In this section you can read posts I've written myself.
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…
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Expect quick tips & tricks, interesting tutorials, opinions and packages. Because I work with Laravel every day there is an emphasis on that framework.
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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…
Recently we released laravel-cors. This package can add the necessary CORS headers of your Laravel app. In this post I'd like to give a quick explanation of what CORS is and how you can use the package. What is CORS Imagine that all JavaScript code for domain X running in a browser would be able to…
This post was first published on 24daysindecember.net Chances are that you've never heard of my company Spatie. We specialise in creating Laravel applications for our clients. Our team is rather small: we consist of only 6 developers and one manager. On first glance we are just a web agency like…
Laravel has an excellent Collection class that has many useful operations. The class is also macroable. This means that you can add function to it at runtime by calling macro on it and passing a name and a closure. In our projects we tend to code up the same macro's over and over again. That's why…
laravel-medialibrary is a 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. Like mentioned before on this blog my team and I are currently creating a new major version, v7,…
laravel-medialibrary is a powerhouse 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. My team and I are hard at work creating a new major version, v7, that adds a lot of…
Let's talk a little bit about Symfony's dump function. It's part of their VarDumper component. The function can dump a variable to the screen or browser in a nicer format than PHP's native var_dump. In the recently released Symfony 3.4 and Symfony 4 the function got a nice little improvement that…
Three years ago I started this blog to share my bookmarks and interesting links with fellow developers. Like on the previous anniversaries I'd like to share some cool statistics from the past 12 months. For the period spanning from end november 2016 until end november 2017 my little blog served 591…
PurgeCSS is a tool that can reduce the filesize of a CSS file. It does this by removing any css classes that are not used. It can detect which CSS classes are used by scanning the source files of your application. In this tweet Jonathan Reinink shared how it can be configured in Laravel Mix: ???? I…
Regular visitors will have noticed that last week this blog got a new coat of paint. This new layout isn't just a new WordPress theme. Things have changed on the backend as well. Previously my blog was powered by WordPress. I've migrated it to a custom built Laravel app. That app is open sourced.…
