In my day to day job I make use of a lot of packages. This got me thinking it would be good to create a package of my own, so I have decided to build a Laravel package. It’s got a long way to go yet before it’s ready, but I thought I would write down my thoughts about the benefits of building a package while it is still fresh in my mind.
Why build a package?
Getting your project seen
Developers love building things and sometimes we want to share these things with other developers to help make their life easier. Creating you project and putting it on GitHub can seem like the difficult part, but letting people know its there and getting them to use it can be even harder.
Rethinking your commute
Like many people, I work in a city, but I live outside the city, meaning I have to commute to work each day. My normal commute takes me over an hour to commute just over 20 miles. That’s pretty shocking when you think of it. My average speed is less than 20 miles per hour. I enjoy my job but, like most people, I really don’t enjoy the commute to and from work.
Using Laravel Eloquent's Many to Many Relationship
The more time you spend reading the Laravel docs, the more things you will find that will save you time and effort. I have been using Laravel for many years but this week I discovered I had been using the many to many relationship in a sub optimal way, and by that I mean I avoided it at all costs.
Managing Expectations
How long will something take to do? Who knows? Sometimes you just need to make just a tiny little quick change, but it doesn’t work out quite as expected and you have to go back and keep making small change after small change, then before you know it, it’s lunch time.
Is web development just copying and pasting?
It seems it’s impossible to make a website these days without using some kind of package manager, whether its npm for your frontend dependencies or something like composer for your php dependencies. If you need to do something a bit tricky then, chances are, someone else had the same problem and created a package to solve that problem so you can just add it to your dependencies, install it and away you go. But does this mean web development is just copying and pasting other people’s work into your website?
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