Top Ten Laravel And PHP Things - 1-1-2026

It's Friday and it's the first top ten of 2026! Obviously it feels like its been a bit of a quieter week as I hope everyone is off enjoying themselves but I've managed to put together 10 great posts for you to read.

In 🥇 place this week we have Andy Brudtkuhl with "Compound Engineering for Laravel" - In this post Andy talks about a more structured approach with letting AI Write Laravel code for you. The basic idea of this is every feature you build should make the next one easier. So you accumulate knowledge that AI Agents can re-use. If you’re already using AI agents in your coding workflow this is worth a read to see if some of this thinking can help the AI Agents improve - https://t.ly/EDHUq

In 🥈 place this week we have Povilas Korop with his latest series over on his AI Coding Daily Youtube channel. Povilas works through building a real world Laravel project from Upwork using AI tools. If you’re just starting to dip your toes into Using AI in your development cycle or if you’re already using it there are still things to learn through this series. He walks through how he uses AI to plan and build the project, how he uses tools like Laravel Boost and other tools to build out the project - 📽️ - https://t.ly/rD420

In 🥉 place this week we have Michael Snegurski With "Building Fully Type-Safe APIs With Laravel", he walks us through creating a fully type safe API with the help of Spaties Laravel Data package and their Typescript Trasnformer package. It has plenty of examples of how he works with his React Typescript frontend and hooks into his Type Safe API - https://t.ly/6IVZ0

🥇 Andy Brudtkuhl - "Compound Engineering for Laravel" - https://t.ly/EDHUq
🥈 Povilas Korop - "Coding Exam Project with AI" - 📽️ - https://t.ly/rD420
🥉 Michael Snegurski - "Building Fully Type-Safe APIs With Laravel" - https://t.ly/6IVZ0
4️⃣ Daniel Newns - "Inertia.js Once Props: Stop Sending the Same Data Over and Over Again." - https://t.ly/cw0Co
5️⃣ Ron Northrip - "12 Days of Eloquent" - https://t.ly/BNzKc
6️⃣ Marian Pop - "Inertia 2.0 Error Handling: Production-ready patterns" - https://t.ly/jdGVc
7️⃣ Amit Merchant - "Partial Function Application is Coming in PHP 8.6" - https://t.ly/bHptp
8️⃣ Joel Clermont - Why senior developers feel wrong more often - 🎤 - https://t.ly/LInGZ
9️⃣ Nelson Isioma - "Using PIE for PHP Extensions in Docker Environments" - https://t.ly/SIjCo
🔟 Joel Clermont - "The benefits of caching in CI" - 📽️ - https://t.ly/Nkifd

I've also added a bonus one in this week, as its the start of a new year Ask yourself this question. What if you tried hard? Well Aaron Francis did and I think you might see the benefits of doing so yourself go check out his post on this from 2024 👉 https://t.ly/PdDlv

That's it for this week hopefully there is something there for everyone to enjoy reading.

Thanks for reading/watching this year and let me know in the comments what your favourite read is or what you might have found this week.