Hi there!

I know it's only been two months. Our history dictates I should wait another year or two.

But I have some exciting things!

FieldGoal launch! WOO WOO!

A few years ago we put up a beta of "FieldGoal", a forms-as-a-service tool primarily targeted at folks who need to add forms to their static sites. We let it languish in un-publicized beta for several years, but a few months ago we picked it back up to add Zapier integration and a fresh new design.

Today we're finally going to launch it: FieldGoal is live and ready for action! Check it out today for your static sites or anything else that needs a form backend.

As a fun aside, if you saw my poll about who should be the next guest on the Laravel podcast (it's offline now), I built that with Fieldgoal and another project we just built but haven't publicized yet, easy-embeddable-polls.

Book

I talked in the last email about my book, Laravel: Up and Running. As of this morning, I have one chapter left, chapter 12 (the testing chapter... it's the big beast, because it's complex and needs to be re-written from scratch 😳).

I hope I can get it done by the end of this weekend (!!) and then all that remains is implementing any changes requested by the tech reviewers and my editor and then it'll be off to the publisher!

Amazon right now says it'll deliver in April 2019, which is stupid and wrong and a result of a trigger-happy O'Reilly employee who is not my favorite person right now. I don't know exactly when it'll publish, but I'm hoping for end of 2018. It's close! Woo woo!

Nova Packages

Laravel Nova, the admin-panel builder from Laravel, released earlier than expected (read my quick writeup), and as a result a lot of my free time has gone into building NovaPackages.com, Tighten's package/plugin repository for third-party Nova packages.

We currently have 162 packages listed which have been downloaded 58,036 times, and there are new packages being added every day. It's been a ton of fun to build it and to continue thinking creatively about how it can best serve the community.

Podcasts

I recorded a new Five Minute Geek Show! It's called How We Set Our Prices. Honestly, it feels good to start sharing again.

I'm thinking about whether I want to rename the show or make a new one with a bit more freedom to do interviews and other things that take more than five(ish) minutes. I'm not sure. I'll keep thinking about it.

Similarly, it's time for the Laravel Podcast's season three to wind down. I have three more interviews left and then it's going to go on pause for a bit while I think about what's next. I have some ideas but I want to talk through them with Taylor and give them a bit of space to breathe. I'll let you know as soon as I know what's next!

Other Tighten stuff

Tighten has another dev battle coming up soon, and we just announced we'll be sponsoring VueVixens and diversity sponsorships at VueConf Toronto (as well as sending several members of our team).

And finally, once my book is done, I hope to do some more live streaming. I'm not the only one at Tighten who's doing live streaming, so be sure to subscribe to the Tighten Twitch page.

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