PHP profiling with Blackfire
Blackfire is a PHP profiler that allows you to inspect your app's performance. It's great for discovering what exactly is slowing down your application, or what is eating away precious memory. For my projects, ...
Jens Segers
Full stack developer with a passion for product development & technology. Engineering manager and Solution Architect at Lighthouse.
Vagrant manager
This week I discovered a small Vagrant utility for OSX that makes managing your Vagrant boxes really easy. Some may argue that Vagrant doesn't really need UI tool since the command line interface is so simple. ...
Laravel pagination with grouping and eager loading
I found myself in a bit of a strange situation when I was doing this query in Laravel:
Debugging Laravel
Often you will want to debug what is going on in the background of your Laravel application, by doing something like var_dump or dd . When I used to work on a lot of CodeIgniter projects, we always had this ...
Server provisioning with Chef and knife-solo
Configuration management tools are awesome, if you are still doing everything manually or with bash scripts, then check out my blog post on infrastructure as code . I use Chef as my provisioning tool of choice, ...
Laravel OAuth client
David Desberg, also known as Lusitanian, has created an awesome OAuth 1 and 2 client , so I decided to integrate it into Laravel. His library has support for 34 services, including all the mayor services like ...
Using Eloquent without Laravel
Not many people know this, but you can actually use the Laravel database component outside the Laravel framework (PyroCMS is actually using it in their CMS). This means you can use Eloquent in whatever project ...
Laravel route model binding is awesome
If you haven't looked at Laravel's route model binding, you should definitely do it. Model binding allows you to inject model instances into your routes. This way, route parameters will automatically be converted ...
Laravel collections are awesome
The Collection class in Laravel is really awesome. In Laravel, database query results are returned as a collection object, that "wraps" the actual results. The class contains a lot of handy methods that ...
Using Guard to manage assets
This blog post is outdated; I ditched guard a long time ago in favor of Gulp
Installing the PHP mcrypt extension on OSX 10.9
This blog post is outdated, please read this updated blog post .
Combining Laravel and MongoDB
Unfortunately, Laravel 4 has no native support for Mongo databases. Once I started searching for open source Mongo packages on GitHub, I was disappointed that not one package was able to seamlessly integrate a ...
Integrating Rollbar in Laravel
Recently I discovered rollbar.com , which is a remote error logging system that allows you to collect errors and logs from multiple applications into a single dashboard. It will send you notifications if certain ...
Deploying websites with Git (and Composer)
I have been using Git to deploy my websites for quite some time now. It is so much easier than having to drag 'n drop files with FTP or SFTP. When I switched to Laravel 4 earlier this year, I updated the ...
Setting up your own VPN server with PPTP on Ubuntu or Debian
I often connect to my own VPN server because of ports that are blocked on public networks, or if I want to access something on my home network. I use a PPTP server because OSX and Windows support it right ...