Dan Newns.

Articles

Deep dives and notes from the blog.

30th December 2025
Article
If you'd asked me at the start of 2025 what the year would look like, I don't think I could have predicted just how much would change. Some years are about big career moves or business milestones. This year was about something far more important.
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27th December 2025
Article
We've been long time fans of Inertia.js here at Jump24 and honestly, it's become our go-to for building modern Laravel applications without the faff of maintaining a separate API layer. Between deferred props, prefetching, and partial reloads, the Inertia team has been absolutely smashing it with performance features lately.
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26th November 2025
Article
Laravel 12.37 quietly shipped with a new factory method that might seem minor when you first look at it - Factory::insert(). You might actually be thinking wait a minute the insert method has been around for a while and you've already been using it in your code already, I mean I know we have.
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20th November 2025
Article
Right, let's have a chat about test suite performance. You know that feeling when you push your code, then go make a brew while waiting for the CI pipeline to finish? Yeah, we've been there too. Laravel 12.38 just dropped two new testing traits that might just save you enough time to actually drink that tea while it's still hot.
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12th November 2025
Article
Right, let's talk about a bug pattern we've all created at least once, it's not a pattern that breaks anything as such is more a pattern of we've forgotten to do something.
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5th November 2025
Article
You know that feeling when you need to fetch data from multiple APIs, and you're sitting there watching your application make request... after request... after request... while your users are staring at a loading spinner that's been going for so long it's practically become a screensaver?
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28th October 2025
Article
Hands up — how many of you have a Laravel 9 or 10 application that should be upgraded but the idea of refactoring thousands of lines makes you want to switch careers? We’ve been there. More than once.
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22nd October 2025
Article
PHP 8.5's new URI extension finally fixes 20 years of parse_url() problems.
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18th October 2025
Article
Laravel 12.34 dropped earlier this week with a feature that made me actually say "oh thank god" out loud: automatic queue failover.
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15th October 2025
Article
Right, let's talk about something that's been bugging us for years. If you've been writing PHP for any length of time, you've probably written some variation of "get the first item from this array" more times than you'd care to admit. And if you're a Laravel developer like us, you've probably been spoilt by the Arr::first() and Arr::last() helpers that make this dead simple.
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13th October 2025
Article
Right, I'm going to be honest with you - when I first heard about PHP 8.5's pipe operator, my initial reaction was "oh great, another operator to remember." and I can't see me needing to use this. But after spending some time playing with it I've completely changed my tune. This little |> operator might just be the best quality-of-life improvement PHP has seen since constructor property promotion.
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8th October 2025
Article
I'll be honest with you - we've been using Laravel for over a decade, and it's only the last year or so that we've properly discovered the Pipeline Class. I know, I know, it's been sitting there in the documentation this whole time, but somehow we just never gave it the attention it deserved.
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