Over Engineered

Sometimes you have files or other large chunks of data that you need to associate with a record in your database. It might be convenient to just store that as base64-encoded data or HTML in a "longtext" column, but that can eventually cause issues—especially as the table grows. What other options are there?In this episode of Over Engineered, we go back to the show's roots and try to find the absolute best solution to a problem we already have an acceptable solution for.

At the beginning of August, after six years of working on it on-and-off, Ben Holmen took his Kilopixel project live. It's a 1000 pixel display, where each pixel has to be manually toggled by a custom CNC rig, and it's whimsical and impractical and took the internet by storm. In today's episode, Chris chats with Ben and Joe about the whole project and what's next for the display.Links:KilopixelI spent 6 years building a ridiculous wooden pixel displayThe Kilopixel recapShow HNKilopixel on Side ProjectsBen Holmen on Over Engineered

Up until now, browser testing in Laravel has felt… bad. Dusk was a huge step over nothing, but it's been slow and flaky and just waiting to be replaced with something better. And with Pest 4, Nuno's cracked it!In today's episode of Over Engineered with dig into the technical details of what makes browser testing in Pest 4 both very fast and much more stable than Dusk and all the other browser testing approaches that came before it.Links:PestNuno Maduro (all his socials)PlaywrightNuno's livestream of this episode

Alex Hillman has been thinking about and actively supporting communities for decades. In this episode, Chris and Alex talk about lessons he's learned along the way that can help meetup organizers tend their local tech communities, and brainstorm about ways that we can organize together to support meetups in general.Links:tiny.mbastackingthebricks.comindyhall.org10k.cityphpx.world

Simon Hamp and Marcel Pociot have been working on NativePHP for a number of years, and Simon just surprised with world at Laracon EU with a NativePHP for Mobile announcement. In this episode, Simon and Chris get deep into the the NativePHP innards, explore sustainable open source, and generally just have a good time for <<checks watch>> over two hours 😅Links:NativePHPZephpyrdagger

Zuzana Kunckova started Larabelles five years ago, and over that time it has grown into an important part of the Laravel community. In today's episode, Zuzana and Chris talk about the future of Larabelles now that she has more time to dedicate to it.Links:LarabellesSponsor Larabelles on GitHubSponsor Larabelles on PatreonOther ways to support Larabelles

What happens when you get a bunch of Laravel podcasters + a bunch of mics in a room? Chaos, apparently.Recorded live after PHP × NYC with Ben Holmen, John Drexler, Daniel Coulbourne, Chris Morrell, Ian Landsman, Dave Hicking, and Joe Tannenbaum.

There's lots of advice out there for running software teams, but much of it comes from large organizations with dozens or hundreds of developers. Smaller teams have different needs. On today's episode, we pick up from a question Dan asked on Bluesky and talk about how best to approach running a small development team.Links:Dan's Bluesky PostThunk

Shawn McCool has been talking about event sourcing for years, and recently started a new series of streams on the topic. In this episode, Chris and Shawn talk about event sourcing, Verbs, and community (among other things).Links:Shawn on TwitchEvent SourceryVerbs

Design patterns can be very useful, but can also be weaponized as a way to "prove" that someone is doing something the "wrong" way. Mary has been thinking a lot about the good side of knowing design patterns, so we sat down to chat about them.

Joe Tannenbaum is thinking about starting a podcast about side projects. So we took an afternoon to talk through what that might look like.

Ben Holmen started his Pair-amid scheme as an experiment in meeting new people and experiencing new code. He shared his calendar with the world, and booked pairing sessions with 15 complete strangers. The outcome? A bunch of new friends and new experiences.In this episode, Ben and Chris talk about pair programming, side projects, and how to find fulfillment and social connection as a remote programmer.Links:The Pair-amid schemeThe kilopixel display

ReactPHP is a low-level library for event-driven programming in PHP. It lets you write code that's much closer to the async/await style of JavaScript in PHP. In today's episode, Chris and Len talk about our experiments with ReactPHP.Links:ReactPHPWhiskeyCommunity PromptsConductorDawn

What set two developers on a quest to build custom tooling to enforce their code style preferences? Today's episode is a story that starts with two independent projects—Tighten's `tlint` and InterNACHI's `laralint`—but meanders to all the right places, including the future of PHP itself, the intersection of bikeshedding and art, and so much more.

Today we take a break from over engineering to talk about burnout. Both Chris and Ian have been working on the same products for multiple decades. We sit down to talk about that and what to do about the kind of burnout that comes from working on the same thing for so long.Links:Brent is Leaving TwitterJoin the RTSN.DEV mastodon instance

Steve McDougall (aka JustSteveKing) is known as the "API guy" on Twitter. In today's episode we start with the question, "what if the best option is just a single page app with a good, RESTful API?"Links:HAL - Hypertext Application LanguageJSON:API SpecLaravel SanctumAPI Versioning Blog PostSteve on Twitter (follow for updates on upcoming course)

The internet has been talking (yelling?) about full-stack javascript a lot lately. In today's episode, we sit down and talk about what it means to be "full stack" and whether there are really any truly full-stack javascript frameworks out there (spoiler: there are, but maybe not Next.js or Remix).Links:Sails.jsThe Boring Javascript StackAdonisJSNestJS📻 The Future of the Laravel Frontend w/ Taylor Otwell

Jess Archer took something that was quite good—the Symfony console output features—and built something that was absolutely great: Laravel Prompts. In today's episode, we dig into some of the gnarly details around building prompts and working with ANSI escape sequences in the terminal.

Taylor Otwell has been finding ways to improve Laravel for over a decade, but has only more recently set his sights on the front-end side of things. In today's episode, we sit down and talk about the current state of building UIs in Laravel, and what the future might hold.Links:Laravel VoltAire Form BuilderLaravel “Context” FeatureHooks PackageLaravel CareersBlade Parser

Joe Tannenbaum took the internet by storm with his incredible SSH CLI "experiments." In today's episode, Chris and Joe sit down to get into the messy details of parsing ANSI escape sequences and dealing with multibyte strings, but spend as much time talking about programming as art and life as an actor.Links:Joe Tannenbaum on TwitterJoe's "Lab" of CLI experiments"Kitchen" by Liza LouConveyor Belt packageRTSN.DEV