iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alex Vanderbist @alexvanderbist.com · 02/10/2026

Added a swinging sign to the spatie.be homepage. Swing it all the way around and you get confetti. Before AI, stuff like this was never worth the time. Anyone with an agent can generate a slick UI now but the silly extras are what makes it feel a little more human.

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Alex Vanderbist @alexvanderbist.com · 30/04/2026

Been going back and forth on this for Flare for a couple of days now... Two logs in the current filter. Pin them to the bottom (because that's where new logs land) or to the top (because that's how every table works)? Neither feels obviously right. Both feel slightly wrong 🙃

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Alex Vanderbist @alexvanderbist.com · 24/04/2026

Wait, terminal tables are responsive now? How does that even work?

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Alex Vanderbist @alexvanderbist.com · 23/04/2026

The end result on a 6 MB source map: ~100x faster and ~10x less memory usage compared to axy/sourcemap. This is not a stab at axy's package btw (great lib we used for years). Our package is just optimized for our specific read path. github.com/spatie/sour... & full blogpost soon

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Alex Vanderbist @alexvanderbist.com · 23/04/2026

The biggest win: PHP's lesser-known (un)pack function lets you store data as raw bytes instead of PHP objects. Each mapping is 5 ints. As an object that's ±200 bytes, but as 5 int32s in a packed string it's only 20 bytes. That's 10x less memory used!

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Alex Vanderbist @alexvanderbist.com · 23/04/2026

Then there's the decoding state. Each line stored its state as an associative array and those string keys aren't free. PHP keeps them in a hashtable at ±250 bytes per entry. Swapping to just values [0,0,0,0] is only ±150 bytes per entry. A 10MB improvement on 110K lines.

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Alex Vanderbist @alexvanderbist.com · 23/04/2026

First win: lazy parsing + binary search. A source map is a list of lines, each with mappings sorted by column. The old approach decoded every line upfront, all 110K of them. By only decoding the line you ask for and halving the search space, it's only ~17 steps instead of 3000.

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Alex Vanderbist @alexvanderbist.com · 23/04/2026

We just released a new package: spatie/sourcemaps-lookup It resolves JS stack frames against source maps. Flare uses it in its frame resolver. It's 99% faster and uses 91% less memory on a 6 MB map. Took me a couple of steps to get there... 🧵

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Alex Vanderbist @alexvanderbist.com · 02/03/2026

I suppose I could put this in the composer.json post-install-cmd 😅

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Alex Vanderbist @alexvanderbist.com · 02/03/2026

What is @AnthropicAI waiting for to implement agents.md? Best solution I could come up with is having a CLAUDEmd file with one line that references the `@agents.md`. This works but seems a bit inefficient...

agents.md

AGENTS.md

AGENTS.md is a simple, open format for guiding coding agents. Think of it as a README for agents.

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Alex Vanderbist @alexvanderbist.com · 02/03/2026

I'm giving Codex a go this week. Loving the UI so far but it seems like it's pretty good at planning too. Claude Code often thinks Codex' plans are "slightly more comprehensive" or in-depth

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Alex Vanderbist @alexvanderbist.com · 23/02/2026

You had me at laravel-site-search without having to set up meilisearch 👀

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Alex Vanderbist @alexvanderbist.com · 23/02/2026

Been deep in package development this week, so I set up an AI skill to toggle between local path repositories and Packagist. No more manually editing composer.json 👌 github.com/AlexVanderb...

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Alex Vanderbist @alexvanderbist.com · 16/03/2025

Ginger, especially in drinks 👌

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Reposted by Alex Vanderbist

spatie.be @spatie.be · 30/01/2025

More than a year in the making, performance monitoring is coming to Flare! Join the waitlist to be among the first to access it. What features are you most excited about?

flareapp.io

Performance Monitoring | Flare

Performance monitoring for Laravel & PHP, coming soon to all Flare plans at no extra cost. Get early access by joining the waitlist.

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Alex Vanderbist @alexvanderbist.com · 15/01/2025

Any tips for handling large #Laravel Horizon jobs more effectively? Getting [job] attempted too many times usually points to OOM/timeouts, but debugging is tough - especially with 30min+ execution times and retries. What's your approach?

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Alex Vanderbist @alexvanderbist.com · 18/12/2024

What, no dinner and a movie first?

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Alex Vanderbist @alexvanderbist.com · 18/12/2024

Nice, looks like a great starting point. Thanks!

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Alex Vanderbist @alexvanderbist.com · 18/12/2024

Now that an official VS Code extension for Laravel is available, I'm ready to give it another try. Is there a definitive guide on how to configure VS Code for PHP development? I know there's a Laracasts course, but I feel like a lot has changed since 2021

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Alex Vanderbist @alexvanderbist.com · 05/12/2024

Nice! Amazing to see it done in just two LOC. You're probably very good at code golf 😂

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Alex Vanderbist @alexvanderbist.com · 29/11/2024

The generator is about 40 lines, curious to see what you solution looks like 👀

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Alex Vanderbist @alexvanderbist.com · 28/11/2024

Time to migrate back to X 😛

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Alex Vanderbist @alexvanderbist.com · 25/11/2024

Nice! I love that this works for direct commits too 👌

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Alex Vanderbist @alexvanderbist.com · 25/11/2024

this post but for global scopes

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Alex Vanderbist @alexvanderbist.com · 25/11/2024

Thanks! Waiting until Thursday for a lifetime license is definitely worth it 👌

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Alex Vanderbist @alexvanderbist.com · 22/11/2024

"are you almost there?" followed by me force quitting and restarting the app for another 10 minutes because the updater got stuck

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Alex Vanderbist @alexvanderbist.com · 22/11/2024

Every year, we create a fun video and promo for Black Friday, and this one might be my favorite yet! Next week we'll be giving away 100 t-shirts and a bunch of other prizes, if you know where to find them 🕵️

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Alex Vanderbist @alexvanderbist.com · 09/11/2024

composer install nunomaduro/bluesky soon?

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Alex Vanderbist @alexvanderbist.com · 08/11/2024

Why doesn’t your current setup look like this?

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Alex Vanderbist @alexvanderbist.com · 08/11/2024

It’s been 3 years, when will we finally pick a decent replacement for Twitter :(

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