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- Laravel 12 is out! Laravel Cloud, Starter kits, the anatomy of a breakthrough “Service-as-a-Software” business & more
Laravel 12 is out! Laravel Cloud, Starter kits, the anatomy of a breakthrough “Service-as-a-Software” business & more
Ahmad
March 02, 2025
Hey Makers,
Laravel 12 Has Officially Landed! 🚀
While this release doesn’t introduce major new features, that’s actually a good thing. It’s a testament to Laravel’s stability and maturity, features are now rolled out continuously throughout the year rather than bundled into one big, disruptive update. Laravel 12 focuses on maintaining this reliability with upstream dependency updates, minimal breaking changes, and a seamless upgrade process.
That said, there are still some exciting additions! This release brings brand-new starter kits for React, Vue, and Livewire, each packed with modern UI components and flexible authentication options.
Another big news? Laravel Cloud is Live! deployment platform that takes your app from GitHub to production in minutes.
And the best part? SaaSykit is already upgraded to Laravel 12, so you can start building with the latest and greatest features right away! 🤘
New At SaaSykit
When building Laravel applications, you might want to categorize routes so they can be retrieved later for specific use cases. One practical example is generating a sitemap.xml file by filtering only public-facing routes. Laravel does not have a built-in way to tag routes, but we can achieve this using route metadata and custom logic.
From the Community
One of our systems at work is a very big consumer of the Stripe API, in fact, there's stuff happening on that pretty much every single minute of the day. Part of that system uses Stripe's API to download files, loop through them and create/update models in the database.
This took some time to get right because just as I thought I'd got it working, a file far bigger than anything I'd had before would come through from Stripe and then I'd have to re-engineer parts of the code to prevent things such as timeouts from happening. These days, it can handle absolutely massive files, some of which are close to 4,000,000 rows of data and I suspect these files will keep getting bigger and bigger.
I recently stumbled upon a cool Laravel feature I hadn't come across before: the ability to prevent destructive commands from running in production.
So, for those of you like me who haven't heard of this feature before, I thought I'd write a quick article to share it with you. I think it's something you'll really like! I'll be adding to all my Laravel projects from now on.
When we build forms for an application, it's common to need a field where a plain textarea isn't enough. So how do we proceed? We could process it on the backend and treat the input as Markdown, but this requires manual configuration and can often be limiting. A better alternative is to use a rich text editor to maximize options for customization.
AlpineJS is a lightweight JavaScript framework that makes your HTML dynamic.
Among the plugins provided by AlpineJS is Intersect, a wrapper for JavaScript's Intersection Observer API. This plugin reacts as soon as an element enters the browser's viewport.
The viewport is the area of the window in which web content can be viewed, i.e. the visible part of the page at the level of the scroll bar.
A few small, yet powerful methods for writing error-safe logic, similar to the native PHP null-safe operator used for strings. Although a sharp knife, it can be useful in a few situations.
Deploying a Laravel application involves several steps to ensure it performs optimally in a production environment. Laravel’s Artisan command-line tool offers powerful commands that simplify this process. In this blog post, we’ll explore five essential Artisan commands that should be part of every deployment workflow: optimize:clear, optimize, queue:restart, schedule:interrupt, and schedule:clear-cache.
All about SaaS
If you’ve been following this newsletter, you’ve probably noticed my fascination with how AI products are increasingly rewriting the rules of SaaS pricing.
Many of the next generation AI apps don’t simply provide a platform to make people more productive, they own a process from beginning to end. They autonomously resolve customer support tickets (Intercom), cull and edit photos (Aftershoot), run outbound campaigns (11x) or take on the role of a sales engineer (Vivun). This creates even more economic value for customers – and it facilitates a different way of capturing that value.
Chegg filed suit against Google for changes in their algorithm forcing the company to consider a sale.
They allege the Google AI Overviews feature displays Chegg’s AI-enabled Q&A homework helper. This suit stands as the first of its kind challenging Google for changing search patterns, but it won’t be the last.
The last thing any startup needs is people finding out about it.
You can get attention later—that’s easy. You don’t need the distraction of all those customers clamoring outside your office, begging to give you money, while you’re still refactoring your NoSQL database schema.
It’s instant death if a competitor were to launch at the same time as you, so you’re right to keep all your ideas completely secret. Once you launch, then millions of people will know about you, including competitors, but by then you’ll be a full 4 months ahead of the whole world, making competition impossible, even if they are two Stanford kids with $9,000,000 in funding and the wind of YC at their backs.
Here's a thing I hadn't thought about before:
If you are the vice president of customer experience at a large airline, you are probably worried about your job. You were hired to affordably provide great customer service to millions of people, and for years, you built a sprawling array of infrastructure to do it. You hired thousands of passenger assistance representatives and reservations agents; you created an assortment of ticketing applications in Microsoft Azure; you recruited a team of engineers to build them in Java and Angular. But, because you believe in continuous innovation, you’ve been following what’s been happening in Silicon Valley.
Drew Houston is the co-founder and CEO of Dropbox. Under his leadership, Dropbox has grown from a simple idea to a service used by over 700 million registered users globally, with a valuation exceeding $9 billion. Drew has led Dropbox through multiple phases, from explosive viral growth, to battling all the tech giants at once, to reinventing the company for the future of work. In our conversation, he opens up about:
Videos
Keep building, keep rocking! 🤘