January 3, 2015
Laravel 5 Eloquent attribute casting is awesome
Attribute casting is a new feature of Laravel's Eloquent model that was recently added without really getting much attention (yet). So what does it do, and how can you use it?
Jens Segers
Full stack developer with a passion for product development & technology. Founder of SportShots.ai and Engineering manager and Solution Architect at Lighthouse.com.
December 14, 2014
Perceptual image hashes
I recently discovered perceptual image hashes when I was in charge of removing thumbnails from a large set of images. Perceptual hashes are a completely different concept compared to the usual cryptographic hashing ...
November 29, 2014
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, ...
November 11, 2014
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. ...
September 22, 2014
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:
July 2, 2014
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 ...
June 23, 2014
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, ...
June 20, 2014
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 ...
June 10, 2014
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 ...
June 1, 2014
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 ...
May 29, 2014
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 ...
November 10, 2013
Using Guard to manage assets
This blog post is outdated; I ditched guard a long time ago in favor of Gulp
November 5, 2013
Installing the PHP mcrypt extension on OSX 10.9
This blog post is outdated, please read this updated blog post .
August 20, 2013
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 ...
August 9, 2013
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 ...