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

Laravel and PHP developers to follow on Mastodon

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

I love Twitter and I will be there until the ship goes down. Unfortunately, there are some strong signals that it may go away for a while or even permanently. I surely hope it doesn't come to that.

Through years of curating people to follow, I've built a very nice, positive group of people I admire and get inspired by. If Twitter goes down, I want to stay following these people (in a non-creepy way, rest assured). That's why I've already created a Mastadon account, and am looking around for the positive Laravel and PHP vibes there.

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

You can follow me on these platforms:

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.

Introducing PHP 8.2: all new features and changes

Original – by Ruben Van Assche – 9 minute read

PHP 8.2 has been released. It is a minor release compared to 8.0 and 8.1. This can be partly attributed to the departure of Nikita Popov as one of the most significant contributors to the PHP language. The PHP language has a lot of maintainers and isn't built by one person, but Nikita was one of the most active of them. Features like union types, typed properties, named arguments, and arrow functions, to name a few, were all added by Nikita.

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🚀 Mailcoach Cloud is now available: affordable email marketing for bloggers, Artisans, and entrepreneurs

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 24 minute read

We're proud to announce that Mailcoach Cloud has been launched. Using Mailcoach, you can create beautiful email campaigns, set up drip campaigns (or any email automation), and send transactional emails.

Mailcoach works well, whether your email list has 5 or 500 000 subscribers (yes, Mailcoach has been used for lists of that size), or even more. And thanks to our sharp pricing, Mailcoach is the most affordable solution compared to our competitors in most scenarios.

Privacy-minded people will appreciate that open- and click tracking is off by default. And to people that require full GDPR compliance, we can proudly say that everything is hosted on EU servers owned by EU companies.

If you decide to subscribe, you can use this coupon code for one month free: ONEMONTHFREE. You can help us get the word out, by retweeting our launch tweet, or upvoting us on Product Hunt.

In this blog post, I'd like to share why we've built Mailcoach, how you can use it, and how we have built it.

Let's dig in!

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Oh Dear 2.0 has been launched

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 27 minute read

I'm proud to announce that we have launched a redesigned Oh Dear. If you're unfamiliar with Oh Dear, it's the best all-in-one monitoring tool for your entire website. You can register for a 10-day free trial.

You can help us spread the good news by upvoting us on Product Hunt, or retweeting our launch tweet.

In this blog post, I'd like to share what Oh Dear can do for you, how we've rebuilt various parts, and give you an overview of the technology behind the service.

screenshot

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A package to manage dynamic servers

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 6 minute read

I'm proud to announce that our team has released a new package called laravel-dynamic-servers.

This package can help start and stop servers when you need them. The prime use case is to spin up extra working servers to help you process the workload on queues.

In this blog post, I'd like to introduce the package to you.

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Creating installer commands for Laravel packages

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

One of the joys of using packages in the Laravel ecosystem is how easy they are to install. Packages can be pulled in using Composer, and Laravel will automatically discover them.

In this post, you'll learn how to easily add an install command, making it even easier for package users to start using a package.

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Increase performance by using Eloquent's `setRelation` method

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

While working on the upcoming Oh Dear redesign, I noticed that list that displays all sites of a team was very slow.

To display that list, a lot of queries were used. With a couple of minor adjustments, I could reduce the number of queries needed to just a single one, solving the performance problem.

In this small blog post, I'd like to share one of the techniques I used.

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