freek.dev - all blogposts

A deep dive into Eloquent performance, from detecting N+1 queries to choosing aggregates, indexes, query plans, pagination, chunking, and transaction boundaries for a growing team dashboard.

Laravel queues are great out of the box, until they bite.

Transformers.js lets you run AI models directly in the browser without a backend, API keys, or an internet connection after the model is cached.

Split a task into reasoning and execution to get deterministic behaviour out of a non-deterministic model.

An interesting article on how PHP is used by the government.

In this article, we’ll build an AI-powered Slack bot with the Laravel AI SDK.

Tom Wilson reflects on what AI is changing for design engineers, and where human judgment still matters.

A deep dive into modular monoliths, from module APIs and database ownership to cross-module communication, architecture tests, incremental migration, and the signals that justify microservices.

A deep dive into immutability in PHP, from readonly properties and interior mutability to immutable value objects, collections, dates, cloning, boundaries, and testing.

We explain how Flare now uses OAuth to connect MCP clients, the CLI, and the API with scoped permissions instead of broad long-lived tokens.

A sharp look at Tailwind's default rem-based breakpoints, and the accessibility tradeoff they make.

We explain why Flare's old AI-generated solutions no longer fit the way developers debug with modern coding agents.

Michael explains why exit() can make parallel test workers crash without useful diagnostics, and why verbose flags do not help when the process dies outside PHPUnit's control.

Sebastian explains why Amp became his default coding harness, and why user experience now matters more to him than model churn.

A practical walkthrough for running Claude Code inside Docker's new sbx sandbox, with a custom PHP setup and extra tools for open source work.

Brent surveys the most notable additions coming in PHP 8.6, including partial function application, the new polling API, readonly property defaults, and several smaller improvements and deprecations.

Ankur Sethi argues that manually retyping LLM-generated code is a practical way to avoid cognitive debt.

An essay on how AI-assisted development turns engineers into full-time reviewers.

Brendt shares fresh Packagist-based PHP version stats for July 2026: PHP 8.4 is now the most-used version, while PHP 8.5 reached 16% adoption after six months.

Steve King builds a real order fulfilment flow to show how a workflow engine handles long-running processes in Laravel.