A recap of 2019 original
A year ago, I wrote a recap of 2018. Now that 2019 is coming to a close, I thought it might be fun to write a similar post on what I did this year.
Streaming a large export as a CSV file to the browser original
A while ago, I created an easy to use framework agnostic PHP package to read and write CSV and Excel files called spatie/simple-excel. Behind the scenes, generators are used to ensure low memory usage, even when working with large files. Today I added a method that allows you to stream CSV files to the browser. In this small blog post, I'd like to demonstrate how you can use it.
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freek.dev turns five! original
Thoughts on pricing for Mailcoach
At Spatie we currently building Mailcoach: a solution to self-host newsletters and email campaigns. It can be used a stand alone app or as a laravel package. We'll also create a video course that explains the internals of the package. We're not going to make this software open source, but sell it. We're still are deciding on our pricing model.
Julien Bourdeau, engineer at Algolia, shares his thoughts on how it should be priced.
Today, Freek announced that they're going to release the pricing model soon and opened a conversation about what it could be. It got me thinking, and unfortunately, I couldn't fit my thought in 280 characters. First, it's important to understand that MailCoach will be 2 main things: a full-fledged app and a Laravel package.
Read more [www.sigerr.org]
Sending a welcome notification to new users of a Laravel app original
My team and I currently building Mailcoach, a solution to self-host newsletters and email campaigns. In Mailcoach you can create new users to use the app.
How should these new users be onboarded? The easy way out would be to send these new users a default password reset notification to those users, but that isn't a good first experience. The default auth scaffold by Laravel doesn't help us here: it only contains functionality to log in and to let users register themselves.
To onboard new users created by other users, I've created a package called laravel-welcome-notification which can send a welcome notification to new users that allows them to set an initial password.
In this blogpost I'd like to explain how you can use the package).
Writing open source software, and staying sane while at it
My colleague Seb lists a few very good actionale tips that help you maintaining open source software.
In the 4.5 years I’ve been a developer at Spatie, over 200 packages have been built and released by our team. I’ve done quite some authoring and maintenance over the years, and I’d like to share 8 actionable tips on writing and maintaining open source software without going insane.
Read more [sebastiandedeyne.com]
A PHP package to read and write simple Excel or CSV files original
For a couple of projects I needed to read and write a couple of very large Excel and CSV files. I didn't find a good package that does this so I decided to create one myself. Under the hood it uses generators, so memory usage will remain low, even when working with large files.
In this blogpost I'd like to walk you through spatie/simple-excel.
The mixin PHP DocBlock original
When using PHP, you've probably used DocBlocks. They can be used to add additional information that can't be inferred by looking at the source code alone. DocBlocks can be used by IDEs, like PhpStorm, to improve autocomplete suggestions.
In this blogpost, I'd like to highlight a not so well known DocBlock: mixin.
A job middleware to rate limit jobs original
Recently we released a new small package called laravel-rate-limited-job-middleware. As the name implies, this package can be used to limit how many times a job may be executed in a given amount of time.
In this short blog post, I'd like to introduce the package to you.
A package that adds resource links to your Laravel API resources original
At Spatie we have several projects where the UI is rendered using JavaScript (we're big fans of Inertia). The backend and routes are defined in the Laravel app. The backend sends information to the frontend using API resources.
We often add the available routes the frontend can use as links property on the resource. To avoid having to add all routes manually, my colleague Ruben released a package, called laravel-resource-links that can automatically add resource links to the API resource.
In this post, I'd like to introduce the package to you.
Event store optimizations in laravel-event-sourcing original
About a year ago, we released laravel-event-projector. It focused on adding projectors, an important concept in event sourcing, to Laravel.
After the release of the package, we continually kept improving it. We added aggregates, a way to test those, a brand new section in the our documentation that explains event sourcing from scratch, and DX improvements all across the board.
We now feel confident that the package is a good starting point for getting started with event sourcing in Laravel. That's why we're renaming the package to laravel-event-sourcing.
Creating beautiful status pages using Oh Dear! original
My buddy Mattias and I are running an uptime checker service called Oh Dear. Earlier this week, we've launched a new major feature: status pages.
In this blog post, I'd like to walk you through what status pages have to offer. We'll also dive deep in some technical details of the underlying Laravel app.
Generating speaker cards using Tailwind and Laravel original
I'm currently organizing the Full Stack Europe conference. The first edition will be on 23 - 25 October in the beautiful city of Antwerp, Belgium. I believe that the best apps or sites aren't built by programmers. They're built by teams. That's why we designed this conference for everybody and don't stick to just one aspect of programming.
Ignition: a new error page for Laravel original
Today at Laracon EU, Marcel Pociot and I unveiled Ignition, a beautiful new error page for Laravel. It is the new default error screen in Laravel 6 and you can manually install it into Laravel 5 applications. In this blog post, I'd like to tell you all about it.
Watch the Flare reveal live original
These past eight months Marcel Pociot, me and our teams at Beyond Code and Spatie have been working on a secret project called Flare. We believe that Flare is going to change the way you work with Laravel. To be kept in the loop subscribe to our mailinglist.
We are going to launch it this Friday at Laracon EU at 16.30 local time (15:30 CET). The Laravel News YouTube channel will live stream the launch. You can watch the stream right below.
Supercharging common controllers original
From time to time our team needs to create fairly complicated CRUD interfaces from scratch. While this isn't rocket science, there surprisingly aren't that many good resource out there on how to do this. That's why our team dove in and published a couple of packages that can help create modern CRUD…
Implementing event sourcing: testing aggregates original
Earlier this year we released v2 of laravel-event-sourcing. This package is probably the easiest way to getting started with event sourcing in Laravel. A significant feature of v2 was the addition of aggregates.
Today we released another new version of the package that adds test methods. These methods allow you to verify if the aggregate behaves correctly. In this post, I'll show you an example and explain how the test methods are implemented.
These test methods were inspired by the awesome testing methods Frank De Jonge made in his Eventsauce package.
How to add webmentions to a Laravel powered blog original
The comment section of this blog used to be powered by Disqus. At its core, Disqus works pretty well. But I don't like the fact that it pulls in a lot of JavaScript to make it work. It's also not the prettiest UI. I've recently replaced Disqus comments with webmentions. If you reply to, like or…
Going serverless with Hugo and Netlify original
Our team releases a lot of open source packages. All of our packages are well documented. For the smaller packages, we use a simple readme on GitHub. The bigger packages, like medialibrary and event projector get documented on our documentation site. We recently moved our site from a Digital Ocean…
