Beyond Fat Controllers: Mastering Event-Driven Decoupling in Laravel

Fat controllers in Laravel accumulate business logic over time, making code fragile and hard to test. Using Laravel's built-in event system, controllers can be slimmed down to dispatch a single event (e.g., UserRegistered) while independent listeners handle side effects like sending emails, logging, and analytics. Implementing ShouldQueue on listeners moves heavy work off the HTTP request cycle, improving performance and fault tolerance. The post also covers best practices to avoid 'Event Hell', when to use Eloquent Observers vs. Events, and how to configure retry logic for queued listeners.