I’ve been wanting to start blogging more frequent development updates and now is a great time to start! This week I added profile photo upload / management to Spark. Adding this feature forced me to dig into Laravel’s Flysystem integration and file upload classes a little bit more than I have in the past, since both Forge and Envoyer do not accept...

I’ve received a few tweets asking me to demonstrate how Lumen is benchmarked against Silex and Slim. First, I should state that all of these frameworks are faster than you will ever need out of the box. Keep in mind that even full-stack Laravel 5.0 powers sites that receive 15,000,000 unique visits per day. The benchmarks themselves are actually really...

Programmers are an interesting bunch – brimming with passion and pride in the shadows of our mansions. They’re beautiful, our mansions of bits and bytes. But, do you know what gets us worked up? The neighbor’s yard – and their kids… Lord knows they need a tutor. They probably don’t even code to an interface. Gross. I mean, it’s dangerous. It works both...

In the past, fishermen have used the color of the morning sky to predict if the day’s weather will be suitable for sailing. Like the fishermen, I’ve found that the day’s beginnings paint a preview of its course. Start positive, and it’s easier to ride the good vibes for the rest of the day. I asked the Twitterverse how they start the day. Here are a...

Tonight I want to write a quick post and mention a few PHP developers who have inspired me lately. I’ll name them and share a few reflections on how they have inspired me over the past few months. Fabien Potencier (@fabpot) – Fabien is the project leader for Symfony. He manages a very large PHP project, and he does it very well. He’s humble and professional....

This summer marks the third anniversary of Laravel’s release. It has grown very quickly, and I think its future is very bright. In many ways I feel like “the best is yet to come”! However, as Laravel has grown, it has become more difficult to maintain. With the launch of other “products” such as Forge, Cashier, Envoy, and Homestead, the time commitment...