Segfault #6 – Speaking at Laracon, Product Validation, Gifts for you 🎉
Hello Friends 👋🏻
Welcome to the sixth edition of the Segfault newsletter.
It’s good to be back after so many months on the hiatus — I had to go through some soul-crushing experiences in my personal life and some of those have fundamentally altered the way I think about life. BTW, I just turned 40 this September, yay! 🎉
Amidst the chaos, one thing stands out as a professional achievement: being able to speak at Laracon IN 2023. It was such a fun event, thanks to the amazing team behind it. I got to meet the Laravel core team and make some friends.
I delivered a fast-paced talk on Creating a Reporting Builder for Laravel. I showed a proof-of-concept on how easily one can build reports without sweat and tears. I also showed them a glimpse of the (unreleased) landing page of a Report Builder product I am working on.
The topic resonated well with quite a few people from the audience and they came up to me after the session to share their interest. I was overwhelmed with joy listening to their feedback. It also gave me some kind of validation about my product idea 😌
PS. Interested to hear more about the reporting product? Hit that reply button!
👓 Recommended Readings
I read quite a few great articles over the last few months, so it’s difficult to pick only 3 from them. Nevertheless, here are my top 3 picks for you:
How To Be Successful – In this 5-year-old blog post, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has shared 13 impeccable traits that would set someone up for above-average success. We all know some of the traits (“focus”, “work hard”, etc.) but there are some good ones that are not get brought up every day. It is a good piece worth coming back to every couple of months.
The crippling problem of being able to build whatever you want – In this thought-provoking article by Andrew Schmelyun, the author has tried to shed some light on why we developers have so many unfinished projects. He does this nicely by comparing the work we do with others with similar creative passion. He also shares his own strategies on how he tackles this. A great read.
DevOps With Laravel: Dockerizing a Laravel application – In this long-form article, author Martin Joo has gone in-depth on how you can practically dockerize your Laravel application. It is hands-down the most detailed write-up I’ve seen on this topic. He showed how you can dockerize a standard Laravel application, along with Vue support and even the scheduler/worker.
If you have come across a great write-up and want me to share it with others, feel free to reply to this and/or write in a comment.
📦 Great PHP/Laravel Packages
I came across some nice packages over the last few months that I’ve bookmarked myself and would recommend to others. Here are 3 of them:
Laravel Auditing — This package will help you understand changes in your Eloquent models, by providing information about possible discrepancies and anomalies that could indicate business concerns or suspect activities. This becomes essential when working with any enterprise-level application.
Loupe — A rather remarkable package that provides a full-text search engine with tokenization, stemming, typo tolerance, filters, and geo support based on only PHP and SQLite. It’s the easiest way to replace the good old SQL
LIKE %...%queries with a way better search experience but without all the hassle of an additional service to manage.Stethoscope — This Laravel package allows you to monitor the infra your application is running on. With this package, you can check the server’s health at any time: monitoring the CPU, memory, hard disk, web server, and network. They’ve thrown in a nice UI with historical trends of the metric, too.
🐦 Tweetworthy
This tweet thread is over three years old but has some real golden nuggets within it on how to improve your pricing strategies as a freelancer.
Tom goes at length in explaining the pros and cons of the various pricing strategies that you can apply, based on your project’s requirements:
Hourly billing
Daily billing
Retainers
Fixed-pricing
Value-based pricing
He also added some nice strategies that look so obvious when you read them, but we forget to apply them when we come across the chance (ex: When a hard deadline is introduced to a fixed-price project, add 20% to the price).
Overall, it's a great thread to keep handy whenever you’re pricing your next freelancing project.
🎉 Gifts for You!
I couldn’t be more excited to share some gifts with you IRL but nevertheless digital we go. A few amazing founders and writers have shared some nice discounts for you guys!
1. DevOps with Laravel
This is an amazing resource from Martin Joo, one of the most well-known members of the Laravel community for his in-depth technical articles. It’s a massive 465-page guide that teaches you how to be better at infrastructure and architecture.
In the book, he takes a typical Laravel app with the following components: API, Vue SPA, MySQL database, Redis queue, multiple worker processes, and scheduler. Then prepare it for production and deploy it using different techniques. Starting with simple shell scripts and then moving on to Docker and containers all the way to Kubernetes and serverless solutions.
Martin has generously offered a 30% discount for you guys only. Use the coupon code “040A3EB7” at checkout to avail this 🎁
2. Indexing Beyond the Basics
There is a scarcity of quality content on the practical Database optimization and performance tuning. Tobias Petry (the Database Guy) is one of the few developers who has invested a lot of time into sharing valuable tips and guides with the community regarding this.
In his latest book, Indexing Beyond the Basics, he has gone in-depth on indexing and query optimization like never seen before — filled with deep analysis, great graphics, and practical use cases. He also added a few videos to help illustrate the concepts visually. If I were you, I’d grab this book instantly.
Tobias shared a generous 20% discount for you. Use the code “SEGFAULT20” during checkout.
3. Releem: MySQL Performance Tuning Tool
Keeping your database performance up to an acceptable and efficient level is of paramount importance for any serious application. We, the developers, sometimes struggle here trying to get into the pesky details of figuring out the nitty-gritty of server and database tuning.
To rescue us all, Roman Agabekov, the founder & CEO of Releem, has come up with a really handy service that does the performance tuning of your MySQL database automatically. It works seamlessly and also provides you with a monitoring dashboard to check the health and performance trends over time.
Roman was generous enough to provide a 10% discount for you all. Use the coupon code “E28E7C96” during checkout to get this applied to your invoices.
4. Userdoc: Software Requirements powered by AI
Most software projects fail due to poor requirements. Unless a team spends time to properly communicate, analyze, document, and approve the business requirements — it bites them back in the future and risks the success of the project.
To solve this problem, founder Chris Rickard has built Userdoc. It empowers product and/or development teams with sophisticated AI that ensures their project has the best chance of success. It has a very intuitive user experience, with collaboration tools, versioning support, sharing abilities, etc. among other features.
Chris has shared a 10% discount for 3 months for us all. Use the coupon code “10OFF3MTH” during checkout to grab this generous offer.
5. Backpack for Laravel
Backpack is a collection of free and paid Laravel packages that help you build custom administration panels for your web applications. It was founded by Cristian Tăbăcitu almost 7 years ago and has a strong loyal user base that is growing rapidly every month.
Unlike the other Administration panel builders, Backpack is super flexible and doesn’t have any additional requirements beyond the standard Laravel setup. You can customize every aspect of it thanks to the intuitive template loading functionality.
It has over 25+ columns to be used in the CRUD, 50+ fields for use in the forms, built-in support for bulk operations, exporting, user permissions, widgets, and so much more.
You can even generate a fully functional CRUD panel in less than 5 minutes using the DevTool. It will create the migration, factory, seeder, model, controllers, and views for you. Check out the intro video to get a feel of what’s possible 😎
Here is a 20% discount code from yours truly to get you started. Use the coupon code “SUPER-Q04Z4” during checkout to join the party!
That’s all for today. Feel free to hit that reply button if you want to share something interesting with me. Or write a comment for everybody to see!
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Thank you for subscribing.
Mohammad Emran
PS. If you enjoyed my writing above or found the resources I shared helpful, it would be of great help if you let your friends know about this newsletter by sharing it 🤜 🤛