If you've been building Laravel apps for a while, you've probably run into the classic N+1 query problem. Lazy loading is convenient, but it kills performance when you loop through a collection and access relationships one by one.

Today, we’re diving into something that might seem small but is actually incredibly important in your Laravel journey: how to properly use Laravel’s config files together with your .env variables. This is one of those topics that can really level up the way you structure and manage your application, especially if you’re building apps that need to run in different environments (development, staging, production, etc.).

In this guide, we’ll look at why eager loading should be considered a default practice when working with Eloquent models. It helps prevent hidden performance issues, reduces unnecessary database queries, and makes your application scale more predictably as it grows.

Type hinting is a programming feature that allows developers to specify the data types of variables, arguments, and return types in functions or methods. It is a feature that has been introduced in many programming languages in recent years, including PHP, Python, and Java. In this blog post, we will discuss why type hinting is important, the advantages and disadvantages of using it, how we can implement it in our code, and see some examples