Hey, friend!I... honestly don't know where January went. Was that maybe making up a little for how last March was the longest March ever? For how 2020 was the longest year ever? Who knows. I'm dedicating the next portion of my life to self care. You've probably seen me mention that here or there. I'm getting back into cycling (indoor and outdoor), buying weights so I can finally do Olympic lifts (deadlift, presses, squats, etc.) at home--something I've wanted for years but have just settled for going into the gym--and generally just trying to care for myself more. I'm even inching slowly toward getting a more normal amount of sleep every night! Along with all of this has come a much greater self-awareness for when I'm not able to keep up. I think a lot of people hit a wall this past month and, while hitting a wall we can't get past is bad, becoming aware of when we feel good and when we feel bad (and what makes one or the other more likely) is really, really valuable. I have extreme good days and extreme bad days much more than I had ever expected or have experienced in the past. Days when I buy a domain, start a new project, release a project, knock out 50 emails in a few hours, show up to my 1:1s invigorated, and make plans to stream and blog and teach. And then days when I want to lay down on the couch and do nothing, I'm legitimately terrified of my email and Slack and Twitter "inboxes", and where cleaning the dishes is a huge chore. If you have ever suffered from depression, this will sound familiar. This is what life was like during my most depressed days. But (thank God!) between therapy, self-care, and medication, I feel like my depression is under control... but I'm still seeing some of the same symptoms. Why? I think it's just freaking exhaustion--mental, emotional, physical. And I don't think it's just me. I think this past twelve-ish months has taken a huge toll on so many of us, and we don't yet know the full extent of the damage. So. The end goal of me blabbing here is: I encourage you to develop an increased amount of self-awareness, and I encourage you to respond to any awareness of difficulty with grace and kindness (to yourself!). And care. What else has been happening? A few quick updates: LaravelVersions.com As a company owner and a consultant I often need information about which version of Laravel is the latest, whether a given version is still receiving security fixes, and other similar timelines. But all of the information was never together in one place. So I made that place: https://laravelversions.com/ Code Style I've randomly spent a lot of time recently tweaking PHPCS, PHPCS-Fixer, Tlint, and other similar projects to get just the right setup for our projects. First I extracted our common files, many created by Tightenite Sara Bine, to a dedicated configs repo. But even that wasn't enough. So now I'm working on a little project called Duster, inspired by an idea from my friend Tom Witkowski, that installs PHP-CS, PHP-CS-Fixer, and Tlint, and then provides configuration files for each. It's not ready for the limelight yet but hopefully it will be soon. What Else? Links
Mattstauffer.com Tighten blog Laravel Podcast Popular Tweets
That's it for now! Until next time... Your friend, |