Hey, friend!

The kids' school is over for the year. They're off at Harry Potter World with their mom, and I'm anticipating hearing all about it when they get home; my main hope was that neither of them got RSV, or the flu, or COVID before the trip, and they're both sickness-free, so I'm sighing a huge sigh of relief.

My Christmas shopping is done. I'll start wrapping gifts tonight, before the kids arrive from their mom's house Christmas afternoon. I'll plan and shop for my Christmas dinner menu Saturday.

Tighten is wrapping up our year; we're officially off starting this Friday, but quite a few folks, including myself, took some time off to have a longer period off this week. I set Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday this week aside to try to work on the third edition of my book (Laravel: Up and Running).

A lot has happened this year. To the world, to my country, politically, personally, at work. Some of it was good. Some of it was awful. I know I grew a lot in my ability to interact with things difficult and painful and unexpected and unavoidable, and I watched a lot of people I love do the same--experience things we never hoped to experience and dig deep inside ourselves, or in our circles of support, or in podcasts and movies and literature, to figure out how to get by.

I don't have any deep thoughts or advice for you as we approach the end of another year of pandemic and social and political unrest, but once again I have a wish for you:

I wish, I pray, that you have a break from your stress, from your anxiety, from your worries, this coming week. I hope for peaceful and joyful times with your family, or alone, or with your friends. I hope you take a break from work, from pressure, from whatever makes your life feel like some times it's a little too much to bear, and you just rest.

I wish you cookies, snuggles, movies, naps, or whatever else it is that gives you joy and peace. I'll see you next year, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready to take on a new year.

What Else?

Tighten Blog

Tighten YouTube

Ben Holmen: Building With The TALL Stack (and Tighten)

Links

Open AI PHP: add artificial intelligence in your project

Popular Tweets

Symfony/Laravel folks: If I'm binding a bunch of commands in a single app, is there an easy way to run a bit of code for every command just before the body of the command? Basically I want to do something the (OutputInterface $output) at the top of each command, but it's ugly. (Tweet) (image)
Working on a blog post with @JustSteveKing about how we both code (and how different our styles are!) I think y'all are going to love this. (Tweet)
I've been working slowly on Laravel Valet v4 for the last few weeks. So far there are no new features, just a ton of internal code re-writing to make it much easier to maintain and extend. But... while I'm at it... any feature or syntax requests? (Tweet)
I’ve gotten a lot of requests to support Valet for Linux & Windows. I’m not saying they’re getting official support, but I may be able to do something in Valet 4 that makes it easy for those maintainers. Are the main options the Cpriego Linux and Cretuesebiu Windows forks? (Tweet)

That's it for now!

Until next time...

Your friend,
Matt Stauffer