Blog | Andy Hinkle

September 22, 2025

Seek Out People Who Care Deeply

Last night, I went to a comedy show featuring Colin Jost and a handful of other Saturday Night Live cast members doing stand-up. It was exactly what you'd expect - funny, light, a little chaotic. We had a great time. But the part that stuck with me most wasn't even a joke.

September 16, 2025

From Scared to Speak: My First Laravel Talk

Five Laracons. That's how many I'd attended before I finally worked up the nerve to give my first tech talk. And honestly? I was terrified.

February 2, 2025

Using Conditional Traits for Clean Queries

While this works, it can get messy if you add more conditions. A better way is to use conditional traits, which would change the code to look like this:

October 9, 2024

Avoid Abstraction Until It's Clearly Necessary

We're often drawn to best practices like code reuse, separation of concerns, and maintainability. But there's a fine line between helpful abstraction and over-engineering. One common pitfall I see is the tendency to extract even the smallest pieces of logic into service classes, helpers, or other abstractions when it's not actually necessary.

September 5, 2024

Laracon 2024, a Recap

Let me take you on a little journey, starting with my arrival in Dallas. This was my fourth Laracon—from taking the train in Chicago to navigating the subway in New York. But Dallas? Dallas had a different kind of excitement in store for me.

September 4, 2024

Deeply Monitoring Laravel Events with AWS CloudWatch

When you're deploying with services like Laravel Vapor, paired with AWS services like CloudWatch, you have powerful tools at your disposal to gain deep insights into your application's events and behaviors.

August 16, 2024

We started a podcast

Laravel has always been a passion of ours, and we've been fortunate to be part of such a vibrant and welcoming community. Through The Midwest Artisan, we want to give back by sharing our experiences, tips, and successes with others who share our love for this incredible framework.

July 21, 2024

Using Cloudflare Page Cache with Laravel

Cloudflare is a popular CDN that can cache your website's assets and pages to improve performance and reduce server load. In Laravel applications, you can use Cloudflare's page cache feature to cache entire pages and serve them directly from Cloudflare's edge servers.

July 10, 2024

Useful bash aliases for Laravel projects

Bash aliases are a great way to speed up your workflow. They allow you to create custom commands that can be used to perform common tasks quickly and easily.

June 26, 2024

Just Try It

We often find comfort in the familiar. The frameworks, libraries, and patterns we've used for years become our go-to tools. However, this comfort can sometimes turn into a reluctance to explore new packages or patterns, leading to missed opportunities for growth and innovation.