Level 37
The best things you can do is take some time to plan out your project, even in VERY simple terms, before you start coding. It sounds dumb, but even if your entire project will only have 4 models, with simple BelongsTo relationships between them, it can be super helpful.
Steps for planning:
- Write down, in plain English (or your language of choice) how should things work in your application. What do they need to do, and how are they related to each other. You'll be amazed at how quickly things start to make sense when you try and explain them, even if no one but you will ever read the explanations.
- Make an ERD (entity relationship diagram) showing how the DB schema will be set up, and where things like foreign key relationships need to be created.
I feel like I went from a junior dev to an intermediate when I started doing that little bit of planning work ahead of time. It seems so insignificant (you should be able to knock both of those steps out in an hour or two) but it's proven to be so useful for building my own mental model of what I want my Laravel models to do and how I should structure them.