Originals - Freek Van der Herten's blog on PHP, Laravel and JavaScript

In this section you can read posts I've written myself.

Building Mailcoach

Original – Jan 30th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 12 minute read

Today, our team released Mailcoach, a beautiful, self-hosted mailing list manager. It integrates with services like Amazon SES, Mailgun, or Sendgrid to send out mailings affordably. It’s packaged as a stand-alone app, or can be integrated into a Laravel project, it's perfect for bloggers, artisans, and entrepreneurs.

Even if you're not in the market for an email solution, Mailcoach includes a video course on how it’s built. I'm sure you'll see some valuable techniques that you can bring to your own project.

In this blogpost, I'd like to share why and how we've built this.

Remove all history from a GitHub repository

Original – Jan 16th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

From time to time I need to remove all history from a GitHub repository, for instance right before releasing a package I've worked on in private. Sometimes I don't want people to see all mistakes I've made along the way :-).

Stay up to date with all things Laravel, PHP, and JavaScript.

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On all these platforms, regularly share programming tips, and what I myself have learned in ongoing projects.

Every month I send out a newsletter containing lots of interesting stuff for the modern PHP developer.

Expect quick tips & tricks, interesting tutorials, opinions and packages. Because I work with Laravel every day there is an emphasis on that framework.

Rest assured that I will only use your email address to send you the newsletter and will not use it for any other purposes.

Using GitHub actions to run the tests of Laravel projects and packages

Original – Jan 6th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 10 minute read

For many years we've relied on Travis to run the tests of our packages. For projects we used Circle CI. Recently we moved this responsibility from Travis and Circle CI to GitHub actions. In this blogpost I'd like to explain why and how we did this.

📺 How to avoid large function signatures by using pending objects

Original – Dec 30th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

In this video I demonstrate how to you can create a fluent API by using pending objects. We'll take a look at how subscribers can be created in Mailcoach. As a bonus I explain how jobs are dispatched using a pending object in Laravel.

My favourite albums released in 2019

Original – Dec 28th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

These are my 10 favourite albums which were released in 2019, alphabetically sorted.

📺 Building filters using laravel-query-builder

Original – Dec 19th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

On the subscribers screens of the Mailcoach, you can filter out the subscribers that have a certain status, you can search and sort them.

In the video below, which is part of the upcoming Mailcoach video course, I explain how we built these filters, powered by three of our packages: laravel-query-builder, query-string and Blade X.

📺 Video: Using tags and segments in Mailcoach

Original – Dec 11th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

My team and I are currently building Mailcoach, a self-hosted solution to easily send out newsletters and email campaigns. In this video, I demonstrate how email lists can be segmented using tags.

Building Mailcoach: deleting unconfirmed users automatically

Original – Dec 9th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

My team and I are currently building Mailcoach, a self-hosted solution to easily send out newsletters and email campaigns. In this video, I live code a new small feature.

This video was created unrehearsed and I didn't make any edits. So you can see every mistake that I made along the way.

A recap of 2019

Original – Dec 8th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 17 minute read

A year ago, I wrote a recap of 2018. Now that 2019 is coming to a close, I thought it might be fun to write a similar post on what I did this year.

Automatically convert your code to PHP 7.4 syntax using Rector

Original – Dec 3rd 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

In PHP 7.4, two new features were introduced that I'd like to use in my packages and projects: short closures and typed properties. Even though an IDE can help with converting to the new syntax, I'd don't want to manually hunt down all the places where the new syntax can be used. Lucky there's a tool that can do this work automatically.

Streaming a large export as a CSV file to the browser

Original – Nov 29th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

A while ago, I created an easy to use framework agnostic PHP package to read and write CSV and Excel files called spatie/simple-excel. Behind the scenes, generators are used to ensure low memory usage, even when working with large files. Today I added a method that allows you to stream CSV files to the browser. In this small blog post, I'd like to demonstrate how you can use it.

Video: a first look at the alpha version of Mailcoach

Original – Nov 28th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

My team and I are currently working on Mailcoach, a self-hosted solution to easily send out newsletters and e-mail campaigns. In this video you'll get a preview of an alpha version of the package.

freek.dev turns five!

Original – Nov 26th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 6 minute read

How time flies. My blog is again one year older. I've been running it now for five years. Like all the previous years, I'd like to give an overview of everything that's happened on this blog in the past year.

My Alfred workflows

Original – Nov 22nd 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Alfred is a fantastic tool for macOS that allows you to be more productive. The app allows you to install workflows to make it more powerful. In this short blog post, I'd like to share the workflows that I have installed.

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).

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.

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.

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.

The mixin PHP DocBlock

Original – Oct 14th 2019 by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

When using PHP, you've probably used DocBlocks. They can be used to add additional information that can't be inferred by looking at the source code alone. DocBlocks can be used by IDEs, like PhpStorm, to improve autocomplete suggestions.

In this blogpost, I'd like to highlight a not so well known DocBlock: mixin.