Book is done, baby here, fall is our busy season

Laravel: Up and Running is done! It's actually been done for a few weeks; it went out to the copy editors two weeks ago, and they gave me their review and I re-submitted two weeks ago. It's in the final build processes right now. O'Reilly is predicting end of October for the Ebook launch and early November for the print launch. I cannot wait!

My beautiful daughter graced us with her presence at the end of July, so I've been relatively quiet on the Internet. Between driving my son to and from school every day and taking care of my daughter, my free time (HA!) has gone down to basically negative numbers. But I'm slowly eking out time here and there to get back on the Internet.

Fall is when things get crazy at Tighten. We just hired two new amazing developers, Daniel Coulbourne and Logan Henson, and our workload is crazy even with two new developers shoring us up. I love it. This is my favorite time of the work year.

I won't be traveling to any conferences for the rest of this year. I do have a fun little project up my sleeve that I'll be recording for in January, so once that gets a little closer to reality I'll be sharing more. Unsurprisingly, it's me, teaching Laravel. Who would have guessed?

Finally, I've moved from Sendy to CampaignMonitor for these emails. I'm expecting that using CampaignMonitor will drop the effort it takes me to write a new email drastically, which means, wait for it, more frequent emails! I figured I'd catch you up on my life in this one, so if all goes well, let's expect the next newsletter to contain another one of my short essays about life, business, and whatever else.

Check out what I've been up to lately:

THE BLOG

• What's up with Laravel: Up and Running?
• Directory structure changes in Laravel 5.3
• Introducing Mailables in Laravel 5.3
• Introducing Laravel Passport
• Introducing Laravel Scout
• Routing changes in Laravel 5.3
• 5.3 feature announcement notes from Laracon
• Customizing pagination templates in Laravel 5.3
• Image dimension validation rules in Laravel 5.3
• Advanced operations with Collection::where in Laravel 5.3
• New JSON-column where() and update() syntax in Laravel 5.3
• The new cache() global helper in Laravel 5.3
• Customizing additional parameters in FirstOrCreate in Laravel 5.3
• The new $loop variable in Laravel 5.3

TIGHTEN BLOG

• MailThief by Tighten - a package for testing mail in Laravel

MEDIUM

• Please Remember My Black Son

FIVE-MINUTE GEEK SHOW

• 89 | Start preparing now for what you need then
• 88 | Someone is going to have to do the hard work to bring equality
• 87 | I don't think we mean the same thing when we say "remote"
• 86 | Why source diving is an undersung skill
• 85 | Planning makes better (meetings, podcasts, bizdev, interviews)