iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 11/06/2026

🔥 In PHP, you can use the "set" property hook to validate a value before setting it! Have you used property hooks in your PHP projects yet? Here's a simple example of only allowing an enum property to be set to specific enum cases:

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 04/06/2026

Fun PHP question: Without cheating, what does the second line output? 😄

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 09/04/2026

I've just made a PR to Laravel! ⚡ It proposes a new "Via" attribute which could be added to notification classes. It can be used to define hardcoded notification channels without requiring a "via" method. Is this something you'd use if it were merged? 😄

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 08/04/2026

Alternatively, you can enable the feature on a class-by-class basis like so:

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 08/04/2026

⚡ As of Laravel 13.4.0, you can use "FormRequest::failOnUnknownFields" to enable errors which will be thrown if unknown fields are passed in requests! Is this something you think you'd use in your own projects? 😄

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 03/04/2026

These are always the best emails to see when you start your day! 🎉

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 23/03/2026

My Short URL package is really close to hitting 2 MILLION installs! I think it'll hit it at the end of April 😄🎉

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 13/03/2026

It's been a busy morning! I've just updated all my Laravel packages to support Laravel 13 (and a few other small updates) 😄

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 16/01/2026

⚡ You can use the "once" helper to memoise data in Laravel! The result of the closure will be stored on the first call. Then all future calls will return the stored result. When used in the right places, this can lead to some nice performance gains.

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 08/01/2026

🔥 If you're using job batches in Laravel, the "job_batches" database table can grow quite quickly. To solve this, you can schedule the "queue:prune-batches" command. I've just added this to @findapr after I noticed the table contained a ton of old rows (approx 28k rows) 😄

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 07/01/2026

Fun little quiz: Without cheating, what will the last line output in PHP? This is something which used to catch me out all the time! 👀

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 09/12/2025

I've just hit a mini-milestone with my Email Utilities package: It's crossed 100 stars on GitHub! ⭐ It's really close to hitting its first 1,000 downloads, too. I've just checked and it's been installed 995 times 👀

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 03/12/2025

I've just released Email Utilities for Laravel v1.1.0! 🎉 This release includes: ✅ Artisan command that can be used to update the disposable domain list (shown in the screenshot) ✅ Caching to improve performance ✅ An updated list of disposable domains (4932 domains!) [1/2]

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 02/12/2025

I've just made a PR to Laravel to propose first-party support for sending transactional email with Mailtrap! Is this something you might use? 😄 👉 PR: github.com/laravel/fram...

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 24/11/2025

I want to say a huge thank you to Mailtrap for sponsoring me on GitHub! 😄🎉 I've been using Mailtrap for a few years for email testing, and it's always been a great platform. So it's really cool that they're now sponsoring me! Thanks! 🩵

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 07/11/2025

As of Laravel 12.36, you can use the "File::allDirectories" method to get an array of all nested directories (including nested directories) within a given path 🔥

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 06/11/2025

As of Laravel 12.29, you can use the "UseResource" and "UseResourceCollection" attributes to explicitly define the resource class and resource collection class a Laravel model should use 🔥

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 29/10/2025

Did you know PHP 8.5 adds a new FILTER_THROW_ON_FAILURE option for the `filter_var` function? If the `filter_var` validation fails, it will trigger an exception to be thrown 🔥

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 09/10/2025

I've just released an early version of a small package so I can use these rules in my projects 😄 Repo: github.com/ash-jc-allen... P.s. - I'd be forever grateful if you could star the repo ⭐

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 08/10/2025

Always the best emails to receive! Huge thank you to everyone who's bought any of my books over the past 3 years. Your support means the world to me 🩵 I hope they've been useful and taught you new things!

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 06/10/2025

I've just made a PR to Laravel to add 2 new email validation rules: "domainIs" and "domainIsNot" I don't know whether they'd be helpful to others, but they're something I'd definitely use 😄 What do you think?

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 25/09/2025

I've just released v1.1.0 of my Redactable Models package! 🎉 You can now set the hashing algorithm that should be used by the "HashContents" redaction strategy. In this example, we're SHA256-ing the "name" and "email" fields of users who were soft-deleted over 30 days ago 😄

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 24/09/2025

Did you know you can encrypt the payloads of your queued classes in Laravel? It's as simple as implementing the `ShouldBeEncrypted` interface 🔥 You can use it with: ✅ Jobs ✅ Notifications ✅ Mailables ✅ Listeners

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 17/09/2025

Did you know about the "non-empty-list" PHPStan annotation? I use "list" on an almost daily basis, but only just learned about "non-empty-list" today 🤯 I think this could be super useful, so I'm gonna start using it in my code from now on 😄

