Laravel 9.0, weekly updates, and 🔥 tip

Laravel 9.0

Today we have a new major release - Laravel 9. This has been labeled a maintenance release as it bumps to PHP 8, Symfony 6, and Flysystem 3.

However, there are lots of changes and new features in Laravel 9. You may read about the highlights in the Release Notes.

Not included in the Release Notes are all the changes in Laravel 8.x over the last 15 months. These include things like anonymous migrations, guessing model factories, and changes to nearly every core file.

So whether you upgrade manually, run the Laravel 9.x Shift individually, or save with a Shifty Plan, be sure to upgrade to Laravel 9.

Weekly Journal

I continued to make some small tweaks to the Laravel 9.x Shift last week. However, for the most part, Laravel 9 hasn't made many additions since our beta release.

I also finalized the automated PRs for the most used Laravel packages. Over 200 in total. A few dozen have already been merged and even more coming across this morning.

Since everything was in a good place, I took some time over the weekend to finally build a Git script I always wanted - git trim. For years I used noisy, compound commands. But none of them really did all the cleanup I wanted. git trim is a single command to quickly remove merged, pruned, untracked, or stale branches.

Jess and I also record another episode for The BaseCode Podcast. We discuss the friction and motivation for rewriting Shift's testing layer.

Once everything is launched and stable for the Laravel 9 release, I'm going to hop in the car and head to a Laracon viewing party. It's a few hours drive. So it'll give me time to decompress and catch up on some podcasts.

🔥 Tip

Nuno tweeted something over the weekend which I echoed and want to reiterate here.

Don't worry so much about design patterns or best practices. YAGNI. This isn't to say you shouldn't learn them. More that you don't have to stress about applying them. Just write code. 🔥