

How a slow dependency becomes an outage, and how deadlines, concurrency limits, retry budgets, and jitter protect useful work. A practical deep dive with PHP examples and a controlled overload test design.

Long AI conversations fail quietly. The agent drops part of what you asked and never says so. What the research measures, and why a new chat is the fix.

WordPress 6.8+ stores bcrypt of an HMAC-SHA384 of the password behind a $wp prefix, and Laravel 13 throws on it. Import those rows with User::create() and they break without an error.

A request that added a product to a membership with 5,000 members timed out. Instead of hiding it on a queue, we batched the writes, fetched only what we needed and skipped the ORM, and got it down to under a second and a half.

Large photo uploads can be slow, but resizing and compressing images in the browser can freeze the page if the work runs on the main thread. This article shows how to use a Web Worker to process images before uploading them without interrupting the app.

What Agent Experience engineering means in practice: discoverable code paths, scoped agent instructions, useful feedback, and human ownership of risky decisions.

Five Laravel iteration methods timed over 1,000,000 MySQL rows. And a PostgreSQL run where PHP reported 3.3 MB while the process peaked at 324.8 MB.

The AWS SDK for PHP ships a bunch of clients you may never use. This extra weight is often unnecessary, and can also cause problems with serverless deployment limits. Fortunately, Composer has a solution!

A privacy issue in a service my family uses reminded me that authorization and retention matter - but how you handle and communicate an incident matters just as much.

A Laravel agent that remembers conversations re-sends every tool result it ever stored, on every turn, capped at a hundred rows nobody documents. Ten measured turns: over a million tokens of history, most of it pages the model already read. Three fixes, with the before and after for each.

A deep dive into Eloquent performance, from detecting N+1 queries to choosing aggregates, indexes, query plans, pagination, chunking, and transaction boundaries for a growing team dashboard.

A single-source CLI tool to compile repository rules, skills, commands, and MCP configurations to the developer's local AI agents.

Laravel queues are great out of the box, until they bite. Over the years I’ve collected a few gotchas the hard way. Let me save you the headache.

Transformers.js lets you run AI models directly in the browser without a backend, API keys, or an internet connection after the model is cached. The article explores how it works, which models are available, and the trade-offs of client-side AI compared to traditional AI providers.

Fuzz brings the power of Fuzz testing to PestPHP. Allowing you to write coverage-guided fuzz tests in the Pest style you already know and love.