In this section you can read posts I've written myself.
Introducing our Laravel Nova packages Laravel Nova is a beautiful admin panel that was first showcased at Laracon 2018 by Laravel creator Taylor Otwell. Using Nova building rich admin panels is a breeze. Nova was released today. Taylor was kind enough to give us early access to Nova shortly after…
The past few months my buddy Dries and I have been preparing a brand new conference called Full Stack Europe. The conference will take place in the city of Antwerp somewhere in spring or early summer of 2019. With the conference, we want to welcome every type of developer, wether you identify…
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Before we moved in to our new offices in 2014, we quickly set up a temporary one-page website, initially only in Dutch. It lasted for 4 years and bursted out of its frames ever since, because… hmm … no priority, no time. A new site was like a running joke for a long time, until Laracon US 2018…
For the first time in 4 years we completely redesigned our company website. We launched it today. The site is a simple Laravel app with some technical niceties. True to form we also open sourced the app, you can find the code in this repo on GitHub. In this blogpost I'd like you to give you a tour…
In most applications you store the state of the application in the database. If something needs to change you simply update values in a table. When using event sourcing you'll take a different approach. All changes to application state are stored as a series of events. The key benefit is that you…
The last few months I've been working on a package called laravel-event-projector. This package aims to be a simple and very pragmatic way to get started with event sourcing in Laravel. Ahead of it's release, which will happen in a few days, I've recorded a small video introduction. You can find the…
Recently I was working on a client project where a data import was performed via queues. Each record was imported in its own queued job using multiple queue workers. After the data import was done we had more rows than expected in the database. In this blogpost I'd like to explain why that happened.…
Bad title because we don't do overtime at Spatie, but our team has been very busy putting out new open source stuff. In the past weeks our team has released three new packages. In this post I'd like to quickly introduce them too you. sheets First up is spatie/sheets, created by Sebastian. This…
In most applications you store the state of the application in the database. If something needs to be changed you simply update values in a table. When using event sourcing you'll take a different approach. All changes to application state are stored as a series of events. The key benefit here is…
Recently when I was working on a project I got some strange results when using the empty function. Here's what I was debugging. I've simplified the code a bit to share with you. var_dump( $person->firstName, empty($person->firstName) ); This was the result: string(5) "Freek"…
At Spatie we have over 180 public repositories. Some of our packages have become quite popular. We're very grateful that many of our users open up issues and PRs to ask questions, notify us of problems and try to solve those problems, ... Most of these issues and PRs are handled by our team. But…
Last week I stumbled upon this article titled "GitLabbers share how to recognize burnout". It list these points to recognize burnout: You're constantly tired You no longer enjoy things Your job performance suffers Your relationships are strained (You have a hard time remembering…
laravel-medialibrary is a powerful package that can help handle media in a Laravel application. It can organise your files across multiple filesystems, generate thumbnails, optimize images and much much more. At Spatie we use this package in nearly every project. The last few months our team has…
For the past few years Spatie, the company where I work, has released many Laravel and PHP packages. Those packages are primarily built to be used in our own projects. We do not operate in a void. We have a community around us. They use our work. They help to make our packages better by submitting…
By default all scripts on a webpage are allowed to send and fetch data from and to any site they want. If you think about it, that's kinda scary. Imagine that one of your JavaScript dependencies would send all keystrokes, including passwords, to a third party website. That would be pretty bad. In…
Imagine you want to have an Eloquent model hold a status. It's easily solved by just adding a status field to that model and be done with it. But in case you need a history of status changes or need to store some extra info on why a status changed, only adding a single field won't cut it. To handle…
Laravel has a very powerful notification system. From the docs:
PHP 7.2 was released almost two months ago. I decided to wait a bit until a stable version of Xdebug with PHP 7.2 compatiblity was available. And that happened yesterday with the release of Xdebug 2.6. I'm on MacOS and use brew to install stuff. Upgrading from PHP 7.1 to 7.2 is laughably easy. These…
At Spatie we have a dashboard against the wall that displays a lot of information useful for our company. One of the things it shows are the urls of client sites that are down. Behind the scenes it leverages the webhooks from Oh Dear!, a website monitoring service that Mattias Geniar and I launched…
I'm currently building a webapp named Oh Dear: an easy to use and beautiful website monitor. It has recently gone into it's beta phase. At the moment of writing everybody can register a new account. After you've registered you'll start your trial period of 10 days. Oh Dear is built on top Laravel…
