Programming on ma.ttias.be

Lessons learned: don't mix $timeout attributes and properties on queued Laravel jobs

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Update: the fix described in this post has since been merged into Laravel and ships in the next 13.x release. From that release on, a child class’s plain $timeout property correctly overrides an attribute inherited from a parent, so the specific footgun below no longer bites. This post stays up as a historical write-up: how the bug behaved, the subtle PHP reflection edge case behind it, and the fix that closed it.

More time to think

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’m finding myself thinking longer about the code I write and the features that get developed, than I did before the agentic coding era.

Finding Dutch audio across streaming services

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We have 4 streaming services at home: Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, and Apple TV+. Try finding which films and series are actually available with Dutch audio.

Imposter: a single-phone party game, free and open source

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Our babysitter recently played a fun game with our kids called “Fake It”. It’s a simple party game, not too complex, and doesn’t require any props. The app store is full of them, but they all hide ads or have a €9.99/week (week!) subscription model, all trying to trick you into buying or paying. But it’s such a simple game. Surely, I can just make my own version, right?

How we implemented a mobile-friendly Oh Dear UI with AI

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We just shipped a mobile-friendly version of Oh Dear . It touched 226 files, added over 5,000 lines, and modified 160+ Blade templates. The PR took three weeks from first commit to merge.

Catching SQL performance issues in PHPUnit and Pest, as part of your test infrastructure

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been on a bit of a SQL performance kick lately. Over at Oh Dear , I wrote a 3-part series about finding, fixing, and automatically detecting SQL performance issues . The last part of that series covers how we catch regressions before they hit production by running checks in our test suite.

Using AI is no longer optional

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve gone from generating funny images to AI being a core part of being a developer quite fast, haven’t we?

Web development is fun again

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I remember when PHP 4 was a thing. jQuery was new and shiny. Sites were built with tables, not divs. Dreamweaver felt like a life hack. Designs were sliced in Photoshop. Databases lived in phpMyAdmin.

cargo: no such subcommand: +nightly

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Mon, 23 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I was trying to run the following command:

$ cargo +nightly install [package]
error: no such subcommand: `+nightly`

But … that didn’t work. This was my fix:

Could not find directory of OpenSSL installation

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Mon, 23 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Ran into this error when compiling some software from source:

Could not find directory of OpenSSL installation, and this `-sys` crate cannot
proceed without this knowledge. If OpenSSL is installed and this crate had
trouble finding it, you can set the `OPENSSL_DIR` environment variable for the
compilation process.

The fix is, luckily, rather easy.

wabt-sys compile: error: CMAKE_PROJECT_VERSION was not declared in this scope on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Mon, 23 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

When trying to compile WebAssembly (wabt-rs) for a dependent package, it failed on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS due to this error message.

Git commit without the pre-commit hook

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Mon, 29 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Quick tip if you want to skip the pre-commit validations and quickly want to get a commit out there.

Want to improve? Add a delay

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Thu, 11 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re a bit like me, you’re probably impatient. You want things to move quickly. There’s no time to waste!

A PHP package to simplify working with percentages

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I created a PHP package that can make it easier to work with percentages in any PHP application.

Dissecting the code responsible for the Bitcoin halving

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Sun, 10 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

When I wrote this in May 2020, the Bitcoin network was a few hours away from its third “halving”. So what is it and how does it work under the hood?

Creating a 2-of-3 multisig with raw transactions on EOSIO

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Tue, 05 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

These instructions can be followed to create a 2-out-of-3 multisignature address on the EOS blockchain (or any derivative thereof). This means you will need at least 2 out of the 3 keyholders to sign off on a transaction before any funds can be spent.

Selecting all checkboxes on a page with the Developer Console

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Sun, 03 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A quick reminder to myself that the Developer Console in Chrome or Firefox is useful to mass-select a bunch of checkboxes, if the site doesn’t have a “select all”-option (which really, it should).

Composer require specific version while ignoring package dependencies

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’m working on some new versions of PHP packages, and for that I’m working of a temporary branch. I wanted to update my local composer packages, but ran into a package constraint.

Forcing a Content-Type header with Guzzle's form_params

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Mon, 09 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I just lost an hour or 2 of my life to this, so I figure I’ll do a small write-up to save future me from having to do the same dance.

Adding a sticky table of contents in Hugo to posts

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Wed, 26 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Bram Van Damme recently shared a really cool method of showing a table of contents on a page and I’ve wanted to implement it on this blog ever since.

Making a JSON prettifier in pure JavaScript

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Fri, 20 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I toyed with the idea of making a JSON prettifier myself. I often use these to re-format and debug a minified JSON payload.

How to use ffmpeg to combine multiple videos to one

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Sat, 09 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s a quick tip on how to combine multiple separate videos into a single one, using ffmpeg.

A github CI workflow tailored to modern PHP applications (Laravel, Symfony, …)

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Thu, 03 Oct 2019 11:45:56 +0000

Last year we wrote a blogpost about our setup we use for Oh Dear! with Gitlab, and how we use their pipelines for running our CI tests . Since then, we’ve moved back to Github since they introduced their free private repositories.

Benchmarking websocket server performance with Artillery

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Tue, 04 Dec 2018 22:18:20 +0000

We recently deployed a custom websocket server for Oh Dear! and wanted to test its ability to handle requests under load. This blogpost will explain how we performed that load test using Artillery .

Tracking SQL queries

mattias@ma.ttias.be (Mattias Geniar) — Thu, 22 Nov 2018 12:00:33 +0000

This is a very clever technique that allows you to add meta data (or “comments”) to SQL queries from within your application or framework.