Freek Van der Herten
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freek.bsky.social
Freek Van der Herten
@freek.bsky.social
PHP developer at Spatie, built Mailcoach, ‪myray.app‬, ohdear.app and flareapp.io, blogging at ‪freek.dev‬, organising fullstackeurope.com
🔗 Eval Testing LLMs in PHPUnit
Eval Testing LLMs in PHPUnit
Prompts break silently. Here's how to catch regressions with PHPUnit evals before your users do.
joshhornby.com
January 5, 2026 at 1:42 PM
🔗 Build an AI-Powered Drawing Guessing Game with Laravel, Prism, and HTML Canvas
Build an AI-Powered Drawing Guessing Game with Laravel, Prism, and HTML Canvas
Learn how to build an AI-powered drawing guessing game. In this little app, users will draw anything they like, and the AI will try to guess what it is.
tighten.com
December 30, 2025 at 1:31 PM
🔗 Partial Function Application is coming in PHP 8.6
Partial Function Application is coming in PHP 8.6
Partial Function Application in PHP 8.6 will let you write a “pre‑configured” callable by calling a function with some arguments and using placeholders for the rest.
www.amitmerchant.com
December 29, 2025 at 11:56 AM
Reposted by Freek Van der Herten
We're almost ready to sign off for the year. It's been a productive and exciting year for us. If you're interested, you can read our year-end review email here: spatie.mailcoach.app/webview/camp.... Wishing you happy holidays from everyone at Spatie!
December 19, 2025 at 12:58 PM
Reposted by Freek Van der Herten
📢 Sponsor Announcement!

We’re excited to welcome Ray by @spatie.be as a Gold Sponsor for #LaraconIN 2026.

Debug Laravel faster with Ray. Beautiful UI for inspecting variables, queries, mails and much more! myray.app
December 12, 2025 at 6:08 AM
🔗 Laravel and Traefik: Dynamic Configuration for Effortless Multi-Domain Management
Laravel and Traefik: Dynamic Configuration for Effortless Multi-Domain Management
Streamline dynamic multi-domain routing in Laravel with Traefik by serving YAML via the HTTP provider for automated, secure, and scalable configuration management. Ideal for Laravel developers and DevOps teams who want to eliminate bulky static files and improve maintainability.
coz.jp
December 11, 2025 at 1:17 PM
🔗 A Production-Ready Laravel Architecture with Traefik and FrankenPHP
A Production-Ready Laravel Architecture with Traefik and FrankenPHP
A practical guide to deploying a high-performance Laravel stack using Octane, FrankenPHP, and a fully automated Docker Compose workflow.
coz.jp
December 9, 2025 at 1:05 PM
🔗 How do arrays work?
How do arrays work?
This post dives into the technical details of the array and figure out how you might invent the array yourself.
nan-archive.vercel.app
December 5, 2025 at 2:00 PM
🔗 The $1,000 AWS mistake
The $1,000 AWS mistake
A cautionary tale about AWS VPC networking, NAT Gateways, and how a missing VPC Endpoint turned S3 data transfers into an expensive lesson.
www.geocod.io
December 4, 2025 at 1:58 PM
Reposted by Freek Van der Herten
In space, no one can hear you scream, but you can hear us say Ray lifetime licenses are back for a limited time starting NOW!

Don’t miss your chance to grab Ray at a stellar price, just in time for the upcoming release of Ray 3.0.
November 28, 2025 at 8:28 AM
🔗 Build Your Own Private, Self-Hosted AI Applications with Ollama & Laravel
Build Your Own Private, Self-Hosted AI Applications with Ollama & Laravel
Imagine your team wants to bring AI into their workflow to automate routine tasks, extract insights from data, assist with content creation, or improve customer support. Smart move!
tighten.com
November 26, 2025 at 1:21 PM
Reposted by Freek Van der Herten
And we're off! From Nov 24 to Dec 1, get 30% off all Spatie courses and products. Check out all the deals at spatie.be/products, and grab yourself a few courses (for some light holiday reading?), or some Laravel components for your next (awesome!) project.
November 24, 2025 at 9:14 AM
🔗 How to use Flexible Caching in Laravel | Tutorial | Quick Win Wednesday #QWW
How to use Flexible Caching in Laravel | Tutorial | Quick Win Wednesday #QWW
In this episode of the Quick Win Wednesday series, I'll have a look at how to use flexible caching in Laravel. A great way to avoid unhappy users who'll hit invalid cache.
youtu.be
November 21, 2025 at 1:15 PM
🔗 Stopping Laravel SQL Injection with sole()
Stopping Laravel SQL Injection with sole()
While parameterized queries are the preferred method, sole() adds an extra layer of protection when using raw queries, especially when only one record should match.
aaronsaray.com
November 19, 2025 at 1:54 PM
🔗 The effects of the Cloudflare outage on Oh Dear
The effects of the Cloudflare outage on Oh Dear
Mattias shares his insights into what we saw during the outage and our lessons learned.
ohdear.app
November 19, 2025 at 10:14 AM
🔗 What's new in PHP 8.5
What's new in PHP 8.5
PHP 8.5 includes the pipe operator, clone with, a new URI parser, and more.
stitcher.io
November 18, 2025 at 1:53 PM
🔗 Improving unit test run time in a Laravel modular monolith
Improving unit test run time in a Laravel modular monolith
Using Laravel’s new traits, WithCachedRoutes and WithCachedConfig, you can significantly reducing test run times.
cosmastech.com
November 17, 2025 at 1:56 PM
We just launched Performance Monitoring in Flare! 🚀

Catch errors and performance issues in your Laravel and PHP apps, all from one platform, at no extra cost. Read on why this a big step for Flare 👇
November 12, 2025 at 9:19 AM
🔗 Creating custom Facade fakes in Laravel
Creating custom Facade fakes in Laravel
Adding `fake()` methods to your custom facades in applications and packages can provide some nice DX and APIs.
ryangjchandler.co.uk
November 6, 2025 at 1:32 PM
💌 I’ve just sent out a new edition of my newsletter on Laravel, PHP and all things web.

Read it here (and subscribe should you like it and want to receive the next one in your mailbox)

freek-dev.mailcoach.app/archive/4879...
freek.dev newsletter #192 | freek.dev newsletter
Every month I send out a newsletter containing lots of interesting stuff for the modern PHP developer. Expect quick tips, links to interesting tutorials, opinions and packages. Because I work with La...
freek-dev.mailcoach.app
October 29, 2025 at 10:59 AM