Hi there!

Do you remember me? Your buddy, Matt? I sent you an email about a year ago saying "I'm back!" ... turns out... I wasn't quite back yet.

Here's a quick update of what's been keeping me busy for the last year. If you're new to the newsletter, don't worry, they're not normally this long. 😅

Speaking

My daughter is about to turn two, and my son is about to turn six, so I'm stepping back into speaking a bit (meaning: we sleep a bit more than we did last year).

I spoke at Laracon Online this spring about Laravel for Fun (and Profit); the gist of the talk is that I want us to re-discover the fun of programming. The video isn't online yet, but you can see my slides here.

I spoke at the inaugural Laravel Live UK about Laravel and the Enterprise, which is something I've gotten super interested in lately. It wasn't recorded, but I expect to try to give it again at another conference some time this year. You can see the slides here, and I started a small web site where I'm collecting useful information and also asking for input and questions about enterprise Laravel: enterpriselaravel.com.

I'll be speaking at Laracon US in July and Laracon AU in October about Patterns That Pay Off, a new talk about patterns (design, organizational, relational, etc.) I've seen bring tangible benefit to my company and our clients.

Podcasting

The Five-Minute Geek Show is on a bit of a hiatus. I did a special Christmas episode with my kids, but I sort of ran out of interesting things to say on my own. What I've really wanted to replace it with is other people being interesting.

When Taylor and Jeffrey and I realized we needed a bit of a break from the Laravel Podcast in the format it was in, I had the idea to go interview all kinds of interesting people from around the Laravel world. So, I've spent that time interviewing everyone from the big names (Taylor Otwell, Adam Wathan, Jeffrey Way) to the folks you may never have heard of, but whose stories are incredible. The most common response I hear is: "I had never heard of that person but now I want to be their best friend."

I'm calling this "Laravel Podcast: Season 3", and here are the interviews I've done so far:

Open Source

A few conversations on Twitter have led me to want to remind people about Torch, my open-source project teaching you how to use Laravel's individual components in non-Laravel projects.

I made a few quick proof-of-concept apps for conference talks: blink-my-lights is how people can visit blink.mattstauffer.com and press buttons to blink a physical light in my office. Podcast-subscriber makes it easy for people to subscribe to my son's podcast via SMS or Facebook Messenger.

Tighten has a few great open source things going on. We continue to maintain Collect, a Laravel-collections-only subsplit. Daniel Coulbourne made a package called Ziggy, which makes it easy to export your routes and their aliases from Laravel to your JavaScript code. Logan Henson made a linter for Blade called Tlint. Caleb Porzio made a package called Parental, to make Single-Table Inheritance work better in Eloquent.

And I've been spending a bit of time on Jigsaw, Tighten's Laravel-Blade-based static site generator, lately. Keith Damiani is the amazing lead who's led the charge to make it incredibly more flexible. Then, I want to see it become easier and better-known.

The first piece we launched toward that goal was Built With Jigsaw, a gallery of sites built using Jigsaw (and links to each site's code, if it's open source). I have two other really cool Jigsaw-based projects coming out soon--keep your eyes peeled for them.

Blogging

It's been a year... but it's been a pretty chill year on the blogging front, to be honest. Let's see what we have.

Aug 18, 2017: Real-time (automatic) Façades in Laravel 5.4
Jan 21, 2018: Controlling LIFX lights with your (Laravel or other) web applications
Apr 12, 2018: Matt's Magical Finance Plan for 20- and 30-somethings
May 14, 2018: Refactoring Vue: Cleaning Up a List of Posts With Better Component Splitting and More ES6
May 18, 2018: Adding an Auto-Generated Sitemap to Your Jigsaw-based Static Site
May 21, 2018: Creating Multiple Windows for Slack on Your Mac Using Single-Site Browsers
Jun 5, 2018: How to count the number of lines of code in a PHP project
Jun 6, 2018: Enterprise Laravel Help Me: White-Labeled Clothing Stores
Jul 13, 2018: Testing with a MySQL 5.7 Database On Codeship

See that "Enterprise Laravel Help Me" post? I put up a "Help me with my Enterprise Laravel issue" form up on my site, and I'll do my best to answer any questions people are having with working with Laravel in the enterprise. Got questions? Hit me up!

Laravel: Up and Running 2nd edition, and a new project

I'm more than halfway done with the second edition of Laravel: Up and Running. We'll be done with the 2nd edition by the time Laravel 5.7 comes out in August, and then update it for 5.7 as fast as possible and then launch! You can already pre-order it on Amazon; don't worry about the 2019 launch date, that's just from someone's nervous fingers at O'Reilly.

I also have figured out the next big project I'll be working on after Laravel: Up and Running is released. I'll be dropping more hints in the newsletter, but here's your first hint:

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