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

Sevalla is the all-in-one PaaS for your web projects. Host and deploy your applications, databases, object storage, and static sites. Enjoy advanced deployment pipelines, a complete database studio, instant preview apps, and one-click templates. The pricing is simple: no hidden fees, no seat-based pricing, and you pay only for what you use. Get real human support from developers.

Get started now with a $50 credit at Sevalla.com.

Simplifying work with custom stubs in Laravel

Link – May 19th 2025 – blog.genijaho.dev - submitted by Geni Jaho

Stubs are fake implementations of interfaces or classes that simulate the behavior of real services.

Impostor Syndrome – Maybe I’m Not Good Enough?

Link – May 16th 2025 – www.moisis.dev - submitted by Moisis Hadjiagathangelou

After more than 9 years working with Laravel—leading a dev team and architecting solutions—I still sometimes feel like I’m not doing enough.

Real-world uses of TypeScript’s utility types

Link – May 14th 2025 – piccalil.li

Utility types are types that modify other types. You can think of them as functions, but they operate on types instead of values.

Five levels of handling images in Laravel

Link – May 12th 2025 – spatie.be

We'll cover resizing, image optimization, and UI enhancements and show how Spatie's packages and products can make the whole process easier, more efficient, and even a bit fun.

What nobody tells developers about documentation

Link – May 9th 2025 – newsletter.posthog.com

Users don’t know what your product does, how to use it, or why they would use it. You need docs to explain this.

A package to handle passkeys in Laravel

Original – May 9th 2025 – spatie.be

I’m proud to announce that we’ve released a new package called spatie/laravel-passkeys that makes adding passkeys to a Laravel app as easy as it can be.

Introducing PHP Operators

Link – May 7th 2025 – php-operators.com

Here's a fun little sideproject from my colleague Seb. This web app is built with Laravel, Alpine.js, and Tailwind CSS. Content is stored in Markdown files and loaded with our sheets package.

Livewire and Inertia: how we love and use both at Spatie

Link – May 6th 2025 – spatie.be

If you held an individual Spatie employee at gunpoint (please don't) and forced them to pick a favorite, you'll get a 50/50 split. But when we look at the choice at hand as a team, it becomes easier to determine the right fit.

Settling the File Structure Debate

Link – May 2nd 2025 – muhammedsari.me - submitted by Muhammed Sari

Group by type or context / process? One of these methods will crush your project's growth. Find out which!

Unorthodox decoration

Link – May 1st 2025 – muhammedsari.me - submitted by Muhammed Sari

Everyone knows the classic decorator pattern—but have you met its duck-typed cousin? Discover how to extend Laravel behavior without interfaces, the clever way.

Think of an Elephpant -

Link – Apr 30th 2025 – liamhammett.com - submitted by Liam Hammett

Find out how we can champion PHP as a community and help bring it to the attention of more developers

Type Preferences

Link – Apr 29th 2025 – liamduckett.com - submitted by Liam

A short post about my preferences around type safety and static analysis.

Laravel Observers vs Event Listeners: What’s the Difference?

Link – Apr 28th 2025 – bert.gent - submitted by Bert De Swaef

If you’ve been working with Laravel for a little while, you’ve probably come across observers and event listeners. But what is the difference?

DevOps With Laravel: Queues and Workers in Production

Link – Apr 25th 2025 – martinjoo.dev

Marin Joo covers configuring Supervisor to manage worker processes, including defining commands, scaling, and logging. He also explores using multiple queues and prioritizing them to optimize worker usage.

Optimize Bulk Insertions with Laravel's New fillAndInsert() Method

Link – Apr 24th 2025 – www.harrisrafto.eu

Laravel’s new fillAndInsert() method enables bulk insertions while applying model casting, timestamps, and UUID generation.

Impact, agency, and taste

Link – Apr 23rd 2025 – www.benkuhn.net

Many of the most effective people I’ve worked with also do the most metacognition, i.e., reflecting on their own (and their team’s) work and thought processes, and figuring out how to improve them.

Running PHP tests in parallel on GitHub actions

Original – Apr 22nd 2025 by Freek Van der Herten – 6 minute read

A couple of years ago, Laravel introduced a great feature which allows to run PHPUnit / Pest tests in parallel. This results in a big boost in performance.

By default, it determines the concurrency level by taking a look at the number of CPU cores your machine has. So, if you're using a modern Mac that has 10 CPU cores, it will run 10 tests at the same time, greatly cutting down on the time your testsuite needs to run completely.

A default runner on GitHub doesn't have that many cores, so you can't leverage parallel testing as good as in your typical local environments.

In this blog post, I'd like to show you a way of running your tests on GitHub, by splitting them up in small chunks that can run concurrently.

We use this technique at Oh Dear to cut down the running time of our vast testsuite from 16 minutes to only just 4. In this blog post all examples will come from the Oh Dear code base.

Freek.dev