Set up Varnish, and some PHP in Laravel for setting proper headers

Queues are a great way to take some task out of the user-flow and put them in the background. Here's (most of) how I set up Beanstalkd to work with Laravel 4 in a production environment.

How Config and Environments work

How to extend or replace a core class in Laravel 4

OpCache is like APC - it caches your compiled PHP so you don't need to rebuild it on every request. PHP 5.5 comes with OpCache out of the box. I happen to have PHP 5.4 and wanted it now, so I decided to install it. Here's how.

This will cover receiving GitHub's WebHooks using Node, and taking action on them with a shell script.

We can use openCV ("a library of programming functions for real time computer vision") for detecting faces in an image. Here is a quick way to do that.

There has been some confusion about how to extend the Illuminate Request and/or the Response classes. Because of their importance in handling HTTP requests, these two classes are handled slightly differently than normal classes. I will go over how to extend them and then I will show you a method which favors composition over inheritance.

The art of using Event Emitters for cleaner code in Node.js

There's some confusion about what the PHP-FIG is. I'm here to add to that confusion.

Version 2 of my article.

When your Laravel web app is behind a load balancer, reverse-proxy or other intermediary, you don't get the correct user IP address reported to you. This will cover how to retrieve the correct client IP address in those situations.

This will go over getting an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS server up and running for production use using Nginx instead of Apache. This does not pretend to be an exhaustive resource, particularly around security. This is Laravel friendly.

A growing list of Vim tricks as I learn them.

The most powerful cache isn't necessarily the one you install on your application server. Here are the different kinds of caching available and what they mean for your web application.