It all started with a simple annoyance. I was working on a Laravel project and kept having to run the same set of commands in a tinker session to setup a test subscriber in a specific state. Every time I would need to copy and paste a bunch of commands into tinker to get […]

Picture this: You’re responsible for a piece of software that powers nearly three-quarters of all websites on the internet. Every day, billions of people interact with applications built on your platform. The responsibility is staggering – and so is the target on your back. This was the reality facing The PHP Foundation in 2024 when […]

Introduction While certainly not a new concept, Queues have become a powerful and handy feature of modern frameworks. They enable our normally thread-locked apps to asynchronously dispatch tasks, allowing workflows and, especially, users to continue forward. Expectations are high for websites to deliver fast and get content on the page to maintain a good user […]

Picture this: You’re three months into a new Laravel project, the kind where deadlines loom large and stakeholders change their minds faster than you can push commits. Your frontend developer – let’s call her Sarah – walks over to your desk with that familiar look of barely contained frustration. “What exactly does the Update User […]

Picture this: you’re at your desk, coffee growing cold, staring at a legacy codebase that feels like it was written during the Jurassic period. The tests are brittle, the UI updates require a degree in JavaScript archaeology, the CSS is a maze of !important declarations, and the admin panel… well, let’s just say it makes […]

CSP is the Content Security Policy for your website’s pages. Think of it as a foreman on a construction site, checking all the material loads coming to the gate, verifying that they meet the requirements and sources defined by you, the architect. Accepting pine paneling for oak paneling in the specs would be disastrous for […]

Picture this: You’re sitting in front of your computer, watching your PHP application crawl through a list of RSS feeds one by one. Each request takes half a second, and with twenty feeds to process, you’re looking at ten seconds of your users staring at loading spinners. You’ve heard about async programming, but every time […]

 Do you ever wonder how PHP parses your code? Wonder no longer because in this video, Scott Keck-Warren from the PHP Architect Channel shows you how to inspect your code using the AST with the PHP-Parser library. How PHP Really Reads Your Code (Using ASTs) When we pass our source code to the php […]

This might be an unpopular option, but one of the parts I enjoy most about being a developer is having to debug problems. It’s always interesting because you get to be a “detective in a crime movie where you are also the murderer” to quote Filipe Fortes. Once you track down the problem you might […]

If you’re like me, you’re always on the lookout for tools and techniques that can reduce the chances that your code has bugs and make it easier to maintain. Value objects are one of my go-to techniques for making my code easier to maintain, and you can use some of the tools built into Laravel to […]