Hey, friend!

I had a topic in mind for this newsletter, but it has to do with a difficult mental health situation I had yesterday, and to be honest, I'm just sort of tired of sharing the negative things every time. I don't know if that's the right feeling/response, but it is how I feel.

Let's just leave it at this: yesterday I had a very confusing physical, mental, and emotional experience that I realized afterwards was the precursor to a panic attack but which never turned into a panic attack. It wasn't great, but it was much better than a panic attack, so, yay? Don't worry, I have a great therapist & a great psychiatrist and we're just switching medicines right now so things get wonky while you change meds.

Here's what I want to talk about instead: Happy shit. Stuff that's been great this past month. Here's a completely inexhaustive list:

• Disney's Encanto, especially the main character
• Seal Team (the movie, not the show)--it wasn't a great movie but there's a Seal, voiced by Seal, named Seal Seal, and a dolphin, named Dolph, voice by Dolph Lundgren, and the main boot camp instructor type character was voiced by JK Simmons
• One of my friends randomly brought me donuts two days ago and the kids and I finished the entire half dozen in one day
• Yoga With Adriene just released another 30-day free course on YouTube... I'm an on-and-off Yoga practitioner but I love Yoga With Adriene. The most approachable and normal yoga instructor ever
• The Moana soundtrack. It never gets old.
• Tighten's #question-of-the-day Slack channel. Tighten Apprentice Programmer Rissa Jackson had the idea to ask (and others ask sometimes too) a question every day that prompts fun conversation. Today's is "What song always makes you feel like either a) dancing or b) singing along?", and yesterday's (which prompted a TON of great conversation) was "You are on a deserted island. You can pick 5 "foods" that renew forever. What 5 do you pick?" The word "Soylent" was involved in one of the answers, so you can get a sense of our collective sense of humor there.
• My son's officially become a soccer addict. He watches soccer videos on YouTube, plays soccer video games, kicks the soccer ball around in every free second, and asked for soccer stuff for Christmas (his favorite was likely either a full Messi outfit or the FIFA 21 game for our Switch). He's in soccer camp every day after school and will be starting his first "academy" in a few weeks, which means more frequent and more intense practice. I love his joy in this.
• New friends. I've made a lot, in Atlanta, in the last two months, and it was much needed.
• Exercise
• Mindfulness meditation
• Sweet potatoes
• Decent decaf coffee
• My kids back in physical school
• Tycho, whose music is getting me through a big writing project I'm working on that will be announced at/around Laracon
• Snuggles from my kids

What Else?

Tighten Blog

• How to Train Your Keyboard

Tighten YouTube

• Kristin Collins: My Favorite Dev Tools
• Andrew Morgan: Train Your Keyboard

Matt Stauffer YouTube

• Making Jewelry With Silver, with Aisha Blake
• Comics, Culture, and Heritage, with Beserat Debebe

Links

• Troy Hunt: Beg Bounties
• Adam Wathan on Twitter: "Strongest argument I've come up with for using top margins exclusively instead of bottom margins... When using top margins, the class is in the same spot in the file as the actual gap is in the UI 👌 https://t.co/kHcBNwqkuH" / T
• Getting Started With PHP in 2022 | Laravel News (oved on to other languages and want to pick it up again or tho)
• Provide Country and Other Locale Data in Laravel | Laravel News
• Tobias Petry on Twitter: "⚡️ Database Tip Sometimes you have very complex queries involving multiple calculation steps. Instead of nesting queries or doing it in application code you can use Common Table Expressions (CTE) to refine your data in every
• Laravel: Asynchronous and concurrent HTTP requests | Laravel HTTP Client | Medium | Medium
• Using Digital Ocean Spaces with Laravel 8 | Light-it
• How to update large data in Laravel
• Efficient Distance Querying in MySQL - Aaron Francis
• Faking HTTP requests in Laravel - Freek Van der Herten's blog on PHP, Laravel and JavaScript
• Avoid describing your data multiple times in a Laravel app using laravel-data - Freek Van der Herten's blog on PHP, Laravel and JavaScript
• Generate Intervals of Time With the Laravel Hours Helper | Laravel News

Things Worth Learning

• Making Jewelry With Silver, with Aisha Blake
• Culture, Comics, and Heritage, with Beserat Debebe

Popular Tweets

• About 1/3(?) of these are misconceptions, but the rest are very good summaries of some of the big and concerning downsides of the NFT world as it currently exists. (Tweet)(Link & Thread)
• I've been hearing about bell hooks for years but only just picked up one of her books for the first time about 2mo ago, "All About Love." I'm only a few chapters in because it's so freaking deep and impactful I have to move through it *very* slowly. Couldn't recommend it more. (Tweet)
• I want to publicly thank @driesvints for taking over management of the issues on @laravelphp Valet. It's made my job maintaining the project *so* much easier. (Tweet)
• Wouldn’t it be nice to have an API you could use to figure out when any given PHP release is going to expire? Well, friendly Tightenite @fax_blaster made one just for you! Plus, it hosts the visual depreciation chart so it’s easier to find. https://phpreleases.com (Tweet)(Quote Retweet)
  • By the way, this is @fax_blaster's first big public project she's released, so make sure to show her some love for the hard work she put in on this project. Super proud and impressed with her initiative and hard work! (Tweet)(Quote Retweet)
• One of my best friends, @tubbystaste, just got featured in @eaterchicago for her Jamaican-inspired Vegan cookies! Check it out and maybe get your family (or yourself?) some this holiday season! (Tweet)(Link)
• I fixed this sign for programmers (Tweet)(Image)

That's it for now!

Until next time...

Your friend,
Matt Stauffer