Hey, we’ve moved The Laralist to Substack. We believe it will help us grow and reduce operational costs. There are a few differences since Substack isn’t fully customizable. The layout is different (we tried to keep it as similar as possible). Also, the code snippets aren’t colorized, sorry, but it’s not possible unless we use images. If you prefer images, let us know!

I’ll leave you with this week’s edition.

🧱 Laravel

🛠️ A Production-Ready Laravel Architecture with Traefik and FrankenPHP (6 minute read)

A detailed guide shows how to build a high-performance Laravel stack using FrankenPHP and Traefik. It covers multistage Docker images for web and worker processes, automated deployments with Docker Compose, and routing multiple services behind Traefik. The setup delivers sub-10 ms request handling and clean separation of responsibilities in production.

Redirecting Test Emails Safely in Laravel (3 minute read)

Mail::alwaysTo() offers a safeguard for email testing. By directing all mails to a designated address, it prevents accidental real-world sends during development, ensuring safer email handling.

Laravel 12.35 released

Laravel 12.35.0 introduces the deferred queue driver and failover cache driver for enhanced reliability. It also supports SQS FIFO message groups for job classes and adds clickable file references for thrown exceptions.

💡 Tip of the Week

Use the ⁠rescue() helper to execute functions that might fail, providing a default value if an exception occurs.

$result = rescue(function () {
    return someOperationThatMightFail();
}, ‘default value’);

🐘 PHP

PHP in 2025 is so good... (3 minute video)

Modern PHP looks very different from the old days. With strict types, readonly classes, property promotion, and strong tooling like PHPStan, Pint, and Pest, it now offers the safety, structure, and developer experience of any contemporary language.

🧩 PHP 8.5’s URI Extension: Because parse_url() Has Been Lying to Us for 20 Years (3 minute read)

PHP 8.5 introduces a robust URI extension that addresses the longstanding issues with parse_url(). It offers RFC 3986 and WHATWG-compliant parsers, enhancing URL parsing accuracy and security for developers.

📦 Package of the Week

Nimbus

Nimbus is an in-browser API client for Laravel, automatically discovering routes and validation rules to create interactive schemas for testing APIs, enhancing development without manual setup or leaving your environment.

✨ Misc

The Price of Mandatory Code Reviews (4 minute read)

Data from 400+ companies shows teams without reviews ship almost twice as fast but with over twice as many bugs. High-quality reviews reduce bugs by 60% yet slow delivery, while quick turnarounds (under three hours) keep productivity high. The best teams balance speed and quality with selective, fast reviews.

Reducing code motion (3 minute read)

A refactor of Aggregate, a community-driven content feed, simplified its post scheduling process by removing the scheduled state and adding a future publication date to published posts. This change eliminated cron jobs and automatic transitions, trading some complexity for a more streamlined solution. Human-centered models don’t always yield the simplest technical solutions.

What caused the large AWS outage? (8 minute read)

A 14-hour outage in the AWS us-east-1 region began when a race condition in the DynamoDB DNS system created empty DNS records, knocking out DynamoDB and triggering cascading failures across EC2 and networking services. The takeaway: even at massive scale, a single flawed dependency can lead to widespread disruption.

🔍 Mistakes I see engineers making in their code reviews (9 minute read)

The article highlights effective code review strategies, focusing on understanding the entire codebase, limiting comments for clarity, avoiding personal biases, and prioritizing approvals. Thoughtful feedback fosters shared understanding and enhances code quality.