Laravel 8.59, weekly updates, and 🔥 challenge

Laravel 8.59

Few new features this week which brings us to Laravel 8.59.0. Here are the highlights:

  • Return a new or existing Guzzle client based on context in #38642
  • Allow quiet factory creation with createOneQuietly and createManyQuietly in e9cd94c8
  • Add ValidatedInput::merge in #38640
  • Add support for disallowing class morphs in #38656
  • Silence validator date parse warnings in #38652
  • Add AssertableJson::each in #38684
  • Add whereMorphedTo to streamline finding models morphed to another model in #38668

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

This version bump and update is automated for subscribers to a Shifty Plan. If you don't have one of those, be sure to bump your constraint and run composer update to get the latest features.

Weekly Journal

Last week I took a road trip to Bloomington, IL for the nearest Laracon viewing party. It was good to catch up with the same crew from last year and talk shop over coffees. But hopefully this time next year we'll all be back at the traditional, in-person Laracon.

I also did a last minute community sponsorship for Laracon with a discount code for the Shift Workbench. Now that the recordings are available, if you missed Laracon you can watch the talks at your convenience and, of course, enjoy this 25% discount for the Shift Workbench as well as other digital swag.

When I returned I created a Jigsaw blog. Jess updated its template using the Tailwind 2.x Shift. I also added Torchlight. The result is Shifty Bits - a blog where I'll post content from this newsletter each week.

This was something multiple people had asked about through replies or on Twitter. So while I will continue to send this weekly newsletter conveniently to your inbox, its content will also be publicly available as it benefits the community, and also Shift through some SEO mojo.

It was a long holiday weekend here in the US, so I took the opportunity to relax after all the work and travel these past few weeks. I plan to use the remainder of this week to finalize the Pest Converter with some of the fancier bits of automation. Jess and I will also pair to finalize some tweaks to the Shifty Plan dashboard.

🔥 Challenge

I wasn't in the code that much last week so this is more of a current challenge. I've wanted to make an internal dashboard for Shift which graphs important metrics. Something which allows me to easily see spikes in automation.

At previous companies we used Splunk. Now I neither have the scale nor budget to warrant that service. But I do know it would do what I want. After talking shop at the Laracon viewing party, I heard about Grafana . That seems like it could work pretty well, but I'm not sure how to import the custom log data into one of its sources.

So if anyone is familiar with Grafana, uses Splunk's free plan, or has alternate solutions to suggest, please let me know.