Freek.dev

Laravel / PHP / AI

design

All my posts about design.

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A new design for Ignition original

by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

A couple of years ago, Ignition became the default error page in Laravel.

Ignition provided a vastly improved design over Whoops: it brought Laravel specific niceties (such as showing the routing, queries) and the ability to display and even run solutions (e.g. generating an app key).

At Spatie, we think we can improve the design of Ignition even more. Our initial plan was to release this new design in tandem with Laravel 9 as a big bang surprise release. We've changed our mind on this because we'd like to have feedback from the community.

In this blog post, I'd like to share our ideas and plans for Ignition.

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Name the Date

– medium.com

Kevlin Henney wrote a good post on the importance of naming things well.

Good naming is part of design. It sets expectations and communicates a model, showing how something should be understood and used. If you mean to tell the reader getMillisSince1970, don’t say getTime.

Read more [medium.com]

Software Architecture is Overrated, Clear and Simple Design is Underrated

– blog.pragmaticengineer.com

Gergely Orosz argues that you should start with a simple design and try your best to keep it simple. I don't necessarily agree with everything in the post, but it's an interesting opinion nonetheless.

Software architecture best practices, enterprise architecture patterns, and formalized ways to describe systems are all tools that are useful to know of and might come in handy one day.

Read more [blog.pragmaticengineer.com]

A few notes about the frontend of the renewed spatie.be original

by Willem Van Bockstal – 5 minute read

Before we moved in to our new offices in 2014, we quickly set up a temporary one-page website, initially only in Dutch. It lasted for 4 years and bursted out of its frames ever since, because… hmm … no priority, no time. A new site was like a running joke for a long time, until Laracon US 2018…

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The art of the error message

– thestyleofelements.org

Marina Posniak, UX writer at Spotify, shares some great tips on how to write error messages well.

To start, ask yourself if you even need the error message. Before writing anything, consider if there’s a way to redesign the experience so there’s no error at all. Is there a way to just make it work? (Really, the best error message is no error message.) But if you do need it, think carefully about the message. When things go wrong and the app “fails,” say something useful. The message should help the user solve the problem and move on.

Read more [thestyleofelements.org]

A newsletter about programming, design, and other related topics

My colleague Sebastian started a new side project: a newsletter about programming, design, and other related topics.

Growing the Stack is a biweekly—as in, once every two weeks—newsletter about programming, design, and other related topics. The newsletter isn't tied to any programming language or ecosystem, and it's not meant keep you up to date with all the new & shiny tools out there. It tries to bundle content that inspires. Content that triggers you to consider and try out new ideas.

Subscribe here: https://sebastiandedeyne.com/newsletter

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