(This is part of an open ended series of posts where I write down random things I feel are sharable from the years of mailing lists I’ve not caught up on…)

I’m annoyed at all things programming this week, but this gets me all caught up on the Laravel News mailing list from July 2025 on.

Here is Part 1 and Part 2.

  • The Hidden Cost of MySQL Defaults in Laravel Apps – Sponsored-ish post, but good tips (and the sponsor does seem to have a cool little product.)
  • Controlling Factory Relationship Expansion in Laravel – Neat trick, but I feel like in order to make it work, you need to disable foreign keys in your database. Which just seems Not Awesome[tm] to my old school brain.
  • Wire:Live 2025 – Playlist of all the Wire:Live 2025 talks.
  • rector-laravel – I should run this against the Events In Plain Sight codebase. You know, in all my copious free time.
  • vantage – I’m pretty sure I like this more than Horizon for queue insights. But it would be even nicer if it integrated into Nova seamlessly. While yes, Nova is running as a sidecar, but then going to a page in there that looks and feels different is jarring. And just because it is an internal page doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be consistency. (And yes, they do provide programatic access in order to do this, but that’s not the point of this whinge.)
  • Introducing Mailviews Early Access – Stashing this for the ‘once I have some revenue and can spend on nice things’ pile.
  • Refine is Live Blade Editor for Laravel – Ugh. Coulda used this the other week when I could not for the life of me get a panel to expand the way I wanted.
  • Pest Adds withHost for Browser Testing Subdomains in Laravel – Part of me is sad that this is Playwright not WebDriver under the hood, but also, at this point, I am too old to care. Just drive the damn browser.
  • laravel-herd-worktree – Now that I’m using Herd, and, begrudgingly Claude Code, I think this is something I need to explore.