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

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

Using Postmark Rebound to improve handling of bounced emails

Original – Jul 27th 2023 by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Whenever Oh Dear detects something wrong with your site, it can send you a notification. We have multiple channels available: Slack, Telegram, webhooks, and many more. The most popular channel our users use is just simple mail.

Behind the scenes, Oh Dear uses Postmark to send emails. Postmark will inform us whenever a notification mail results in a hard bounce. A hard bounce means that the mail won't be delivered. The most common reason for this is that the mailbox doesn't exist (anymore). This can occur when somebody changes jobs, and the work email address no longer exists.

Watch my Laracon US talk: Enjoying Laravel Data

Original – Jul 27th 2023 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

Here's a recording of my talk that I gave Laracon US in Nashville a week ago.

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.

How to display a subscription confirmation message with CSS

Original – Jul 19th 2023 – mailcoach.app

Here's a cool think you can do using the :target selector

How we use CSS custom properties to customize your newsletter archive

Original – Jul 3rd 2023 – mailcoach.app

Here's an interesting technique that we use in Mailcoach.

Visualising Laravel and Horizon metrics using Prometheus and Grafana

Original – Jun 13th 2023 by Freek Van der Herten – 11 minute read

I'm proud to announce that we've released a new package called spatie/laravel-prometheus. Using this package, you can send all sorts of metrics (user counts, subscription counts, queue workloads) around your Laravel to Prometheus and visualize the historical trends using Grafana.

Use ray()->trace() to figure out where a call came from

Original – Jun 12th 2023 – myray.app

An important problem of a programmer's productivity is finding his way through the code. A good project structure and your IDE can get you a long way, but sometimes it’s not enough.

Flare 2.0 has been launched!

Original – Jun 9th 2023 – flareapp.io

These past months, we've been busy redesigning our entire service. We're very proud to launch it today.

Flare and Ignition now offer AI-powered solutions

Original – Jun 9th 2023 – flareapp.io

Today, we're adding AI-powered solutions to Flare. This means we can suggest a solution for almost any error: the AI will likely suggest a helpful suggestion for most errors.

A Laravel package to quickly see which HTML is rendered by which Blade view

Original – May 30th 2023 by Freek Van der Herten – 6 minute read

I'm happy to share that we have released our latest package, spatie/laravel-blade-comments.

This package can add comments to your rendered HTML output. For each Blade view that was used to build up the response, it adds start and ending comments.

Laravel Worldwide Meetup: Introducing Laravel Splade - Quick Wins in Laravel

Original – May 3rd 2023 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

Here's the recording of the Laravel Worldwide Meetup which was held last week.

Saying goodbye to WIP commit messages

Original – Apr 30th 2023 by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

There are two kinds of developers: those that write commit messages and value a repo's history and those that don't. I'm in the latter camp: most of my commit messages just read "WIP", much to the chagrin of some of my colleagues. I've tried to change my ways, but I just can't get into the habit of writing good commit messages.

But now I have a solution: I use the power of AI to write my commit messages for me. In this blog post, I'll show you how I did it.

Automatically clear Ray when running tests via PHPUnit or Pest

Original – Apr 27th 2023 – myray.app

Learn how to automatically clear Ray's screen when running a test

Laravel Analytics v5 with support for GA4 has been released

Original – Apr 6th 2023 by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

We've released a new major version of our Laravel Analytics package. The most important new feature of this release is the support for GA4.

Skipping tests conditionally in Pest

Original – Apr 3rd 2023 by Freek Van der Herten – 7 minute read

In this blog post, I'd like to show the easiest way to skip tests conditionally in tests. Using the simple technique, which can be used for other things besides skipping tests, you can make your tests much more flexible.

Discovering PHP's first-class callable syntax

Original – Mar 14th 2023 by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

When looking at recent changes in the Laravel framework, I saw some PHP syntax that I didn't see before. Because I've been working with PHP for over 20 years and have a firm grasp of the language, I was surprised to see new syntax for the first time.

Pest v2: see all new amazing features in action

Original – Mar 10th 2023 by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

The release of Pest v2 is right around the corner. Pest creator Nuno Maduro and the rest of the Pest team are currently working hard improving the docs ahead of the Pest v2 release somewhere later this month.

In this blog post, I'd like to share the free videos I've created for each of the amazing features.

Ray can now display the values of private properties

Original – Mar 3rd 2023 by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Our handy Ray debugging app gained a cool new trick: it can now display the values of private properties and results of private methods.

Strategies for making Laravel packages customizable

Original – Mar 3rd 2023 by Freek Van der Herten – 10 minute read

While attending Laracon India, many people approached me to ask how we handle the maintenance of all our Spatie packages. One of the ways we keep maintenance burden low is by making our packages customizable. In this blog post, I'd like to cover some of our best tips to make a Laravel package easy…

Casual Artisan Call February 2023

Original – Feb 28th 2023 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

Christoph and I did another casual artisan call do talk about what's been keeping us busy.

Log all notifications sent by your Laravel app

Original – Feb 26th 2023 by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read

We've released a new package called Laravel Notification Log. True to its name, it will log when your Laravel app sends notifications. It also contains helpful methods to determine when notifications were sent.