|
Hi there!
Welcome to the 205th freek.dev newsletter!
Here are a couple of links I hope you'll enjoy as much as I did.
Your Laravel routes can carry metadata now, and Flare shows it
Laravel now supports attaching arbitrary metadata to routes, and the latest laravel-flare client shows that context in error reports and performance traces.
Improving Laravel Architecture With Expressive
Learn how Expressive can improve a Laravel application by keeping Eloquent as the database layer while moving business logic to fully typed objects.
Dex: An AI talent agent for ambitious software engineers (sponsored link)
The best career moves have always come from a warm intro—someone who gets your work, knows the right people, and makes the call at the right moment. That's Dex. An AI talent agent for ambitious software engineers who matches you to a short and sweet list of roles at companies genuinely worth your time: Linear, Lovable, Synthesia, Granola, Fyxer. Low lift, high fit. Brief your agent now at meetdex.ai.
Everything About the Context Facade
A deep dive into Laravel Context, from request metadata and automatic log enrichment to hidden context, scoped values, queues, scheduled commands, and internals.
Feature Flags in Laravel with Pennant
How we use class-based Laravel Pennant features, with a kill switch on every flag and a config-driven path to general availability.
Eloquent Query Classes Pattern
Learn how to use Eloquent Query Classes to organize important database logic in Laravel without adding a full repository layer.
How PHP Attributes Changed the Way I Write Livewire
Bert De Swaef shows how PHP attributes made his Livewire components easier to read by attaching validation, URL sync, and event listeners directly to the properties and methods they belong to. Nice piece on how attributes reduce mental overhead, improve IDE support, and make components feel more self-documenting.
How AI is changing (the way I do) UX
Nick Houtman shares how AI is reshaping UX work: clients arrive with better prototypes, common patterns get safer and more generic, and real research still matters most.
Learn Anything With My /teach Skill
Matt Pocock shows how his /teach skill turns Claude Code into a personalized teacher that adapts lessons to your goals, level, and progress. It creates structured lessons, resources, quizzes, and a learning record so you can keep building on what you learned.
Life is too short for a slow terminal
Mijndert Stuij shares a bunch of practical ways to make your terminal feel instant, from skipping shell frameworks and caching completions to lazy-loading slow tools. A good reminder that tiny bits of latency add up fast when you live in your terminal all day.
Context-aware headings in HTML
A look at the new experimental headingoffset attribute, which lets heading levels adapt to their context instead of hardcoding h2s and h3s. A thoughtful explanation of where this could be genuinely useful, especially in component-based UIs.
Architecture Decision Record
A concise explanation of ADRs: short documents that capture an important decision, the context behind it, and its consequences. Good practical advice on keeping them lightweight, readable, and useful over time.
Storied Colors
A lovely growing index of colors, each with its own provenance, chemistry, and often grim history. Beautifully made, and exactly the kind of rabbit hole I enjoy falling into.
Community links
In this section you'll find links submitted by others. Let me know if you wrote or stumbled across a blog post, tutorial or video that might be interesting to appear in this section.
True Async/Await Is Coming to PHP? (submitted by Nuno Maduro)
Open source in the age of agentic coding (submitted by Andrej)
Old posts
Here are a couple of links from a while ago!
Typehinting Laravel validation rules using PHPStan's type aliases
Choosing where to spend my team’s effort
PHP version stats (June 2025 edition)
How to use Enum Cases in Laravel | How to | Tutorial | Quick Win Wednesday #QWW
Enjoy this newsletter? Help it grow!
If you found this edition useful, here are two quick ways to support the newsletter:
👉 Write a short recommendation. Approved recommendations appear on the newsletter page for others to see.
👉 Forward this email to a colleague or friend who might be interested.
Alternatively, you could consider picking up one of the paid products my team and I have worked on:
If you have any questions, remarks or thoughts about this newsletter, simply hit reply!
Thank you so much for reading!
Freek
P.S. Know someone who'd enjoy this newsletter? Send them here to subscribe.
You are receiving this newsletter because you subscribed at freek.dev
Unsubscribe from this newsletter
This mail was sent using Mailcoach
|
