Building My Laravel Blog: What I Learned

I just wrapped up a Laravel blog project, and honestly, it taught me more than I expected. 🚀 The big wins? Two-factor authentication with email codes 🔐, proper spam protection for comments (because spam is real 🛡️), and role-based permissions using Spatie's package. I also implemented soft deletes for comments—turns out being able to restore accidentally deleted comments is pretty handy for moderation. ♻️ The trickiest part was handling race conditions in slug generation. ⚡ When two posts get created simultaneously with the same title, you need atomic operations to prevent duplicate slugs. Database transactions saved me there. I'm particularly happy with the authorization layer. ✅ Every controller action checks permissions through Laravel Policies. It's consistent, testable, and way better than scattering if ($user->isAdmin()) checks everywhere. The commit history on GitHub shows how it evolved from basic CRUD to something production-ready. Check it out if you're curious about the technical decisions. 👨‍💻