Hi there!

Check it out—I'm finally back in the driver's seat of my life (at least, more than I was before) and I'm ready to write. Ready to podcast. Ready to send you happy little newsletters full of nuggets of joy and possibly occasionally wisdom.

If you've missed out on what's been going on with me, here's the short of it: we had our second child just over a year ago and, just like our first, her sleep schedule is oppressively bad. I disappeared for a while (on purpose—you can hear me talk about it on The Laravel News Podcast Episode 42) but I'm back now!

I also struggled a bit with spam signups, so I've been bouncing between mail providers a bit. I'm settled now (thank you Campaign Monitor for keeping the spammers away) and ready to just write.

So, since it has been a long time, I won't link everything I've done, just a few highlights and then what I've been working on in the last few weeks.

Speaking

Early this spring I taught at Laracon Online about the container, one of the most important and least-understood components of Laravel. The videos are behind a paywall, but you can see my slides here: Mastering the Illuminate Container

Then I spoke at Laracon 2017, giving a talk called "Custom Laravel". You can see the slides here, but I've also built a web site showing the slides in a somewhat-more-accessible format: customlaravel.com

That's it for speaking this year. I turn down most speaking engagements while my kids are as young as my daughter is, but next year I'll start speaking out a bit more.

Podcasting

Both the Five-Minute Geek Show and the Laravel Podcast have been pretty quiet lately. My goal is to get the Five-Minute Geek Show back into a weekly rhythm as soon as I can. Here are a few of my latest episodes:

The Laravel Podcast has something new brewing, but I can't share about it quite yet. Make sure you're following the podcast on Twitter, as I hope to announce it next week.

Blogging

I wrote one really huge intro post to PWAs, or Progressive Web Apps, on the Tighten blog: A Brief Introduction to Progressive Web Apps (or PWAs)

I didn't write it, but Tighten published a fascinating post from our employee Benson Lee as he was quitting Tighten. I'd recommend it. How I Quit My Job At Tighten

Finally, I'm trying to finish out my Intro to Laravel 5.4 blog series so I can get started on Intro to Laravel 5.5. At first I thought it was going to be a drag, since everything is six months old. But it turns out there's some really great stuff that I haven't seen anyone else dig into, so I wrote up a few of my favorites:

I also wrote up a recap of the new Laravel 5.5 features announced at Laracon and a big introduction to Laravel Horizon.

Finally, I took and wrote up a survey about Laravel developers' must-have packages and wrote up some really cool new features in Lambo, the superpowered Laravel installer I created.

That's all for now!

Thanks for reading! As always, if there's anything else you'd like for me to be sending out in these emails, let me know. Until next time!

Your friend,
Matt Stauffer