Blog

Issuing events with Livewire is a useful way to communicate between components. But, there are some caveats to be aware of - especially if you’re coming from something like React or Vue. The majority of this comes from the fact that Livewire treats every component as an island.

This had stumped me a few times in the past. Because of this, I wanted to give a quick example of how you can use Livewire events in a way that you might be more familiar with: with reactivity.

sprintf is an amazing function that doesn’t get enough love. Because of this, I had put together a little tool to explore it in the browser.

In Laravel 11+, it’s quite easy to tell the exception handler to render all (or a select portion of them) as JSON regardless of the request/response type. But what about earlier versions?

Most things we want to validate in Laravel are simple. But, what should we do when we want to add more validation outside of the standard patterns that are provided? In this example, I’ll show how I do just that.

I’ve written about Custom PHP Exceptions before - as well as using PHP Interfaces for code readability. There’s one coding pattern that I use pretty consistently that encompasses these concepts - a custom exception for code or functionality that is not yet written.

In most of my applications, time is reflected in the UTC timezone. This is great for logic and math, but not so great when showing the date to the regular user.

Now, it’s pretty easy to show the UTC dates in the user’s timezone, without even asking them what it is.

Let’s see how to do this with a little bit of HTML and Javascript.

Recently, I had an issue with PhpStorm not detecting my Docker configuration. I was using Docker Compose and everything worked fine with docker cli and Orbstack. Why wouldn’t PhpStorm recognize this? It’s a simple fix, actually. It has to do with the name of your project. Let me explain.

A REPL (Read-Eval-Print-Loop) is useful in a lot of cases. It allows you to run your code in this specific environment in a way that can be particularly useful with debugging.

So, what if you need a REPL in PHP but you don’t have Laravel Tinker available (yet?).

Oh that famous computer science joke: there are two hard problems in programming, cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-1 errors.

But, on a recent Laravel project, I realized something super important. Let me show you what I was doing and see if you can follow along.

Laravel gives a lot of syntactical sugar helpers. This allows you to write your Laravel code in a few different flavors or dialects. Some programmers prefer using fluent interfaces, others composition, and others pure functional statements.

As a seasoned and salty programmer, I tend to stick with what I know. It can be easy to overlook the helpers that Laravel provides. But, with Eloquent, the when function is way more useful than a simple helper. The true eloquence comes from its handling of the results of the first condition check.