Notes on PHP, Drupal, Laravel, React, and Next.js development.
Jun 2026
Setting up Xdebug 3 with VS Code end to end: php.ini config, the PHP Debug extension, launch.json, debugging inside Docker/DDEV and WSL specifically, conditional breakpoints and logpoints, and the connection issues people actually hit.
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Jun 2026
Building a real Laravel REST API: versioned routes, API Resources for response shaping, Form Request validation, consistent error handling, Sanctum token authentication vs Passport, rate limiting, avoiding N+1 queries, testing, and documentation.
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Jun 2026
A practical guide to headless Drupal with JSON:API: when to choose it over GraphQL or a custom controller, the query syntax, the computed-field and missing-include gotchas that trip up first integrations, writing content, fetching media, and locking it down for production.
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Jun 2026
Fetching data in React: the full manual useEffect approach (and everything it takes to make it merely correct — loading/error state, race conditions, no caching), the same thing with React Query, mutations with automatic cache invalidation, and when plain useEffect is still the right call.
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Jun 2026
App Router vs Pages Router in Next.js: file convention differences, Server Components by default, persistent nested layouts, the fundamentally different data-fetching model (async Server Components vs getServerSideProps/getStaticProps), streaming with Suspense, and whether migrating an existing app is worth it.
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Laravel queues in practice: creating and dispatching jobs, choosing a driver (database vs Redis vs SQS), running workers safely in production, job batching with progress tracking, job middleware for rate limiting, and handling failures and retries correctly.
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