Laravel 9.7, weekly updates, and a 🎻

Laravel 9.7

More features in this week's release of Laravel 9.7. Here are highlights:

  • Allow whereBelongsTo to accept Collection #41733
  • Add whenNotNull method to Resource #41769
  • Add whereIn route parameter constraint method #41794
  • Add squish to Stringables #41791
  • Add whereJsonContainsKey to query builder #41802
  • Enable batch jobs delay for database queue #41758
  • Enable dispatchAfterResponse for batch #41787
  • Allow cleanup of databases when using parallel tests #41806

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 Jess and I had our final pairing session. If you didn't see the announcement, Jess will be joining the Laravel team later this month.

We spent some time improving the Tailwind Linter by adding the Tailwind Prettier plugin. This sorts classes within your templates based on Tailwind's recommendations.

Of course, the challenge was Blade files. Again, there is no Blade parser. So the work we did on some of the recent Workbench tasks came in handy.

In addition, we didn't want to apply all of Prettier's formatting to your templates. So we had to do some intermediate parsing to manipulate only the class references.

This still needs some tweaking to handle all sorts of templates, like Vue, React, etc. So I'll continue to work on it later this week.

This week I'm also finishing up some Human Shifts as well as several pairing sessions to help a team increase their test coverage before upgrading their Laravel apps.

Closing

Jess and I have been pairing for a few years now. In the beginning, she worked on tasks for laravelshift.com. In recent years, she's partnered with me to build the Tailwind Shifts as well as the Workbench.

While I'm sure we'll pair for fun from time to time, I'll miss our weekly pairing sessions. But I'm excited for her to join the Laravel team. Dare I say proud.

After playing back my interview on Pushing Boulders, I realized I'm no longer interested in expanding Shift. To the point, I don't think I'll replace Jess.

Shift is in a sweet-spot where I can manage the current services while still having a good work/life balance. My focus will be to continue to improve existing services, rather than trying to enter new markets.

Shift is intertwined with Laravel and its community. I'm more than happy with that. I'm in it 'til the end. 🎻