Sometimes you have files or other large chunks of data that you need to associate with a record in your database. It might be convenient to just store that as base64-encoded data or HTML in a "longtext" column, but that can eventually cause issues—especially as the table grows. What other options are there?

In this episode of Over Engineered, we go back to the show's roots and try to find the absolute best solution to a problem we already have an acceptable solution for.

At the beginning of August, after six years of working on it on-and-off, Ben Holmen took his Kilopixel project live. It's a 1000 pixel display, where each pixel has to be manually toggled by a custom CNC rig, and it's whimsical and impractical and took the internet by storm. In today's episode, Chris chats with Ben and Joe about the whole project and what's next for the display.

Links:

• Kilopixel
• I spent 6 years building a ridiculous wooden pixel display
• The Kilopixel recap
• Show HN
• Kilopixel on Side Projects
• Ben Holmen on Over Engineered

Up until now, browser testing in Laravel has felt… bad. Dusk was a huge step over nothing, but it's been slow and flaky and just waiting to be replaced with something better. And with Pest 4, Nuno's cracked it!

In today's episode of Over Engineered with dig into the technical details of what makes browser testing in Pest 4 both very fast and much more stable than Dusk and all the other browser testing approaches that came before it.

Links:

• Pest
• Nuno Maduro (all his socials)
• Playwright
• Nuno's livestream of this episode

Alex Hillman has been thinking about and actively supporting communities for decades. In this episode, Chris and Alex talk about lessons he's learned along the way that can help meetup organizers tend their local tech communities, and brainstorm about ways that we can organize together to support meetups in general.

Links:

• tiny.mba
• stackingthebricks.com
• indyhall.org
• 10k.city
• phpx.world

Simon Hamp and Marcel Pociot have been working on NativePHP for a number of years, and Simon just surprised with world at Laracon EU with a NativePHP for Mobile announcement. In this episode, Simon and Chris get deep into the the NativePHP innards, explore sustainable open source, and generally just have a good time for <> over two hours 😅

Links:

• NativePHP
• Zephpyr
• dagger

Zuzana Kunckova started Larabelles five years ago, and over that time it has grown into an important part of the Laravel community. In today's episode, Zuzana and Chris talk about the future of Larabelles now that she has more time to dedicate to it.

Links:

• Larabelles
• Sponsor Larabelles on GitHub
• Sponsor Larabelles on Patreon
• Other ways to support Larabelles

What happens when you get a bunch of Laravel podcasters + a bunch of mics in a room? Chaos, apparently.

Recorded live after PHP × NYC with Ben Holmen, John Drexler, Daniel Coulbourne, Chris Morrell, Ian Landsman, Dave Hicking, and Joe Tannenbaum.

There's lots of advice out there for running software teams, but much of it comes from large organizations with dozens or hundreds of developers. Smaller teams have different needs. On today's episode, we pick up from a question Dan asked on Bluesky and talk about how best to approach running a small development team.

Links:

• Dan's Bluesky Post
• Thunk

Shawn McCool has been talking about event sourcing for years, and recently started a new series of streams on the topic. In this episode, Chris and Shawn talk about event sourcing, Verbs, and community (among other things).

Links:

• Shawn on Twitch
• Event Sourcery
• Verbs

Design patterns can be very useful, but can also be weaponized as a way to "prove" that someone is doing something the "wrong" way. Mary has been thinking a lot about the good side of knowing design patterns, so we sat down to chat about them.