No release, weekly updates, and 🔥 tip

No release

There was no release today. I believe Taylor is traveling. There were several patches to Laravel 11 and Laravel 10.48 last week.

A reminder subscribers to a Shifty Plan automatically receive a PR bumping Laravel, as well as other packages, anytime there is a new release.

This automation is a nice way to stay up-to-date and periodically kick-off your CI builds. However, they're really just a bonus for subscribers. The main value of a Shifty Plan are all the included Shifts, full access to the Workbench, and customizable webhooks.

Weekly Journal

Last Tuesday Laravel 11 was officially released. Although the Laravel 11.x Shift has been available for over a month, it was finally being used for real. This meant I was busy monitoring the queues and support emails. I made several tweaks each morning.

These were mostly edge cases around handling unconventional, or at least unexpected code. For example, an application with an empty or missing AppServiceProvider. Supporting applications that didn't adopt the type hints in Laravel 10. Things like that. The core automation seemed to be spot on. I've gotten dozens of reports many users didn't have to change a single thing. That's the dream!

I stopped making tweaks over the weekend to keep it stable as I am traveling to Laracon India today. I missed speaking last year. I got Covid 3 days before my flight and was banned from travel. So I'm determined to make it this year, as missing last year gave me serious FOMO.

Life has changed for me now with the girls. I have to be more selective with many conferences than I used to. It's tough as conferences were a big part of my life - meeting other devs and traveling. Some FOMO is inevitable. I'm balancing that with one international Laracon a year. If I'm still relevant in a few years, maybe it'll be a family trip too.

🔥 Tip

Adopt the new application slimming as you can. The Upgrade Guide does not recommended this. My take is that there is nuance to slimming a Laravel 10 application. As such, to avoid endless support issues, the official upgrade path is to simply bump your dependencies.

However, this leaves you with a Laravel 10 application running Laravel 11. Over time, that will become annoying. Either from a maintenance perspective or from a context switching perspective.

So, if you use Shift, great - it'll be automated for you. If not, next time you do a refactor consider slimming the config files. Then maybe some core files. And keep going until you actually have a Laravel 11 application.