In a new post to his site Jason McCreary shows how he integrated SMS for account administration for the Laravel Shift service. It's his method of providing good support for the project from anywhere, even when he's away from his machine.

In the end, all I need is a quick way to run a Shift on the go. Looking back on almost two years of support, I often have the Shift number readily available. Creating the job and adding it to the queue is at most two lines of code. So the steps are not the pain point.

The pain point is connecting to the server. [...] What do I carry around with me all the time? My phone. I’m already reviewing the support emails from my phone. Wouldn’t it be great when I need to run a Shift manually to just reply or send a text.

He then shares the code he used to create the administration interface via SMS through the Nexmo service. He uses the information the Nexmo service sends to hiswebhook via a special number and handles it via a special endpoint on his side. In this case the interface allows him to re-run a "shift" that was previously requested if there was an error. The code is pretty simple, made up of a controller and route for the endpoint and a "FormRequest" class for the message processing.

Jason McCreary, the developer behind the Laravel Shift upgrade service, has posted a retrospective of his work on the project and some of the things he's learned along the way. The service just recently topped 1000 applications upgraded.

Less than a year ago I created Laravel Shift. While not my first product, it is my first software as a service (SaaS). If you’re not familiar with Laravel Shift or interested in the backstory check out the Q&A on Laravel News or listen to the interview on Full Stack Radio.

In this post, I want to focus more on reaching the milestone of 1,000 Laravel applications upgraded. This may not sound like many, however for my first SaaS product it marks the achievement of my stretch goal. So allow me to share the most important decision, biggest challenge, and what the future holds for Laravel Shift.

He starts with a section talking about the difference between a "project" and a "product" targeted at developers who, usually, have more than one project going at a time. He talks about his decision to move Shift to a "product" and some of the hurdles he hit because of being "a developer, not a marketer". He finishes the post looking ahead to things coming with the service and the announcement of "human services" being offered to get a live person involved in the upgrade of your Laravel application.

The Laravel News podcast, hosted by Eric Barnes and Jack Fruh, has shared its latest episode today: Episode #25 - Laravel 5.3 and Shift with Taylor Otwell and Jason McCreary.

In this episode, we are joined by Taylor Otwell and Jason McCreary to discuss Laravel 5.3, Laravel's first hire, and Laravel Shift.

Besides the topics already mentioned they also discuss Laravel Forge and Laravel Passport. You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page audio player or by downloading the episode directly. If you enjoy the show be sure to subscribe to their feed or on iTunes/Google Play to get the latest episodes as they're released.

The Full Stack Radio podcast has posted their latest episode interviewing Jason McCreary about the Laravel Shift service - a tool that helps you upgrade your Laravel applications more automatically and keep them up to date. It's a commercial service, though, and not an open source tool but there is a demo pull request you can see to get an idea of how it all works.

In this episode, Adam talks to Jason McCreary about building Shift, a tool that automates upgrading your application between framework versions.

Other topics mentioned in the episode also include PocketBracket, Laravel Cashier and the abstract syntax tree functionality (added to PHP in PHP 7.0). You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly. Be sure to subscribe to their feed if you enjoy the show and want to catch future episodes as they're released.

On the Laravel News site they've posted an interview with Jason McCreary, the lead developer behind the Laravel Shift service, a product that helps you keep your Laravel applications up to date with the latest versions of the framework.

Laravel Shift is a new project aimed at automatically upgrading out of date Laravel apps up to the current version. The way it works is you sign-in with either Github or BitBucket, purchase a shift (an upgrade package), and then review the pull request it automatically creates.

I had a chance to speak with Jason, the lead developer on the project and what follows is a Q&A about Shift.

They talk about where the idea for Laravel Shift came from originally and how the upgrade process happens (hint: it's automated). Jason also answers questions about what kinds of applications it will work on and how it's handled if there's an application that can't be upgraded. He also mentions the process for upgrading from a very old version, noting that it would be required to "shift" multiple times to achieve the correct results.

Michelangelo van Dam continues his series on some of the basics of PHP with another look at arrays (started in this article).

Like all things in life, we need to start with simple things. So, in order to understand what arrays are in PHP, we need to take a look at the PHP manual to read what it is all about. [...] The thing with PHP is that an array is probably one of the most used data structures in web applications build with PHP and used for a wide variety of purposes.

He covers the basics of:

• storing multiple values in an array and pushing additional values onto the end
• removing the last item added to the array
• pulling the first element off of the array

In his next article, he plans on expanding this introduction to arrays by looking at associative arrays.