Week ending January 30, 2026
It's Friday once again, another great week in the world of Laravel. With Laracon India this weekend I'm certainly looking forward to the new AI package that Taylor will be demoing. I was lucky enough to jump on a live stream for 30 minutes with Eric Barnes from Laravel News, we got to talk about Jump24, my friday top tens and of course a little bit of golf. So lets get into the top ten for this week.
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Brent RooseBrent continues his optimisation journey from his post last week. This week he's stepped it up and improving PHP database processing performance from 50k to 1.7MILLION events per second through combined inserts, moving calculations to PHP, and fine-tuning queries. Another great deep dive into practical performance optimisation techniques that any Laravel developer can apply to their own database-heavy operations and who knows maybe you can take those slow jobs into lightning fast ones.
Laravel Debugbar v4.0 has been released with major improvements including modern JavaScript (removing jQuery), better performance, improved dataset switching for redirects and AJAX requests, and new features like HTTP client monitoring and webhook scanning. This popular development tool with over 118 million downloads now offers enhanced Inertia and Livewire support, dark mode, and better data collection throughout the request lifecycle. It's a great tool that we use daily at Jump24 so its great to see this new version being released.
In this video Eric and Laravel Shift Creator Jason McCreary discuss how through the use of Cloudflare page caching you can massively improve the performance of your production Laravel application. Even when you think you've cached everything you can, there is always more! Jason recently put together a video series on this exact thing over at https://fastlaravel.com/
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Jack McDadeStatamic 6 has been officially released with a complete Control Panel redesign, Vue 3, Inertia.js, and over 1,000 improvements focused on providing a clean, modern CMS experience. This major release represents their commitment to developer joy and editor empowerment while avoiding the complexity trap that plagues many content management systems.
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Markus StaabMarkus Staab shares how he collaborated with PHPStan's creator to achieve massive performance improvements, delivering 25-40% faster analysis times through 6 weeks of optimisation work. The latest PHPStan release includes ~100 performance-focused pull requests that significantly reduce CI pipeline execution times and developer feedback loops.
Have you ever wondered what can I do to help speed up these queries? Well this article has a comprehensive guide to MySQL performance optimisation covering query analysis with EXPLAIN, strategic indexing techniques, and server configuration tuning. It's essential reading for any Laravel developer looking to eliminate database bottlenecks and dramatically improve your application performance.
A comprehensive guide on properly deprecating PHP methods, classes, and parameters using PHPDoc tags, runtime warnings, and clear migration paths. Learn the three-layer approach that open-source projects like Symfony use to evolve APIs without breaking existing users.
Ryan Chandler shares a handy Bash script that lets you deploy Laravel Forge sites directly from your terminal without using the official CLI. The script includes Git commit details and deployment messages, making it a useful alternative for developers who prefer command-line workflows.
Are you one of those developers who's commit message is always "WIP", well in this article Freek shares a clever bash function that uses Claude AI to automatically generate meaningful commit messages from your git diff, replacing the dreaded "wip" commits with descriptive messages. His solution includes a spinner animation and takes just 2-3 seconds to generate commit messages that actually describe what changed in your code.
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Len WoodwardIn this short video Len talks us through how he built an agentic programmer using Laravel Prompts.
Eric put out a shout to see if anyone would like to join him for a test stream, Dan answered the call and joined him for a 30minute stream where they talked all things Laravel, the weekly Top Tens, Jump24 and of course a bit of Golf
Joel shares a practical solution for handling problematic JSON data from a FileMaker oData API that contained encoded strings and invisible control characters. He demonstrates how to clean and properly decode double-encoded JSON using regex to strip ASCII control characters and multiple json_decode passes.
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Brent RooseBrent has created a video on his lastest post how he improved his processing scripts allowing him to go from 30 events per second to millions per minute, taking it from days to minutes! If you want to learn how you might be able to make small incremental changes to your processing code give this video a watch its got some nice tips.
The final part of a comprehensive series on SQL performance optimization, focusing on how to prevent performance regressions through automated testing and continuous monitoring. Learn how to implement test-driven SQL performance checks using phpunit-query-count-assertions to catch N+1 queries, duplicate queries, and missing indexes before they reach production.