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Freek.dev

Laravel / PHP / JavaScript

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

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.

Learn how to write readable PHP that is a joy to maintain

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 8 minute read

I'm proud to announce that our new premium course on writing readable PHP is now available. It's called Writing Readable PHP.

This course contains a collection of bite-size tips (both in written form and videos) that make your code a joy to read for your co-workers and future self. These tips are aimed towards developers who know the basics of PHP and want to improve their craft. As a bonus, you'll learn to use static analysis to ensure that your code is understandable and correct.

Writing Readable PHP has been created by our team and Christoph Rumpel. It contains our combined knowledge on how to write the best PHP possible.

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Avoid using else

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

Using else often encourages complexer code structure, makes code less readable. In most cases you can refactor it using early returns.

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Code that breathes

Original – by Brent Roose & Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Have you ever needed to maintain a project that wasn't yours? A project that, when you first opened it, gave you chills down your spine? Even without reading the code in detail, you could already tell it was a mess.

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A package to automatically discover routes in a Laravel app

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 9 minute read

I'm proud to announce that our team has released a new package called spatie/laravel-route-discovery. This package can be used to automatically discover and register routes by looking at your controllers and views. Of course, you can also still register routes like you're used to in a routes file.

In this blog post, I'd like to tell you all about this package.

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A Laravel package to monitor the health of your application

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 15 minute read

I'm proud to announce that we've released a new package called Laravel Health. As the name implies, this package can be used to monitor the health of your Laravel application.

It offers many checks out of the box, and an easy way to create custom checks. When something is wrong, you can get a notification, or view the status on a dashboard.

The package also offers deep integration with Oh Dear, allowing for even more robust monitoring

I want to tell you all about it in this blog post. Let's go!

screenshot

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A bash function to run tests for both PHPUnit and Pest

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

I've used this little bash alias for many years to quickly run the tests inside of a project.

alias p="vendor/bin/phpunit"

With this alias in place, I can run the tests by typing "p" on the CLI. Nice!

For a long time, everything was great! But then, Pest appeared on the scene. It's an alternative test runner for PHP with a high focus on developer experience.

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