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• Refactoring my Laravel Project

  Published on 20th February 2023

  My website has been on Laravel for a while and it has grown a lot over the last year. There weren't (m)any tests nor did the codebase have any static analysis or code style restrictions. Whi…

• Short URL String Helper for Laravel

  Published on 17th February 2023

  In a recent project, I wanted to add some string helper methods. Laravel already provides a long list of string helper methods but they didn't cover what I wanted. These string methods can a…

• Lesser-Known Composer Commands

  Published on 15th February 2023

  Composer is the tool PHP developers use to manage their dependencies. Most of the time a composer.json is set up at the start of a project and then forgotten about. I often run the composer…

• Do Not Render a Laravel Component

  Published on 13th February 2023

  There have been many times when I was building a Laravel View Component and only wanted to render the HTML based on some logic. In the past, I added a Blade @if block to the actual component…

• Using the Laravel Active Trait

  Published on 9th February 2023

  In a previous blog post, I wrote how I build traits for using in Laravel. This post discusses how you can use the trait in your Eloquent models. It covers how you actually use them, using th…

• Laravel Active Trait

  Published on 7th February 2023

  When adding functionality that might be applied in multiple places, you might consider a way to reuse the code. You can either make all your classes extend a base class using inheritance or…

• Time Travelling Dudes

  Published on 6th February 2023

  I am really happy with these trilogy triptych prints from Nick Chambers. They are titled “Time Travelling Dudes” and you can hopefully guess which characters the simplified lines are depicti…

• Movies in January 2023

  Published on 1st February 2023

  It's a new year, so here is my January movie review. Overall, I watched 24 new movies this month and every movie was released in 2022. I caught up on some fantastic movies and some hard-hitt…

• Testing Laravel’s Invokable Rules with PHPUnit

  Published on 31st January 2023

  I have previously been writing custom Laravel validation rules with explicit passes() and message() methods. However, since Laravel 9, the preferred method is now a little different. The doc…

• addIf for Laravel Collections

  Published on 30th January 2023

  I wanted to add an item to a Laravel Collection, based on a truthy condition. In the script, I quickly jumped for the basic if syntax, but then wondered if there was a nicer way. if ($condit…