No release, weekly updates, and 🔥 tip

Laravel

No release this week as Taylor is on family vacation.

Weekly Journal

I am on family vacation next week. So while there may be a release next week, there may not be a newsletter. All depends on if it's a fun trip or a week from hell.

Anyway, last week I paired up with Caen on our new side-project. I tweaked some wording on wppm.io after another demo. Then I mostly took the weekend off.

I kicked off this week with another livestream mini-series. This time building a script to automatically create OG images for Markdown posts. I'll be using it for the new Shift Blog and probably this newsletter as well. You may use it for your own needs. I personally find creating OG images an annoying step of creating content. So I welcome your feedback to make this script more flexible.

Today I did my Wednesday livestream. This was the final stream on improving Mockery's error messages. These have been a bit chaotic. The code is actually pretty straightforward. It's more about finding all the error messages and crafting them with the right amount of human readability. I hope to get this PR'd soon as it's been a longstanding papercut.

With the rest of this week I'll make sure everything is in a stable place before family vacation. Next week I'll be in support mode for Shift.

🔥 Tip

This Laravel method was shared on Twitter which I thought was pretty nice:

Env::getOrFail('SOME_ENV_VAR')

It basically attempts to read an ENV variable and will throw an exception if it is not set. This might be important in some environments where you don't want to fallback on a default value (or simply return null).

There was a PR to potentially add a fail parameter to the env() helper. This would make it even easier to use within your config files. But I guess it was closed in favor of using this existing static method.

Maybe there's opportunity for a Env::shouldBeStrict() mode to force this behavior everywhere.