Welcome to the course! In this first episode, we're diving into why uploading large files is best done by breaking (or 'chunking') them up on the client side before sending them to the server. We talk about the big advantages of this approach—like faster uploads and being able to pause and resume transferring files, which is super handy for users.
To kick things off, we show a quick demo of the app you'll be building, walking through the upload process with the Chrome dev tools and some network throttling. You'll see how to upload a big video file, how you can pause it mid-way, watch the progress bar, and then resume the upload. When the upload is complete, the file's chunks are put back together on the back end and stored in the database. There's also the option to cancel uploads completely.
We highlight that this solution is pretty flexible and isn't tied strictly to Inertia.js or Vue—you could use it with any front-end framework. For the back end, we'll be working with Laravel, and the packages we'll use make adding chunked, resumable uploads much easier.
By the end of this episode, you'll have seen what we're building and all the cool features it supports. Next up, we'll start building it step by step so you can add fast, reliable, chunked uploads to your own projects!