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

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.

Avoid describing your data multiple times in a Laravel app using laravel-data

Original – by Ruben Van Assche – 12 minute read

In the vast majority of applications you work with data structures. Sometimes that data is described multiple times. Think for instance of a form request that tries to validate a blog post model, and an API transformer class for that same blog post model. Changes are that both classes describe the same properties.

Using our new laravel-data package, those structures only need to be described once.

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Three types of mocks

Original – by Brent Roose – 3 minute read

Mocking, faking; these might sound like intimidating words if you don't know what they are about, but once you do, you'll be able to improve your testing skills significantly.

Part of "the art of testing" is being able to test code in some level of isolation to make sure a test suite is trustworthy and versatile. These topics are so important that we actually made five or six videos on them in our Testing Laravel course.

In this post, I want to share three ways how you can deal with mocking and faking. Let's dive in!

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A Laravel package to crawl and index content of your sites

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 12 minute read

The newly released spatie/laravel-site-search package can crawl and index the content of one or more sites. You can think of it as a private Google search for your sites. Like most Spatie packages, it is highly customizable: you have total control over what content gets crawled and indexed.

To see the package in action, head over to the search page of this very blog.

In this post, I'd like to introduce the package to you and highlight some implementation and testing details. Let's dig in!

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Replacing Keytar with Electron's safeStorage in Ray

Original – by Adriaan Marain – 3 minute read

Ray is an app we built at Spatie to make debugging your applications easier and faster. Being web developers, we naturally decided to write this app in Electron, which enabled us to move from nothing to a working prototype to a released product on 3 separate platforms within a matter of weeks.

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Asserting valid and invalid requests in Laravel

Original – by Brent Roose – 1 minute read

Testing a Laravel project is one of the most pleasant experiences I've ever had: there's a clean testing API, a very powerful layer added on top of testing frameworks; all while keeping the simplicity and eloquence you'd expect from a Laravel project.

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How to convert a PHPUnit Testsuite to Pest

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

While recording videos for the Testing Laravel video course, I became a big fan of Pest, a test runner that tries to optimize the developer experience. I'm now using Pest as the default for testing new packages and projects.

I've also converted a couple of existing testsuites from PHPUnit to Pest. Luckily, this is a very easy process. In this video I'll show you how to get started. You'll see that it only takes a couple of minutes.

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Building a simple dashboard using Tailwind

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

In this stream, Shruti Balasa show how powerful Tailwind is. She builds a simple dashboard layout in only a couple of minutes. If you want to learn more about Tailwind, consider buying a ticket for her online workshop at Full Stack Europe. You can get a 20% discount for Shruti's workshop by using…

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Strategies for decreasing the number of queries in a Laravel app

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 13 minute read

Oh Dear is all-in-one solution to monitor your site that my buddy Mattias Geniar and I have created. It can monitoring uptime, certificates, broken links, scheduled jobs, and much more.

Under the hood, Oh Dear is a large Laravel application that performs many queries all of the time. To power future features, we've recently changed our database structure and refactored some pieces in our code base. We increased performance by decreasing the number of queries.

In this blog post, we'd like to to share some techniques that might be helpfull to increase the performance of your Laravel app too.

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