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

Posts tagged with best practices

Best Practices for Using PHP Enumerations

Nov 16th 2023 – jeffochoa.me - submitted by Jeff

Although PHP Enumerations are meant to provide an easy and elegant solution to work with a predefined set of values, these classes are often misused, resulting in a lack of consistency due to the introduction of all sorts of methods that increase their complexity. In this article, we are going to go through some practices (both good and bad) with the goal of clarifying the understanding of these types of objects to help you build a more resilient and consistent codebase.

Preventing Duplicate Form Submissions Using Atomic Locks

Nov 14th 2023 – daryllegion.com - submitted by Daryl Legion

Duplicate form submissions or requests can be a common issue in web applications, often leading to unintended consequences. Laravel offers a straightforward solution to prevent these duplicates by using atomic locks.

The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Must Know About Unicode in 2023

Nov 13th 2023 – tonsky.me

No suprises here: UTF-8 is the most popular encoding for data in transfer and at rest.

Ensure model events are fired in your tests when using Model Observers

Oct 31st 2023 – devonmather.dev - submitted by Devon Mather

We will look at a couple of common scenarios where adding a couple of lines to your tests can future-proof your application from data loss when using Model Observers.

Why you should use spatie/laravel-data to store "settings" in your Laravel app

Oct 30th 2023 – stefanzweifel.dev - submitted by Stefan Zweifel

I struggled for a long time to find a good way to represent settings in my Laravel apps. spatie/laravel-data solves this for me with strong types and Eloquent casting.

Single-use tests

Oct 13th 2023 – timacdonald.me

Another gem of a blog post by Tim MacDonald

Event Delegation: A Technique to Improve JavaScript Performance

Oct 4th 2023 – blog.shahryartayeb.com - submitted by Shahryar

In this blog post, you will learn what event delegation is, how it can help you optimize your JavaScript code by reducing the number of event listeners, and how to implement it with a practical example.

Why error tracking is crucial for your application

Sep 15th 2023 – flareapp.io - submitted by Spatie

Alex and Christoph explain why error tracking is crucial for your application.

The Source Of Readability

Sep 8th 2023 – loup-vaillant.fr

It's always nice to read good post on code reability.

Using Postmark Rebound to improve handling of bounced emails

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.

Building Resilient Code: Harnessing the Power of Value Objects

Jul 26th 2023 – www.conroyp.com - submitted by Paul Conroy

Value objects are a great way to add safety and consistency to PHP applications, while improving readability & testability. Let's dive into what they are, what they're not (DTOs!), and how they can help us improve our code quality.

Read-only web apps

Jul 6th 2023 – adactio.com

If you’re about to build a web app and you’re pretty sure it requires JavaScript, why not pause and consider whether you can provide a read-only version.

Locality of Behaviour

Jun 20th 2023 – htmx.org

Locality is that characteristic of source code that enables a programmer to understand that source by looking at only a small portion of it.

Explaining the code on the "Go with PHP" website

May 16th 2023 – themsaid.com

Mohamed write a nice post featuring a lot of good tips on how to make your code readable.

Avoiding one-liners in PHP

Mar 30th 2023 – localheinz.com

Focus on writing code that solves real problems, is well-tested, and is easy to maintain.

Make more things the same

Mar 17th 2023

A nice refactor from Aaron Francis

I'm always on the lookout for a good "make more things the same" refactor and I just found one!

Make your life easy, make more things the same. pic.twitter.com/tQfnqSZ84u
— Aaron Francis (@aarondfrancis) March 8, 2023

Preemptive Pluralization is (Probably) Not Evil

Mar 13th 2023 – www.swyx.io

Before you write any code — ask if you could ever possibly want multiple kinds of the thing you are coding. If yes, just do it. Now, not later.

Strategies for making Laravel packages customizable

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…

Returning native types from the Laravel Request class

Mar 2nd 2023 – jamie-peters.co.uk - submitted by Jamie Peters

Have you ever been using the Laravel Request class and found yourself creating single use variables just for type casting? What if I told you there's a better way...

When to use Laravel global scopes

Feb 22nd 2023 – stefrouschop.nl - submitted by Stef Rouschop

With a proper implementation of global scopes instead of local scopes, the code and security would be greatly improved. Let me illustrate this with a simple example.