thoughts and inspiration on designing, programming, and writing for the web
I love Laravel Forge's quick deploy scripts. Forge allows you to set up a deploy script in their web interface and run it when you push to a git branch. However, I generally prefer to keep orchestration in the git repository. It's nice to have history, and I don't want to visit Forge whenever I want to make a change to the deploy script.
An elegant solution: move the script to a file. I created a deploy.sh and call it from Forge.
A few years ago I taught myself some Go. Not because I needed it but because I like poking around other ecosystems. I came across Go By Example, and it's still is one of my favorite formats to explore a new language or framework.
The examples are succinct and introduce you to a concept without overwhelming you. This format will not turn into an expert, but is just enough to get you curious and kickstart your own explorations.
A green test suite is a blank canvas, and a blank canvas is a paralyzing place to start.
A failing test is a pointer to the next step. When I end the day with a failing test, I know exactly where to begin when I get back. The perfect kickstart to get into flow.
The past few years I've seen more projects use Go or Rust for heavy lifting alongside a higher-level language like PHP or JavaScript.
I've learned a little Go myself but don't know enough about Rust to understand when you'd choose one over the other. Vercel is currently migrating a codebase from Go to Rust, it's interesting to read the reasoning behind the decision.
For example:
Go's preference for simplicity at the filesystem was creating problems for us when it came to file permissions. Go lets users set a Unix-style file permission code: a short number that describes who can read, write, or execute a file.
While this sounds convenient, this abstraction does not work across platforms; Windows actually doesn't have the precise concept of file permissions. Go ends up allowing us to set a file permission code on Windows, even when doing so will have no effect.
In contrast, Rust's explicitness in this area not only made things simpler for us but also more correct. If you want to set a file permission code in Rust, you have to explicitly annotate the code as Unix-only. If you don't, the code won't even compile on Windows. This surfacing of complexity helps us understand what our code is doing before we ever ship our software to users.
Next to PHP, Go is a low-level language—but Rust is even lower. Looks like Go is great for heavy lifting on the web, but if you're into building tools to run in different environments Rust is where you want to be.
I used to leave pull request descriptions empty. "Let the code speak for itself" or "let the commits speak for themselves" are the perfect getaway from the extra work of documenting your thought process.
Recently, I've experienced that spending time on a good description is a worthwhile investment.
One of my favorite underrated (and underused!) CSS properties is font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums.
Tabular numbers are monospaced, which keeps their sizes consistent and keeps numbers with the same amount of digits aligned.
There are two common cases that warrant tabular numbers: tabular data and moving numbers.
A lesser-known piece of Markdown syntax (and HTML) are description lists. Description lists are great for small bits of "key-value"-like information.
Apparently Frank Herbert's Dune can teach us lessons on product management:
Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife - chopping off what's incomplete and saying: "Now, it's complete because it's ended here."
(I haven't read the book yet, but would love to one day!)
I enjoyed Mohamed's post on using PHP and Go to have the best of both worlds.
By employing a polyglot architecture, we get the best of both worlds. PHP provides the development speed required to compete in a hyper-growth market, while Go provides more efficient resource utilization.
Another good quote from the introduction of his PHP to Go course:
PHP may be slow and memory hungry when compared to a compiled language, but that's not a result of a bad design.
It's like this by design because of all the choices it makes on your behalf to conceal complexity.
I also recommend his post on Twitter about the business decisions behind cutting costs on infrastructure.
A few years ago we built a tiny web tool to view a site's DNS records. I still use it on a regular basis when I need to do a quick lookup.
Some cool tidbits:
ip or visit dnsrecords.io/ip to display your current IP address
I've attended this talk twice this year and it hit just as hard the second time. Happy to see it available online. Start watching already!
A short & sweet overview of get(), cursor(), chunk(), and lazy() to retrieve models from the database. It's a tradeoff between speed and memory usage.
Just a Twitter account I've been enjoying lately. Small worlds posts a tiny sci-fi story every day (with lovely visuals!)
Follow @smllrworlds on Twitter.
When building a CRUD interface in an event sourced system, you'll come across the dilemma of how granular your events should be. Should you have a large PostUpdated event, or granular TitleUpdated, ContentUpdated, and AuthorUpdated events?
At Laracon US we announced we're working on a new course at Spatie: Full Stack Artisan.
In Full Stack Artisan, we'll dive into building Laravel applications with Inertia, React, TypeScript, view models, our Laravel Data package, and more.
Last week I took a break from working on course content to set up branding and a landing page.