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Hi there!
Welcome to the 196th freek.dev newsletter!
Because I have so much content to share, I decided to send two newsletters this month instead of the single one. I hope you don't mind.
Earlier this month, I had an amazing time at Laracon India. Reconnecting with people I hadn't seen in a while felt incredibly good, and I came back truly energized.
At Spatie, we've been having a lot of conversations about how we should use AI and all the possibilities it offers. I'm sure many of you are doing the same at your companies. My stance on it is to embrace it as much as possible.
As a developer, it just empowers me so much, both to experiment with new things and to simply get things done. I built a native mobile word game in less than two weeks. I managed to get the open issues and PRs across our Spatie repos down by 85%, and for the first time in years, I feel like I'm actually on top of it.
My colleagues are embracing it too, which is great to see, and I expect we'll be able to tackle the backlogs on Spatie and Flare much faster. Over at Oh Dear, my colleague Mattias has been on fire with PRs that improve performance and polish features.
As a developer, I'm not too worried about my own future. I think if you can communicate well and have empathy, you'll always have a job. So if you're feeling unsure, do expirement with AI, but also try to improve writing and communicating skills. I truely believe that will always give you an edge.
But I do worry about the broader social impact. AI is advancing at an exceptional pace, and the people who create policies around it cannot keep up. That's always been the case with new technology, but the speed at which AI is changing things is unlike anything we've seen before.
Anyway, enough rambling. Here are a couple of links I hope you'll enjoy as much as I did.
⭐ Introducing Ray 3.0
Ray 3.0 is here! Completely rebuilt for better performance (60% less memory), a fresh new look, message archiving, and MCP support so AI agents can interact with Ray directly.
A little bit of info, you won't read elsewhere: for technical reasons that lifetime licenses are silently still available for a couple of days. Grab it now.
⭐ I built a native mobile word game in two weeks
At Laracon India, I did a talk on Ray 3.0 For that talk, I needed a little demo project to showcase Ray. I built a simple website about a then-fictional mobile app to play a Scrabble-like word game called WordStockt. But then I got curious: how far could I push AI-assisted development?
⭐ Laravel PDF v2 has been released: adds support for Laravel Cloud and easy queuing
⭐ Another new Spatie package drops: spatie/laravel-screenshot
We just released laravel-screenshot, a new package to take screenshots of web pages in Laravel apps.
⭐ Laravel Permission v7 has been launched
I'm very happy that our most popular package got some love.
AI Horseless Carriages
Pete Koomen argues that most AI apps are "horseless carriages," bolting AI onto old paradigms instead of letting users shape the prompts that drive them.
How to create an awesome product launch video
Aaron Francis shares how he used Claude to create an entire launch video for his new app, without using any traditional motion graphics software. No Remotion, no MCPs.
Excessive Bold
Martin Fowler on the overuse of bold in technical writing.
Personal AI Assistants Changed Everything For Me
Christoph reflects on how personal AI assistants have changed his daily workflow.
Semantic Diffusion
Martin Fowler on how technical terms lose their meaning as they spread.
Laravel Fuse: Circuit breaker for queue jobs
When an external service like Stripe or Mailgun goes down, instead of letting thousands of jobs timeout (30s each), the circuit opens after a configurable failure threshold and jobs fail instantly.
Real-world examples of using Laravel AI SDK
Amit Merchant walks through practical use cases for the Laravel AI SDK.
The Origin of Laravel - a look at v1 Beta 1
A fascinating deep dive into the very first commit of Laravel, made by Taylor Otwell on June 9, 2011.
Partial function application in PHP 8.6
PHP 8.6 will introduce partial function application, allowing you to pre-fill some arguments while leaving others for later. Brent explains this new language feature with practical examples.
Once again processing 11 million rows, now in seconds
Brent continues his optimization journey processing 11 million database events.
Old posts
Here are a couple of links from a while ago!
What to expect from open source?
Supercharging Rate Limiting with Cloudflare
Introducing laravel-tfa-confirmation
Importing 1.7 billion rows of CSV data from Stripe with PHP
Unorthodox Monoliths in Laravel
Introducing Rich Text Laravel: A package to integrate Trix into Laravel applications
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Thank you so much for reading!
Freek
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