2025 Week 08
PHPSandbox has been on Laravel 10 for a while and I decided to keep it that ways since there wasn't really any main benefit to get from upgrading. At best, I figured I will only be spending time I can use on something else to do it. So, until now, I could say it's one of those things that doesn't have any reward for doing it.
Now that Laravel 12 has been announced, I figured there's actually no point in letting this upgrade linger. Also, all the things that will make this upgrade a lot more straight forward are now in place, so why not just do it? Before now, the code was tad complicated in that it's doing a lot more than being the gateway to most of the data PHPSandbox manages.
Majority of my work on it last year was around reducing this complexity and that finally paved the way for the upgrade to happen. Some of things also done was put more effort into E2E Tests for cases like this where I need to rely on the end user experience for direct feedback.
So, I spent a bulk of the week preparing the codebase, scanning through the docs and making sure things work well afterwards. Overall, I can say this upgrade was fairly straight forward aside some initial concerns I shared in this tweet.
While I didn't get any response or interaction from Laravel or Taylor himself, I believe it's a thing they should actively lookout for.
Next week, Laravel 12 will be out and I plan to upgrade immediately if possible, so, I plan to share how that goes next week.
Something I do think about a lot these days is to not only focus on things that will enable a certain thing to be done, but also on the things that prevents it from being done. When obstacles that prevents things from being done are eliminated, most task will naturally have a clearer path to being done.
I eventually ordered a Ridge wallet to keep my loose cards in one place after avoiding the use use of a wallet for almost a decade. The last time I lost a wallet, I lost some important items and that was when I gave up. These days, I'd rather takeout only the cards I need and put them in my wallet than take them all. This way, I reduce the risk of "loosing it all at once".
Speaking of the order, it has been placed like weeks back with the promise of 14 days max, but I wasn't so worried since I don't need it urgently. I thought if I use a free delivery service, for which my order is eligible, I can save some bucks but this didn't play out as I thought. In fact, as of now, I have decided to not use free deliveries from the US anymore unless I'm okay to get the item in a month.
In addition to the delayed delivery, I also now need to pay a custom duty which sometimes is around 19% of the cost of my order. I'm not yet sure if this is new or it's just something I was completely unaware of. Comparing the quote of the paid shipping to the free one, where I pay custom duty on top, it's almost double. On top of all this, I will need to walk into a pickup point to pay and get the package. This "free" service is now costing me so much more!
Since this is the second time this has happened, I will be avoiding free shipping from the US for now.
I'm old enough to know that the height of political discuss are always revealed around / during election period and Germany whose election is happening on the day I'm writing this is not an exception. Over the week I try to catch up on a lot of the discussions and how things might look like in the coming weeks / months following the election.
As a non-German speaker having DW has been a blessing to at least be abreast of what everyone is saying and what is happening. What I do wish for, is to already be able to understand more German to the point that I can listen to the local news as I think they might have more of the local gists.
I've been closely following the news and some subjects for months now mostly because it makes me thing about how my long term stay here might look like. My goal is to be German citizen one day and I'm deeply interested in how all these political processes evolve to help me achieve that. Also, being an immigrant, it's also normal for me to want to know what the next move of the law makes can be given that Immigration has been a very hot topic of debate in this election.
I'm sure in the coming weeks, I will start getting some pictures on where the country might be headed. I've been a fan of Germany since I was boy hearing of their engineering / industrial capacity and now I still wish them well over months to come.
You might wonder - why am I restarting this weekly notes. Well, I'm not sure. I just think I don't have any reason not to do it at this point. So, we see how this goes!
Bosun.