It’s a good job my job title doesn’t include development. Some things I find out seem a long time after I need then and would be useful in the world of development. My latest discovery is the Laravel debug bar. https://github.com/barryvdh/laravel-debugbar Using it means not so many dd() or dump() in my code to find out what Laravel sees. It even allows me to see the actual SQL queries being used. 
Laravel Debug Bar In many ways I wish I’d discovered this sooner. Installation is very simple, just a composer require and then ensure your .env has the debug option enabled and/or debug bar enabled.
APP_DEBUG=true
DEBUGBAR_ENABLED=true