Gadgets and tools 2025
As the year is almost over, I thought it would be fun to share what gadgets and tools I either purchased in 2025, or got the most use out of. Some of these are great gifts for "your wife's husband".
jenssegers.com
Jens Segers' personal blog
Latest posts
App Runner Custom Domain Association With CDK
As of today, the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) does not natively support associating a custom domain with an AWS App Runner service. This has been a long-standing request from the community.
Simple Next.js environment variable validation
Sometimes I push code to production, only to realize that I forgot to configure a new environment variable on AWS or Vercel. Not ideal. So I looked into how to set up environment variable validation using Zod , and found this interesting YouTube ...
Transcribe meetings locally using Whisper
At work, I attend a lot of meetings. Gemini is great for transcribing and summarizing discussions, but unfortunately, Dutch isn't supported yet.
ARM-Powered GitHub Action Runners using the Raspberry Pi 5
While working on a side project recently, I reached the free tier limit for GitHub Action minutes. For this project, I created multiple Docker images for the ARM architecture to be deployed as AWS Lambda functions. This prompted me to explore ...
A stateless blog with Webmentions
It happened. I have rebuilt my blog using Next.js and Markdown files. It was an opportunity to further improve my React skills and experiment with Next.js' server-side rendering. While doing this, I have decided to throw out my old ...
Automatically update docker images with Watchtower
Yesterday I ran across an interesting tool for Docker called Watchtower . It runs in the background and monitors your running Docker containers for images updates. If a new image is found, it pulls it and restarts the container with the exact ...
Decoupling releases from deploys using feature flags
So you've been working on this new amazing feature for a while now. You're ready to click the merge button and deploy to production, but your product owner is holding you back because there are still some minor design tweaks or not everything was ...
Speed up PhpStorm with Nyan Cat
Tired of waiting on those boring PhpStorm progress bars? Install this Nyan Cat progress bar plugin and make waiting fun again!
Goodbye controllers, hello request handlers
A lot has changed in the PHP landscape over the past years. We started using more design patterns and things like the DRY and SOLID principles. But not a lot has changed for Controllers right?
Dynamic DNS for CloudFlare with ddclient
Today I found out that ddclient added support for CloudFlare since version 3.8.2. Unfortunately, Ubuntu 14.04 ships with version 3.8.1, but I will show you how to update it.
List outdated composer packages
It has been more than a year since I opened a GitHub issue on the composer repository to propose an outdated command. It took a while, but we finally got what we asked!
Protect your server with fail2ban
Fail2ban is a must-have for every SSH-enabled server that is connected to the internet. It protects services such as SSH from illegitimate access.
Find large directories and files on Debian or Ubuntu with ncdu
Time to stop using the find command to search for large directories or files on your servers. There's a neat disk usage analyser tool called ncdu that you should definitely give a try!
Laravel SMTP driver vs. API drivers
After Mandrill changed their pricing model, I (as well as many others) started exploring different transactional email services. Laravel only supports a couple providers out of the box, but what about the others?
Running both PHP 5 and PHP 7 without wasting resources
Installing both PHP 5 and PHP 7 next to each other seems to be fairly simple. In this blog post, I will be showing you how you can free up some resources while you're transitioning to PHP 7. Here's what I did.
List outdated composer packages with Climb
Composer is really missing an "outdated" command like most of the other package managers. Luckily, the Climb package has this covered!
Clearing PHP's OPcache with CacheTool
OPcache is great, it improves PHP performance by storing precompiled script bytecode in shared memory, thereby removing the need for PHP to load and parse scripts on each request.
Installing PHP 5.6 and Mcrypt on Mac OSX
Years ago I wrote a blog post on how to install the PHP mcrypt extension on OSX. But times change, and here's how you do it, for real.
Getting device information from your visitors
Mobiledetect is awesome, but it doesn't extract information for desktop devices and browser. So I decided to create my own package that extends Mobiledetect; meet the Agent .
Easy system email relay with Nullmailer and Mandrill
Installing and configuring Postfix or Exim often feels like rocket science to get everything set up without any security holes. But those days are over; meet the awesome Nullmailer + Mandrill combo!
Dependency injection with League's new Container
The PHP League just released version 2 of their dependency injection container, and this is why you should be excited.
Using Blade outside of Laravel
For me, Laravel's Blade templating engine is one of the best templating engines I have ever used. But wouldn't it be nice to use Blade outside of a Laravel project?
OSX Nano Syntax Highlighting
Wait, nano has syntax highlighting? Why did I not know this?
CLI progress bars in Laravel
Laravel 5.1 was released this week, and it came with a lot of interesting goodies. One of those goodies was the addition of Symfony's progress bar support for console commands. I have a lot of commands that I use to perform periodic tasks, and ...
Laravel error logging with Sentry
Decent error logging is one of the most important things when it comes to building applications. It is so unprofessional when a client calls you about a bug and you have no idea what he is talking about. Wouldn't you rather be able to tell him ...
Tilde and caret version constraints in Composer
Recently, Composer changed their default version constraint from using ~ (tilde) to ^ (caret). Luckily for you, my friend Hannes Van De Vreken wrote a great article about the difference between the two:
Id transformation with Optimus
Recently I wrote a blog post and gave a talk at php.gent about id obfuscation and how it can help hide your application internals from malicious users. While doing some research about other obfuscation techniques, I stumbled upon an ...
Behold the power of yield
The first time I read about yield in PHP was in the PHP 5.5 changelog back in 2013. Actually, I did not really give it that much attention, since I thought it was not that big of deal at the time. It wasn't until I was using it in Python to ...
Adding Whoops back to Laravel 5
If you have ever used Laravel 4, you have probably seen the following Whoops error screen÷