freek.dev / Page 3

A while ago, we released laravel-pdf, a package to generate PDFs in Laravel apps. Under the hood, it used Browsershot (and therefore Puppeteer/Chrome) to convert HTML to PDF. That approach works great, but it does require Node.js and a headless ...

Martin Fowler on the overuse of bold in technical writing -- and how LLMs have picked up and spread this practice. The more you emphasize, the less power it has.

Ray 3.0 is here! Completely rebuilt for better performance (60% less memory), a fresh new look, message archiving, and MCP support so AI agents can interact with Ray directly.

Christoph reflects on how personal AI assistants have changed his daily workflow -- from calendar updates to searching the web less. An interesting take on where this technology is heading.

PHP 8.6 will introduce partial function application, allowing you to pre-fill some arguments while leaving others for later. Brent explains this new language feature with practical examples.

At Laracon India, I launched a major update of Ray. For that talk, I needed a little demo project to showcase Ray. I built a simple website about a then-fictional mobile app to play a Scrabble-like word game called WordStockt. But then I got curious: ...

Brent continues his optimization journey processing 11 million database events. Starting from 50k events per second, he implements combined inserts, skips unnecessary deserialization, and reaches 400k events per second. A great deep dive into PHP ...

Martin Fowler on how technical terms lose their meaning as they spread. When a useful concept becomes popular, it passes through a "telephone game" of explanations until the original definition gets diluted or even inverted. Think of how "agile" or ...

The final part of Oh Dear's series on SQL performance. Mattias introduces phpunit-query-count-assertions, a package that catches N+1 queries, duplicate queries, and missing indexes in your test suite. Since implementing this at Oh Dear, they've ...

If you're using AI tools like Claude Code to help write code, you've probably noticed they don't automatically know your team's coding conventions. The AI might write perfectly valid PHP, but it won't follow your specific style guide unless you tell ...