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

Posts tagged with automation

How to automatically generate a commit message using Claude

Jan 26th 2026 by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

For years, my git history contains "wip" commit messages. I don't really often use git history myself, but my colleagues do. And when they're trying to understand a change I made six months ago, "wip" tells them absolutely nothing. Might as well not have commit messages at all.

I knew I should write better commit messages, but the friction was real. Stopping to think about how to summarize my changes felt like it broke my flow. So I kept typing "wip".

Now, I have a bash function in my dotfiles that uses Claude to generate commit messages for me.

Continuous AI in software engineering

Jul 9th 2025 – www.seangoedecke.com

Continuous AI in software engineering involves integrating AI tooling automatically into existing development flows, such as automated PR reviews, issue labeling, and daily summaries.

Husky: How to automatically format, lint and test before you commit or push

Mar 29th 2024 – tighten.com - submitted by Jamison Valenta

Let's talk about Husky, a tool that automatically runs any number of commands whenever you commit or push. You'll never have to worry about forgetting to format, lint, or test before uploading code to the repo — Husky does it for you every time you run git commit or git push

How to use GitHub Actions build matrix to deploy artifacts to multiple servers

Mar 13th 2024 – philo.dev

Philo explains in great detail how to achieve this

My Reusable GitHub Actions Workflows

Mar 12th 2024 – stefanzweifel.dev

Stefan's backup workflow is very interesting.

Laravel Envoy - Automate the boring stuff

Jul 1st 2023 – blog.oussama-mater.me - submitted by Oussama Mater

Explore how Laravel Envoy can help increase your productivity by automating the boring stuff.

Invoice PDF Generation With Browsershot

May 2nd 2023 – fly.io - submitted by Johannes Werbrouck

Invoicing is boring and manually writing up invoices even more so, that's why you should automate the entire process in your app. Here, I show you how to use Spatie’s wonderful Browsershot package to do just that.

Saying goodbye to WIP commit messages

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.

Creating an onboarding email drip campaign using Mailcoach

Feb 6th 2023 – mailcoach.app

One way to teach your audience the features you offer is by creating a drip campaign about all the features your platform offers. Better knowledge of all features hopefully leads to better conversion rates.

Dynamically Generating Thousands of OG Images for a Viral Twitter Campaign

Nov 30th 2022 – www.netlify.com

Fascinating read by Aaron Francis on how he used Netlify to generate dynamic OG images.

Spawning workers based on queue workload

Sep 7th 2022 – jasonmccreary.me

Earlier this week Jason McCreary deployed a feature which automatically spawns new worker servers for Shift based on the job queue workload. This reduced server costs by 97% and wait times by 80%.

Automate keeping your environment files in sync.

Feb 11th 2022 – github.com

How many times have you onboarded a new dev onto your team, only to have to spend ages debugging with them because your project's .env.example file is wildly outdated?

Here's a package that can help with that!

Our improved changelog workflow for packages

Nov 24th 2021 by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

For years, my team and I manually updated the changelog for our 250+ packages. Recently, we've improved how we go about this.

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

Automatically fix PHP and JS code style problems on GitHub PRs

Jun 25th 2021 – dekker.io

Claudio Dekker runs you through the GitHub action he created to automatically handle code styling issues at Laravel

How to Dynamically Update Twitter Cover Image to Show Latest Followers

Jun 24th 2021 – dev.to

Erika Heidi created a nice solution to generate and update cover images on your Twitter account. In this blog post she explains it all.

Auto Merge Dependabot Pull Requests

Apr 29th 2021 – stefanzweifel.io

Stefan Zweifel created a nice workflow to automatically merge dependabot PRs when all tests pass

Mailcoach v4 has been released: drip campaigns, automations, mail templates and much more

Mar 25th 2021 by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read

I'm proud to announce that Mailcoach v4 has been released. Mailcoach already was a great solution to send out bulk emails affordably. With an entirely refreshed UI and new capabilities, Mailcoach now becomes a more powerful platform for all things email:

send out regular email campaigns with a provider of your choice
create drip campaigns and send automated emails based on the activity of your audience
administer and log transactional emails from your application.

We've also rewritten our extensive documentation.

In this blog post, I'd like to give you a tour of everything Mailcoach can do.

Managing your DNS from GitHub with DNSControl

Mar 11th 2021 – svenluijten.com - submitted by Sven

How you can leverage DNSControl and GitHub Actions to make DNS configuration a breeze.

How to post to Twitter from your Laravel app using Zapier

Feb 3rd 2021 – mattstauffer.com - submitted by Jamison Valenta

This tutorial walks through how to set up your Laravel application to use Zapier to post tweets.

Selling digital products using Laravel part 9: Serving ads on GitHub

Oct 13th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 7 minute read

Our company has created a lot of open-source packages. At the moment of writing, we have over 200 packages, which have been downloaded nearly 100 million times. Because we think the package users might be interested in our paid offerings as well, we've put a small ad in the readme of each repo. In this blogpost I'll explain how we manage these ads using Laravel Nova and S3.