Laravel 13.8, weekly updates and tip

Laravel 13.8

Lots of fixes this week brings us to Laravel 13.8. Here are the highlights:

  • Prevent array to string conversion in signature validation in #59778
  • Memoize credentials in SqsConnector in #59867
  • Disable pausing on managed queue workers in #59871
  • Add work pausing/resuming events in #59895
  • Add assertSessionMissingInput in #59970
  • Add an environment filter to schedule:list in #59993
  • Add queue inspection methods in #59997

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

Weekly Journal

Last week was Derby Week here in Louisville, Kentucky. While Derby is run on Saturday, the track is open all week. So most days I partook in some bourbon and gambling.

Before doing so, I prepared to the Monthly Shift for May. This is sent out to Shifty Plan subscribers. It contains curated refactors to modernize your Laravel applications. This month focused on adopting static class references instead of string names for commands.

Otherwise, I worked with Eric Barnes to cache Laravel News. We rolled out some of the initial changes to cache the home and article pages. We ran into some competition between the caching provided by Laravel Cloud and Cloudflare. We're working with the Laravel Cloud Team to iron out some of those kinks.

Regardless, Eric is already seeing a 20% bump in cache hits. This means a majority of his traffic is cached. I have every confidence we'll get the total cache above 80% or 90%. Then we'll look into reducing his server costs.

I want to do more of these case studies. I feel like Fast Laravel did not get a lot of attention. Caching pages is an OG, but still very relevant skill. So hopefully these case studies help give it more attention.

Weekly Tip

I did a pretty massive refactor to laravelshift.com this week with AI. This was something I would not have done myself. But since I could throw it over the fence at Claude (and had a robust test suite), I took it on. It caboobled on things for about an hour (tripping my rate limit). But it got it done.

So the general tip is - when you're sitting idle, send AI on a refactor. But I'm also sprinkling in some praise since I have been blaming AI for my malaise the last few newsletters.