Laravel 9.25, weekly updates, and 🔥 tip

Laravel 9.25

Couple new features this week, so we bump to Laravel 9.25. Here are the highlights:

  • Add NotificationFake::assertCount() in #43659
  • Allow chunkById on arrays, as well as models in #43666
  • Add whenNotExactly() to Stringable in #43700
  • Add ability to mass update timestamps with Model::query()->touch() in #43665

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 we were traveling, so I didn't code much. Most of my computer time was spent answering support emails. I block off about 30 minutes each morning and evening to get back to inbox zero. Of course, if something pressing comes in during the day, I answer it.

I had a Human Shift come in at the end of the week. This time upgrading a Laravel application from 5.4 to 9.x. I finished running the Shifts. This week I'll refactor the customizations and squash any bugs.

Tomorrow I'll resume my weekly Wednesday live stream and continue developing my dynamic queue workers.

Otherwise, this week will be more of the same - actioning out support emails to continually improve the automation. Sounds meh, but I love it.

🔥 Tip

Since I didn't code much last week, I stumbled into another Twitter conversation about code comments. It's no secret I believe in removing comments. In fact it's one of the BaseCode practices.

I agree with the original tweet that comments have their place. Laravel is a shining example of where comments do improve the maintainability of the code.

Where I disagree is in categorization and scope. First, I don't consider these code comments. I consider these documentation. A docblock of sorts.

Second, there are very few projects that display such commenting. Outside of Laravel, I could only think of projects like Unix or Git.

100% of other projects do not comment their code with the level of care and discipline. As such, the code is more likely to benefit from removing the comment and refactoring the code to be more human readable.