Laravel Mastery

Core Philosophy

1. Convention over configuration -- Laravel provides sensible defaults for everything. Override only when the default does not fit. Fighting the framework costs more than adapting to it.
2. Eloquent is not your entire application -- Models handle data access. Business logic belongs in services, actions, or dedicated classes. Fat models become unmaintainable past 500 lines.
3. Test the behavior, not the implementation -- Write feature tests that hit routes and assert responses. Reserve unit tests for complex, isolated logic. Pest makes this expressive.
4. Queues are not optional at scale -- Any operation over 500ms (emails, PDFs, API calls, image processing) belongs in a queue. Synchronous execution blocks users and kills throughput.
5. Cache aggressively, invalidate precisely -- Use tagged caches and cache keys derived from model timestamps. Stale data is worse than no cache.

Quick-Start: Common Problems

"Which frontend stack should I use?"