Laravel 12.37, weekly updates, and weekly tip

Laravel 12.37

A minor release yesterday brings us to Laravel 12.37.0. Here are the highlights:

  • Allow passing depth to files() and directories() in #57573
  • Introduce Factory::insert() for bulk model factory creation in #57600
  • Add ucwords() to Stringable in #57581
  • Process queue jobs in background in #57648

You may review the full branch diff on GitHub for a complete list of changes.

Weekly Journal

Running a little behind this week. I spent last week mostly at wire:live. It was a fun event, and I'm glad I attended. But now I'm pretty much turning right around to head to Laracon AU.

Before kids and Covid, I was averaging one conference per month. Sometimes two. Oh, the limitless freedom of the time. Now it feels very chaotic.

Anyway, this week I am putting focus into Blueprint as it is the topic of my Laracon AU talk. Mostly giving it some polish while creating my slides.

I'm also giving some love to the Shifty Plan UX. For now some minor feature cleanup. But I hope to return to the monthly-Shift idea before the end of the year.

I leave for Australia on Friday. I basically lose Saturday with the time change. I expect to be jet-lagged on Sunday. Hopefully Monday and Tuesday I can enjoy some sites, before getting into conference mode Wednesday. I speak Thursday. Hang Friday. Then an epically long travel day Saturday. Again, it'll be fun. But draining.

Weekly Tip

Something that came up in conversation at wire:live was performance. While there wasn't a dedicated talk, most talks noted it in various ways.

Crafting a performant Livewire component has always been a bit of a mystery to me. You hear about computed properties, renderless updates, leveraging Alpine.

While all of these have their place, what seems most important is to simply reduce properties. The less public properties, the smaller the snapshot returned in Livewire updates.

You can achieve less public properties by using computed properties or view data. But in reality, both are calculated at least once per request. Unless, of course, you persist the computed property.

It seems there's quite a focus on this. For example, things like Bond. Multiple talks also mentioned returning JSON in Livewire updates.

While the soon to be released Livewire 4 is probably feature locked, I expect to see more features around this in Livewire 5.