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Nico Devs

Nico Devs

Lead Programmer

Article
Run AI in the Browser: A Practical Guide to Transformers.js
· Nico Devs
Imagine you need to integrate AI into your web app. Let's say you want to quickly translate text. Preferably, you'd like to use something free and open source (you don't want any surprise bills at the end of the month). One more thing: people use your...
Article
Build Your Own AI-Powered Slack Bot with the Laravel AI SDK
· Nico Devs
At Tighten, we use Slack for all our internal communication. It's where we chat, share ideas, and keep everyone up to date. And today, with AI becoming increasingly present in our workflows, the question writes itself:...
Article
Chat with Your Documents: A Practical Guide to RAG Using the New Laravel AI SDK
· Nico Devs
Have you ever wished you could just ask your documents a question and get an answer? That's exactly what RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) lets you do. It's the technique behind those AI chatbots that can answer questions...
Article
I broke production. What now?
· Nico Devs
Let me start by telling you how I broke a production database. A long time ago, I worked for a hosting company. We were building our own CRM, a complex tool that centralized all communication: emails, chats, texts—everything. I was working...
Article
Build an AI-Powered Drawing Guessing Game with Laravel, Prism, and HTML Canvas
· Nico Devs
AI is everywhere. It can create songs, build entire apps, and even drive our cars. But... can it play Pictionary? We're about to find out. Today, we're building an AI-powered drawing guessing game. In this little app, users...
Article
Build Your Own Private, Self-Hosted AI Applications with Ollama & Laravel
· Nico Devs
Imagine your team wants to bring AI into their workflow to automate routine tasks, extract insights from data, assist with content creation, or improve customer support. Smart move! You can integrate AI into your system using APIs from OpenAI...
Article
17 New(ish) Vanilla JavaScript Features You Might Have Missed
· Nico Devs
JavaScript: the language many love to hate. Yeah, we've all seen the memes about its quirks and limitations. Maybe that's why we slap a whole typing system on top of it. And add one, two, or... ten thousand npm packages into our apps....
Article
SQL Generated Columns and Views: How to Use Them in Your Laravel App
· Nico Devs
Over the years of working with Laravel Eloquent models, I've come to appreciate how clean and elegant they can make a codebase. Along the way, I've learned which queries they run under the hood and which native SQL features can make those queries more...
Article
10 Efficient (and Fun) Ways to Seed Your Database
· Nico Devs
Seeders allow us to quickly fill our database with records to test our application. Let's say that you need a couple of users to test your authentication system—you could create them manually using your app's register page or...
Article
Five Practical Tips to Improve Search in Laravel Apps With Typesense
· Nico Devs
Typesense is making waves in the search landscape. Since its inclusion as an officially supported driver for Laravel Scout, Typesense has quickly become a...
Article
Filament Crash-Course: Create a Customizable Admin Panel in Minutes
· Nico Devs
In most applications, administrators need a way to manage data. Whether it's a blog's articles and comments, a store's products and orders, or a theater's events and tickets, admins need a place to list, create, edit, and remove records. And...
Article
From MySQL to Typesense: Blazing-Fast Full-Text Search in Laravel
· Nico Devs
Search is everywhere: Finding the nearest gas station, looking up a tutorial on YouTube, or searching for an old message in a chat ... in-app search is there to help us quickly find what we’re looking for. That’s why today,...
Article
How to Automatically Generate Dynamic Open Graph Images for All Your Jigsaw Site’s Pages
· Nico Devs
You just published an amazing post on your blog and are ready to share it with the world when you remember you need to create an Open Graph (OG) image for it. You open Photoshop, thinking, "There has to be a better way." Well, there is! In...
Article
Use HTMX to Create Laravel Single-Page Apps Without Writing JavaScript
· Nico Devs
Sometimes, the landscape of front-end development can seem overwhelming. Should I use React? Svelte? Livewire? Vue? And TypeScript? And a state manager, and maybe a meta-framework? Transpilers, bundlers, minifiers, and... hey, what is Bun?...
Article
Form Validation with Type Inference Made Easy with Zod, the Best Sidekick for TypeScript
· Nico Devs
Server-side validation is a must, but client-side validation is also crucial: when a user attempts to submit a form, providing instant feedback and highlighting the fields with invalid data can be an invaluable guide to help them get...
Article
Husky: How to automatically format, lint and test before you commit or push
· Nico Devs
When a team works on a project, keeping the codebase up to coding standards might be challenging. Perhaps a team member submits code that deviates from the established coding style, or you make a commit fixing a component but unintentionally breaking...
Article
State management in Vue 3: Why you should try out Pinia
· Nico Devs
They say there are two difficult things in programming: naming things and cache invalidation. I would add one more to the list: state management in modern web applications! Today, we'll delve into state management strategies in Vue and...
Article
Nuxt: Superpowers for your Vue 3 application
· Nico Devs
Are you searching for a way to enhance the speed of your Vue application development? Let me introduce you to Nuxt, a framework for constructing Vue applications. Initially envisioned as a counterpart to Next.js...