Mailing List Cleanup - Freek Van der Herten (Part 5)

(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…)

Here is 5th and final installment of Freek Van der Herten’s mailing list cleanup which covers 2025 to current.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 are, of course, also available.

• Easier endpoint tests with Policy::fake – I feel like this should get taught to Claude
• Preventing Destructive Commands from Running in Laravel – A) Don’t connect AI to production, B) I still think Laravel’s love of the CLI is one of the things preventing it from major adoption. (But it is a distant way away from general PHP prejudice.) AWS SSM Documents are an excellent antidote around this.
• API design note: Beware of adding an “Other” enum value – This feels like database nulls all over again.
• Five levels of handling images in Laravel – Largely for myself (but isn’t everything?) as I need to revisit how Events In Plain Sight manages images sooner than later.
• Pipe Operator – This is a nice bit of syntax sugar. Maybe I need to upgrade things to PHP 8.5.
• Stop Ignoring Important Returns with PHP 8.5’s #[\NoDiscard] Attribute – The evidence is mounting.
• Preventing scrollbar layout shifts – I’m kinda surprised that Tailwind doesn’t have this out of the box.
• Deferred Queue Driver in Laravel 12.35 – I personally like events+listeners to do this, but this is a nice little hack if you don’t want that overhead.
• Speed up your Livewire tests – Event In Plain Sight uses Livewire more and more. So something I might have to deal with eventually.
• Run seeders from migrations – This is another place where the CLI obsession comes into friction with the Enterprise. We had to at my last place move to migrations for seeding in production for auditing purpooses. The migrations basically just called the seeder. For data fix ones we timestamped them 50 years into the future to be very obvious that they were data not schema migrations.
• Chat with Your Documents: A Practical Guide to RAG Using the New Laravel AI SDK – I hate that the default for all tutorials is ‘chat’. But RAG systems are the killer app of AI.