Week 11

Cleared to start building Laravel Integration

I’ve been working on fixing some of the hindrances on PHPSandbox that don’t allow us to be able to build some functionalities for Laravel. One that stands out is the support Vite based Laravel apps which require long-open connections like WebSocket in the Expose tunnelling server. This is a functionality that doesn’t come out of the box in the forked copy of Expose - the project that powers the tunnelling. I guess this function is missing because the HTTP client used by expose also lacks a feature that lets it support upgraded connections which is something a WebSocket request will do.

In the past, I’ve had to add support for upgraded connections in a forked copy of the HTTP client but it turns out it doesn’t directly work when applied to Expose and it required that I make some additional changes since Expose works differently.

I found that many times, our work as developers often ends up with layers of dependencies of one task on another and eventually it's easy to get lost in doing a task that is unrelated to what you set out to do. This particular case is an example of such. I had to fix the modified HTTP Client which I will then use in adding the new functionality to Expose which I will now use in adding Vite Support for our Laravel apps. This stage of work requires that I focus on the real problem without which I will find myself already working on something that doesn’t count towards what I want to achieve.

I am happy the problem is solved and Vite now works in a Laravel notebook. I gave InertiaJS a try and it worked flawlessly. I can’t but mention the fact that some other changes needed to be done to make everything work but those are minor things that can easily be fixed since it’s within PHPSandbox itself.

The Laravel integration will be our focus for the next few weeks and it will cover many aspects of Laravel in the bid to make Laravel development more seamless on PHPSandbox. A way I defined to make measuring this goal easy is by using Laravel Bootcamp - If someone who is new to Laravel can use PHPSandbox to go through the Laravel Bootcamp successfully, our goal is achieved.

Generative AI at work

My new team has been focused on a project that utilizes generative AIs - I don’t want to go into the details beyond what I’m permitted to share based on work policies. For me, this is new territory and I’ve only used some AI products in the past and only imagined how things work under the hood. It’s a long shot to think I will even be working on an AI-related project at work but here we go. I spent the majority of my time at work trying to understand some generative AI models and also consuming content around this area. To cap it all, it also means I will need to do some work in Python too. I like that this project actually presents many opportunities to learn something new in the process but at the same time, I don’t want to be too optimistic about that yet since we are still early in the process of development. Above all, it was good scratching this AI thing a bit.