Laravel 8.75, weekly updates, and 🔥 tip

Laravel 8.75

We get a minor version bump to Laravel 8.75. Here are the highlights:

  • Fix AsEncrypted traits not respecting nullable columns in #39848
  • Display exception message with assertRedirect in #39841
  • Add Conditionable trait to ComponentAttributeBag in #39861
  • Add proper paging offset when possible to SQL Server in #39863
  • Add on-demand gate authorization in #39789
  • Add Countable interface to factory sequence in #39907
  • Add fulltext index for PostgreSQL in #39875
  • Add Arr::filterNulls() in #39921

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

I spent the first half of last week working on the massive 7500 word post. Unfortunately, following this really awesome milestone I had a bit of an emergency. I suppose life comes with the Yin and the Yang. As a result, I didn't get to work on Shift much last week.

I did tweak the new in initializer tasks for PHP 8.1 based on last week's code snippet. Jess also completed her enums task which converts the spatie/enums package to native enums in PHP 8.1.

We released all 4 of these tasks for PHP 8.1 Monday. These are available through the cloud-based Workbench, as well as version 0.7.2 of the Workbench desktop app. So if you're already running PHP 8.1, definitely check these out.

Over the weekend I built a quick task to Fix PHPUnit methods. Many applications still have the incorrect visibility, casing, or return type for these methods. In fact, I received two support emails relating to this last week.

Although the recent Laravel upgrade Shifts automate these changes, it made sense to make this a standalone task. So, this is another free task to help keep your projects modern.

This week I am live streaming to build a new Laravel application from scratch. This is mostly for Ashley. She was a bit skeptic when I said, "I could build that." So now I'm going to prove I can build it. 😅

We head out for vacation this Thursday. I'll be back next Tuesday. December is a slower month for Shift. So there's not much going on right now. Jess and I will likely spend the rest of the month refactoring core Shift code in preparation for Laravel 9. We'll also focus on some of the outstanding issues for the Workbench.

🔥 Tip

Something that came up a few times this past week is my workflow. I like to keep the keyboard moving. I don't let myself worry about the implementation details. At least not for the first pass.

I posted a code snippet on Twitter when fixing a Shift bug yesterday. It's nasty. Terrible names. Temporary variables. Simple debugging with print_r. Whatever. I got it working.

So as a general coding tip this week, keep the keyboard moving. Don't worry about naming, design patterns, or tech stack at first. Just spike on the code. Prove your idea. Make the tests pass. You can refactor later (or not). 🔥