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GitHub offers a dependabot service that can let you know of any potential security issues with your dependencies and automatically create a Pull Request for you. This works great without any configuration if you have a repo that contains npm, composer or gem dependencies, but you may need additional configuration if your lock files aren’t in the root directory, or in separate directories in the case of a monorepo.

You might often hear developers say that you should write tests. Great, let’s go! But what should you test and where do you start? I don’t know all the answers, but here are some tips for getting started.

Recently I had to create a large data export for a project. I like using Spatie’s Simple Excel package to do this as it is very simple to use and works well when exporting large amounts of data to a CSV or Excel file with the ability to stream a download to the browser. This particular project had an additional requirement though, exporting multiple worksheet’s of data at once. Luckily, this package allows you to do this too.

An alternative to the for loop, the foreach loop is used to iterate or loop over an array. The foreach loop allows you to loop through the items in the array without setting a limit for it to stop like you do in a for loop.

If you have something you want to repeat then consider using a PHP for loop, saving you from copying and pasting the same code multiple times. Adding the code into a loop means you only have to write it once, and you also only have to maintain the code in one place in future.

Laravel 8 introduced new class based model factories and if you have an existing project you can use the legacy factories package to keep using the old factories. I have tended to keep the factories as they were and continue development, but after working on a fresh Laravel 8 project and using the new class based syntax I decided to go back and update the factories in the older Laravel apps. This article explains how I went about refactoring the factories to classes.