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

Using global mixins in Vue.js

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Recently I needed to add some global functionality to nearly all Vue components in an app. My colleague Seb told me a good way to achieve this: global mixins. In this post I'd like share that knowledge. In Vue a mixin is some functionality bundled in a file that can be added to one or more Vue…

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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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Optimize images in Laravel apps

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

A while ago we released image-optimizer. In short this package can make all kinds of images smaller by stripping out metadata and applying a little bit of compression. Read this blogpost to learn more about it. Although it's pretty easy to work with the package, we felt that we could deliver a more…

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Easily optimize images using PHP (and some binaries)

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 7 minute read

Our recently released image-optimizer package can shave off some kilobyes of PNGs, JPGs, SVGs and GIFs by running them through a chain of various image optimization tools. In this blog post I'll tell you all about it. First, here's a quick example on how you can use it: use…

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A list of podcasts

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

On his blog Left On The Web, Stefan Koopmanschap lists the podcasts he's listening to. His selection contains both tech and non-tech podcasts.

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Easily convert webpages to images using PHP

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read

Browsershot is a package that can easily convert any webpage into a image. Under the hood the conversion is made possible new headless options in Chrome 59. In this post I'd like to show you how you can use Browsershot v2. Here's a quick example of how it can be used:…

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A straightforward Vue component to filter and sort tables

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

Today we released our newest Vue component called vue-table-component. It aims to be a very easy to use component to make tables filterable and sortable. In this post I'd like to tell you all about it. Why creating yet another table component? Let's first touch upon why we created it. To make lists…

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Testing a Vue component part 4: more testing and faking time

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 6 minute read

Welcome to part 4 of a series on how to test a Vue component. Here's the table of contents of the series: Starting out with tests The first test and snapshot testing Creating an instance of a component More tests and faking time (you're here) Jest awesomeness and a skeleton to get started More tests…

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Testing a Vue component part 3: Creating an instance

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read

Welcome to part 3 of a series on how to test a Vue component. Here's the table of contents of the series: Starting out with tests The first test and snapshot testing Creating an instance of a component (you're here) More tests and faking time Jest awesomeness and a skeleton to get started Creating…

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Testing a Vue component part 2: the first test and snapshots

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read

Welcome to part 2 of a series on how to test a Vue component. Here's the table of contents of the series: Starting out with tests The first test and snapshot testing (you're here) Creating an instance of a component More tests and faking time Jest awesomeness and a skeleton to get started Setting up…

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Testing a Vue component part 1: getting started

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read

Recently we released vue-tabs-component, a simple Vue component to render a tabular interface. If you want to know more about to the component itself I suggest you head to the introductory post on it. Like with the vast majority of our open source work this package comes with tests. In this series…

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A Vue component to display tabs

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

Last week my company released a vue-tabs-component, a quality Vue component to easily display tabs. You can view a demo of the component here. In this post I'd like to tell you all about it. Why we created it If you're just want to know what the component does, skip to the next section. Nearly all…

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Quickly dd anything from the commandline

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Laravel's tinker command allows to run any code you want as if you are inside your Laravel app. But if you want to run a single line of code if can be a bit bothersome. You must start up tinker, type the code, press enter, and quit tinker. Our new spatie/laravel-artisan-dd package contains an…

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A conversation on laravel-html

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read

Hi, how are you? I'm fine thanks! How are you? I saw you released another package last week. Yup yup, you mean laravel-html, right? It was actually coded up by my colleague Sebastian, who did an awesome job. But why put out yet another html generator? Html generation is a solved problem, right? Yes,…

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Stay up to speed with PHP by reading these feeds

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

In the PHP ecosystem we're blessed with so many people blogging about their favourite language. Everyday new interesting content on PHP gets posted somewhere on the web. Visiting each blog separately to see if new content has been posted is quite tedious. Luckily this problem has been solved long…

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Make git work better with GitHub

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

A few months ago I installed a command line utility called hub. I'm really fond of it. It's aim is to make it easier to interact with GitHub from the commandline. It's a wrapper around the standard git command. Once it's installed you can do stuff like this (take from the manual page) # clone your…

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