Sam Levy

So back to the theme of this year's conference, Devolution, we've come up with a question for you that talks a bit about how you've, you know, retooled or adapted or evolved professionally yourself.

What is one assumption about Laravel applications that you used to trust almost automatically until production taught you to be suspicious of it?

I've got to say eager loading.

It's before I started working in Laravel, I had... done a lot of hand rolling SQL.

I'd done the migration from the MySQL family functions to PDO.

And I'd been working on a system migrated, I think there were 12,000 handwritten SQL queries in it.

And I migrated every single one of them from MySQL family to PDO.

So I'd learned a lot about how MySQL works and I'd learned a lot about avoiding N plus ones.

Then I came to Laravel where there was this fancy, just eager loading.

You had these models and you can just go, I want this.

And then suddenly it was there.

Yeah.

And I thought it was great until I ran into a system that had nested trees and I looked at how many queries were being run.

And I'm like, oh, there's a thousand, 2000 queries to load this one page.

And it's just because it was, yeah, it was eager loading.

So now I try to avoid it.

It's still handy to have as a tool for that one time where you need a relation on one model and you don't need it on all the rest because The alternative is loading everything just in case.

But, yeah, it's one of the ones that really bit me where I went, oh, okay, maybe that part isn't so great to just leave unchecked.

It's one of those assumptions that is usually safe until the reality of, you know, an actual production system hits you and makes you rethink that and then you're, you know, more cautious about it moving forward.

Yeah.