->paginate(20) makes ->limit(100) redundant

Than bring it up to him in a nice way that you do not think it is necessary to implement repository pattern since eloquent already abstracts data retrieval. But if they are set on it, the reality is you can't do much about it. Use it like they suggest, while a bit overkill it's not a bad pattern to have under your tool belt.

why do you need to make table engine as InnoDB for gifts table?

are the other tables not InnoDB as well? I don't think you can have foreign keys between different engines.

Sorry to raise this post from the dead, but I just published a package that makes this doable. It updates the DB (you control how often with a configurable throttle) so that redis sessions can be tracked/listed/destroyed.

User Agent enrichment happens automatically, and you can optionally install the MaxMind GeoLite2 DB and get Location detail too.

100% type coverage, test coverage, and phpstan at level 9.

https://github.com/willvincent/laravel-session-manager

what is your session driver? do you have some specific setup where file or database deletes are expensive?

if you can't do anything else, you can at least use a driver that does auto clearing of old data for you.

If you are applying for the role of "Laravel Developer" you are expected to know Laravel. Than depending on the required experience, you are expected to know things around the framework or ecosystem you will be working on.

Read the actual description and requirements of the position to have an understanding of what is expected of you. Example one position might expect you to also know some frontend framework, others might not care at all about that and expect you to know something else, it's not fixed.

you have a lot of code there, can you give a specific example you are having trouble with?

since you are using max level I really hope you are actually using larastan

(like AWSs EC2, Cloud Formation, ELB, Auto-Scaling, ECS, EKS, IAM, RDS, S3 if using this Storage, etc...), most of these Services are a requirement not added when needed - all of that is optional tho, you don't need every AWS service to run a server. The cloud saved us so much money we can almost afford the team to run it mentality

I would not recommend auth here, it has way more friction. You ask for user to provide email and password, and also verify his email, and than go back and like your post.

By that point a lot of users have given up if having an account in your portfolio serves no other purpose. Compare that to only sending an email or sms and verifying there.

you need to ask something unique from the user to be able to have unique functionality like unique likes.

even when they don't authenticate, you can still ask for an email address or phone number to send a verification link. only after clicking that link you can do your checks for uniqueness consider their like to be valid.

why couldn't he install pcntl extension?

your session does not have a "login_web_*****" key here, so you are not logged in.

can you show an example of your dataset, and what are you trying to query from it? What is the resulting response you expect? What do you mean by "they all appear to find the latest before filtering by date"? Why do you need "->select(DB::raw('DISTINCT ON(packaging_id) *'))"?

is this secondary db connection on the same sql server? or is it a completely external system. If it's external I think you have to treat it as such in your application and not mix it with your internal queries.