Zep Fietje

Hey friends! I have some availability for freelance development work. If you’re looking for a full-stack developer fluent in Laravel, Livewire or Filament (obviously 💁‍♂️), send me a message! Feel free to share 🫶

The best thing about putting a product out there for early access is the feedback you get from real users. Turns out you all want to edit your themes, so that’s now possible! Thanks for being a part of this 🙌

When you dive deep into accessibility specs, you realize not a single component library gets it right... E.g. focusing the first menu item only ever happens when menu is triggered by keyboard, not on button click. Makes me wonder if that’s by design (for example in @base-ui.com).

What’s the scrollbar situation like on Windows in 2025? Do gutters hide automatically these days, or is it still ugly as ****? Show me screenshots of your browser in the comments if you like. Vertical, horizontal, anything.

Sent out another round of early access invites for the custom Filament theme designer! 🙂 Go check your email to see if you’re among the lucky ones today ✉️

I may or may not have sent out another batch of invites. 📧🔑

You might want to check your inbox to see if you’re among the lucky ones 👀

Sending out another round of invites tomorrow :)

Found this nugget in symfony/intl 7.4/8.0, released yesterday. I’m using it to show localized pricing based on the visitor’s country and available price currencies retrieved directly from Stripe. Thanks, Symfony team! (And congrats on the 8.0 release! 🥳)

Whizzy and Filament Themes are running on PHP 8.5 already 🤘 Anyone else upgraded yet?

Anyone got a clue when PHP 8.5 support will land in Laravel Forge? Can't wait to start using the pipe operator and array_first/array_last functions... 😄

Looks like it was only added two years ago!

Only after so many years of using Laravel, I just found out that an empty dd() call dumps the bug emoji on your page… 🐛 Nice one! 😂

So have you signed up for early access of the custom Filament theme designer yet? You might want get on the list now. That’s all I’m saying. 🤫 filamentthemes.com/themes/custom

Have you seen the new factory “insert” method introduced in last week’s Laravel release? Just used it to refactor store creation for the Filament Themes demo — so much cleaner. 🤤 Thanks @cosmastech.bsky.social! 🫶

Woohoo! Safari is finally usable again. 😂 Thanks for listening to the complaints, Apple. 🍎

Tiny details like this button loading state are such a joy to work on… Don’t ask me why 😂

Pro tips when using Git hooks in your Laravel project 👇 1. Store hooks in .hooks to version them with Git. 2. Add "git config core.hooksPath .hooks" to your Composer setup script to link the hooks during setup after cloning the repo. Super easy, zero dependencies.

I stopped using em dashes — afraid they made everything I write look like ChatGPT. You know what? Fuck that. I’m back — with em dashes. 😂

I just set up pre-commit Git hooks in all my projects—should’ve done this much sooner! No more manually running commands or waiting on CI pipelines. Want me to show you how to set up hooks super easily? Drop a comment below! 👇

I’m wondering if PHP property hooks can fully replace Laravel’s accessors and mutators on Eloquent models. Has anyone tried relying only on native hooks instead of Eloquent’s feature? Any limitations you’ve hit?

Trash your banners, callouts, toasts, and notifications. Inline feedback is often enough: clear, unobtrusive, and right where the user is focused. 👇

Gotta love a good-looking, fully accessible, keyboard-controllable tabs component. 🤤

Even better for simple single-line getters... 👇

Using PHP property hooks a lot lately. Absolutely love this “memoized computed property” pattern. It ensures computationally heavy class properties are calculated only once, even when accessed multiple times. So much cleaner than a separate method and property. 🤤

Did you know @filamentphp can auto-discover custom Livewire components in your panel? Just like it does for resources, pages, and widgets. Perfect for keeping panel-specific components organized, scoped to the panel, and alongside your main folders. 👌

Working hard to become a true bake-end developer… 🥖

Did you know macOS now has a clipboard manager built into Spotlight? (Only took them how many years? 😂) Just press command + space and then command + 4. Really digging the Spotlight improvements in macOS Tahoe in general! 👍

Discussion settled once and for all! The absolute truth, Nielsen Norman Group, tells you to not repeat password fields! 🤣

Had an interesting session helping architect an internal Filament plugin. Explored how Filament’s core patterns can be applied to custom plugins to improve flexibility and maintainability. It always excites me to see what you’re all working on 😄

Fun fact: Laravel’s latest products, Nightwatch and Cloud, also follow the single-password-field pattern at sign-up! 😄 Laravel Cloud even leaves out the name field. Makes me wonder if that would be an even better approach...

Unpopular opinion: “Confirm password” fields are bad. Forcing users to enter passwords twice adds friction and lowers conversion rates. Why optimize for a couple users who make a typo? Just let them reset their password. More friction for a few, less friction for most. 👌

Just realized using maxlength on HTML inputs is terrible for UX. Users get no clear signal when they suddenly can’t type more characters, and when pasting, they may not even notice that their text was truncated. Much better to allow any length and validate on the backend. 🔙🔚

Feels so good when a design finally comes together 😌

Waiting on you, Firefox... 😅

Just leveled up my CSS game: Used the cqi unit to fix a vertical layout shift on the Filament Themes site by computing block size from the container’s inline size. Such a powerful unit… especially when aspect-ratio can’t get the job done. Feeling like a pro 😂

Love this new pattern in iOS 26. 👇 Dialogs aren’t centered anymore, but appear right where you triggered them. Feels odd at first, but ultimately creates a much better UX! Shouldn’t we adopt this on the web too? 🤔

Many of you liked this approach, so here’s the code! Just add this single line to your app.js file, and the CSS from all your components will be automatically imported into your app’s stylesheet. 😎

Just wrapped up another successful session. 📞 One of the weirdest bugs I’ve ever seen. Turned out to be caused by a firewall blocking Livewire requests with very specific content. 🫠 Always a surprise what awaits on a call! 😆

Seeing a lot of misuse in Whizzy lately, so decided to fight it with robots. 😂 Now when you try to reuse a project for a different application, it automatically gets locked before you even get a chance to view the code. 🦾

Wanted to give macOS's built in Dictation another try instead of external tools. Works quite well, but... turns out you can't teach it new words. Or well, you can... It's totally ridiculous, but I now have Laravel and Livewire in my contacts just so it recognizes those. 😂

Dear macOS devs, I don’t care about the bugs, they’re ok. Just fix those later. Please, pretty please, let me get rid of this ugly huge MFer in my browser window. Thank you. 🍎❤️

I keep finding interesting quirks in this new macOS version. 😂 Was about to post that I love the new mail loading animation… …until the progress bar dropped back down after hitting 100%. Like, why, just why? 🤌