Engineering
PHP, Laravel, queues and schemas — the unglamorous decisions that settle whether an app is still pleasant to work on in year three.
The N+1 you cannot see
Everyone knows to eager load. The queries that actually take sites down are the ones hiding in an accessor, a Blade partial, or a policy — and there is a one-line switch that finds all of them.
Queues are not optional
If your request handler calls somebody else’s API, you have already built a distributed system. The queue is how you stop their bad day from becoming your bad day.
Database indexes, explained with a phone book
Most slow queries are one index away from being fast. The reason people do not add it is that nobody ever explained what the index is actually doing.
PHP got good and nobody told you
If your mental image of PHP is from 2014, it is wrong in ways that would change your architecture. Here is what actually landed, and which parts change how you write code.