Hey, friend!

Last week, I texted my friend Leah:

Leah is an interior designer who's been helping me fix up my house. I have absolutely no interior design skills, and I've been trying to set up my first solo house over the past year, and let's just say I'm very grateful for her help. I mean, look at this freaking amazing render she made to plan my living room:

But this new idea I sent her—a picture of Ted, next to The Mister Rogers—shows you just how much I've fallen in love with the fictional character Ted Lasso and the show named after him.

I do aspire to be like Ted, although not quite as much as I do Mister Rogers; but with Ted, I also identify with him. Ted and I have a lot of similarities, good and bad, and have had some similar life situations that make the show especially meaningful to me.

I would write more in-depth about those similarities and situations, but I don't want to spoil the show for those who haven't seen it. However, there's one absolutely endearing aspect of Ted that I think I can share without spoiling anything:

What I love about Ted Lasso is that Ted believes in the people around him, consistently chooses hope over cynicism, and wants to give each person an opportunity to shine and get credit for what they do well.

Imagine that: Hope. Belief. Sharing the shine. Building others up. Not defining them by their mistakes, but their potential.

And, of course, the show itself is brilliant in part because it's not dark, but it's also not unrealistically positive. Bad things happen. People make bad choices. Ted's optimism is not always the best answer. But the picture it paints of the world, and people, and relationships, gives me hope. The same type of hope I hope (ha!) to share with everyone around me.

Like Ted, and like Mister Rogers, I'm also trying to spread hope and love and joy. To that end, I'm starting another podcast!

A new podcast, you say?? Way to bury the lede!

Well crap. I meant to start with this, but I just got so excited about Ted!

I'm starting a new podcast called Things Worth Learning.

You can follow the show today at @worthlearningfm on Twitter,  and it'll show up on all the major podcast networks and its own web site soon.

This new show will be the best of the Laravel Podcast and the Five-Minute Geek Show, inspired by great existing shows such as Hanselminutes, Full Stack Radio, and even Dirty Jobs, but with my own particular spin.

On each episode, I'll invite a fascinating human being I've had the chance to meet in any particular part of my life. I'll ask them a few short questions, but the primary bulk of the episode will be this fascinating person talking about something they're deeply passionate about. You and I will get to learn together, about—well, whatever this person loves. Tech, sure, but also fishing, or sewing, or graffiti, or black cats, or knife carving, or whatever else.

I'm super excited to record this show and to share it with you. I'm grateful to meet so many incredible people, and their interests and expertise extend beyond the topics of the Laravel Podcast. With this new show? The sky's the limit.

Do you have any particularly fascinating people you think I should bring on the show? Respond to this email and let me know!

What Else?

Links

• Getting started with Laravel Spotlight
• This should be a must! to have a cleaner Laravel middleware API
  the package: https://github.com/timacdonald/has-parameters
  the argument... https://timacdonald.me/rethinking-laravels-middleware-argument-api/
• APIs as infrastructure: future-proofing Stripe with versioning
• Use Blink to execute something once and only once — Sebastian De Deyne
• Generators over arrays - Doeke Norg
• Improve code readability by refactoring if blocks to dedicated classes - Freek Van der Herten's blog on PHP, Laravel and JavaScript
• hotmeteor/regex: A set of ready-made regex helper methods for use in your Laravel application.

Popular Tweets

• The further I get into season 1 of Ted Lasso, the more I am convinced not only that Ted Lasso is my new best friend, but also that the writers somehow sneaked into my life and my emotions and thought they would write *exactly* the show I needed. What the hell.

• I know it's gross to RT things praising you, but I must mention: the thing that finally got me to watch Ted Lasso after so many people recommended it was @rissa_bubbles telling me Ted & I are very similar... these notes absolutely going into my "rainy day encouragement" folder

• Ted Lasso is my new best friend.

• If you like Marvel at all, especially if you plan to watch the forthcoming movies, I highly, highly recommend you watch Loki.

• I have been super excited to dig into Larastan and PHPStan and this is the only thing that has kept me back. This is great news!

• I've said it before and I'll say it again: every time a package we make at Tighten (in this case, Quicksand) is no longer necessary because its functionality is available in the core, that's a huge win for everyone! Super glad to see this happen!

That's it for now!

Until next time...

Your friend,
Matt Stauffer