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 05/09/2025

I love using enums and the "match" expression together in PHP! I feel like they pair together really nicely 🔥

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 04/09/2025

My newsletter's been slowly but steadily growing over the past 5 years! I wonder if I'll ever hit 10k subscribers? 👀 It's an arbitrary goal, but it'd be cool to hit that number 😄

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 27/08/2025

📚 One of the things I love about writing my own books is that I can keep referring back to them (even 2 years after their release!) I needed to jog my memory on testing API integrations in Laravel. A couple of minutes reading, and I'm back up to speed! 😄

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 25/08/2025

It looks like I'm slowly starting to get some traffic to my blog from ChatGPT! It's only a small number of visitors. But I'm really interested to see how much this number will grow (or shrink!) over the next few years 😄

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 28/07/2025

Favicon Fetcher 3.9.0 released! 🎉 On Friday, I tagged and released a new version of my Favicon Fetcher package. You can now grab favicons in your Laravel apps using DuckDuckGo's icon API 😄

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 28/07/2025

⚡ You can use the "never" type as a return type in PHP! This indicates that the function/method will never return. This is useful if your method always throws an exception or uses something like "exit" 😄

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 01/07/2025

I'm loving the new "Operating Sytem" tab on my Fathom dashboard! 🔥

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 12/06/2025

⚡ As of Laravel 12.18, you can use the new "UsePolicy" attribute to explicitly define the policy that should be used for a model. This can be useful if you don't store your policies in the default directories 😄

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 11/06/2025

As of Laravel 12.18, you can use the new "encrypt" and "decrypt" methods on the Illuminate\Support\Stringable class 🔥 This will be useful if you're chaining any string operations! A cool contribution by Hristijan Manasijev 😄

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 02/06/2025

I've just made a PR to Laravel to add a new "AsUri" model cast! It will cast strings in your DB to instances of "Illuminate\Support\Uri". And vice versa, back to strings when storing the value. Is this something you think you would use if it gets merged? 😄

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 13/05/2025

Did you know you can pass an array to the "str_replace" function in PHP? It will perform the replacement on each entry in the array! I can't believe I didn't know about this until now 🤯

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 02/04/2025

Woohoo! My new books have arrived 🎉 Physical copies of "The Web Dev's Guide to Freelancing" are now available on Amazon! 👉 Search for the book's name on your region's Amazon site to buy your copy!

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 31/03/2025

🔥 You can use the "Number::ordinal" and "Number::spellOrdinal" number methods to convert numbers to ordinals in your Laravel apps. A great example use case for this is displaying results for a leaderboard!

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 27/03/2025

The proof copies have arrived! 🎉 It feels amazing seeing another of my books come to life 😄 It should be available to buy on Amazon in the next day or so

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 11/03/2025

🔥 You can use the `Number::fileSize` method in your Laravel apps to convert file sizes (in bytes) to more human-readable representations! This is handy for displaying file sizes in your UI 😄

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 04/03/2025

Always the best emails to receive in my inbox! 🔥

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 03/03/2025

I'm loving the UFO light in my office! My wife bought it for my birthday last month! 😎🛸

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 28/02/2025

Which approach do you use for scheduling Artisan commands in your Laravel apps? I prefer using the class names 😄

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 17/02/2025

I'm working on the physical version of "The Web Dev's Guide to Freelancing" book today! Hopefully, you'll be able to buy printed copies pretty soon 😎

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 13/02/2025

Someone's given Battle Ready Laravel a 1-star review on Amazon 😭 I wish there were a way for me to find out why. The last thing I want is for someone to feel unhappy with their purchase!

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 12/02/2025

🔥 You can use "DB::prohibitDestructiveCommands" to prevent commands, such as "migrate:fresh", from running! This is useful for preventing accidental runs of destructive commands in your production environment. I can't believe I've only just found out about this! 🤯

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 17/01/2025

You can use the "Override" attribute in PHP to specify that a method is overriding its parent method 🔥 This is useful for being alerted when a parent method you expect to exist no longer exists! Is this something you've used before? 😄

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 14/01/2025

The Web Dev's Guide to Freelancing is now available to buy! 🎉 👉 web-dev-freelancing.com Learn tips, tricks, and strategies you can use to launch your freelance career! 🔥 20% discount code: FREELANCE20

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 13/01/2025

Releasing tomorrow! 🎉 I'm getting really nervous (and excited) now! 😄

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Ash Allen @ashallendesign.co.uk · 11/01/2025

I'm doing some pre-release testing for my new book on my Kindle 👀 Can't wait to release this on Tuesday!

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