Hello friends! You might know me from my years of shouting at PHP developers to write tests for their code and my (hopefully) entertaining talks at conferences. It probably will not surprise readers that I also have some opinions about text editors and Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). In this article, I want to discuss The […]

A popular trend among developers these days is sharing the specs of one’s local development environment and listing their most often-used tools. In this month’s Workshop, guest columnist Ben Ramsey stops by to share what’s running on his machine and the tools he finds most helpful in his day-to-day work. by Ben Ramsey

This upgrade process is not for the faint of heart, nor is it for those who spend hours meticulously curating their commits and merges. We’re intentionally being reckless because we’re confident that our tests cover enough of our code to know when a problem will arise. by Joe Ferguson

This month we’ll dive into upgrading a PHP 7.1 application originally built with the Laravel framework version 5.6 with reckless abandon. The only way this kind of upgrade can succeed is with a robust suite of tests. Tests allow us to leap major versions of our framework and dependencies and even PHP versions in some […]

This month we’re going back to the early days before Discord and Slack, to when we shared our knowledge through ancient tomes known as Blogs. Most developers have a blog, even if they never published it. by Joe Ferguson

This month we’re going to visit a topic near and dear to my heart: local development environments. I’ve been maintaining Laravel Homestead since late 2016. I have been a longtime tinkerer of just about every local development tool you’ve ever heard of, and they all have their strengths and weaknesses. Lando is just about the […]

This month we’re diving into a fresh Laravel application using the Breeze package to scaffold our authentication using Inertia and Vue.js. No previous Vue experience is required! We’re exploring the ability to quickly build modern single-page applications with Inertia leveraging Vue.js components to build our application. If you previously used Laravel’s make auth commands, you’ll […]

This month we’re straying slightly from our usual PHP tooling to cover Make and how we can leverage it to simplify our lives as developers. by Joe Ferguson

This month we’re exploring a programming concept known as Scaffolding. Scaffolding is the process of using an application to generate code based on some input or configuration file. Just as construction workers raise temporary structures to help perform their work, we can expect similarly. Automatically generating code is a wonderful idea but questions always arise […]

Containers are here to stay, and if you’ve been putting off learning how to migrate a PHP application from a VM to containers, we have you covered this month as we migrate a long-standing Laravel application from running on Linux via Apache and MariaDB. Our application also utilizes Redis for caching, so we need to […]