Freek.dev

My buddy Frederick Vanbrabant, who is currently looking for a new opportunity, recorded a cool video course on how to build a PHP framework using some popular components. Here's the playlist that contains all the episodes.

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Marina Posniak, UX writer at Spotify, shares some great tips on how to write error messages well.

To start, ask yourself if you even need the error message. Before writing anything, consider if there’s a way to redesign the experience so there’s no error at all. Is there a way to just make it work? (Really, the best error message is no error message.) But if you do need it, think carefully about the message. When things go wrong and the app “fails,” say something useful. The message should help the user solve the problem and move on.

Read more [thestyleofelements.org]

Recently Taylor Otwell held a blogging competition. Entries could be submitted on a GitHub repo, the post with the highest amount of ? would win. My colleague Alex wrote a blogpost on how you could easily win the competition by hacking a bit. It's pretty awesome that Alex, without using any of the hacks described in the post, wound up winning the competition.

I feel like programmers are often as good at breaking things as they are at fixing things. Part of the thought process of programming anything new is figuring out its flaws, weaknesses and possible exploitations. As a web developer, I often find myself applying the same thought process to everything I see and read about online. Including Laravel's May Mayhem blog contest.

Read more [alexvanderbist.com]

A few weeks ago Matthieu Napoli released Bref, a tool to get any PHP project up and running in a serverless environment. Matthieu has managed to get working serverless too.

Serverless basically means “Running apps without worrying about servers”. The main difference with a traditional hosting is that you do not maintain the servers and reserve their capacity. They are scaled up or down automatically and you pay only for what you use. ... Today let’s try to deploy a Laravel application on AWS lambda using Bref.

Read more [mnapoli.fr]

A great post by Barry O Sullivan on what, in my mind, is one of the biggest advantages of event sourcing: the ability to create projections.

Projections are a necessary part of any event sourced or CQRS system. These systems don't rely on a single generic data source such as a normalised MySQL database. Instead you build up your data sets by playing through the events, i.e the “film”, "projecting" them into the shape you want. This allows lot of flexibility as you're no longer bound by a single data model on which you have to run increasingly monstrous SQL queries (12+ joins anyone?). With projections you can build a data model specifically for the problem/question at hand.

Read more [dev.to]

#didyouknow that by type-hinting `offsetGet` and `current`, you can get autocompletion of custom Iterator and ArrayAccess classes in @phpstorm pic.twitter.com/Mr19b2gpye

— BrenDt (@brendt_gd) June 1, 2018

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Rémi Collin shares a cool approach on where to place code that doesn't really belong in a controller. He creates small, reusable, testable, decoratable classes, called Actions.

Using this approach can seems a lot of classes at first. And, of course the user registration is a simple example aimed to keep the reading short and clear. Real value starts to become clear once the complexity starts growing, because you know your code is in one place, and the boundaries are clearly defined.

Read more [medium.com]

At the Zeit conference React core member Andrew Clark showed off an upcoming React feature named Suspense. It can automatically pause the render process of a component if it hasn't got all its data. In can be used to avoid things like spinner showing up too quickly.

Async rendering in React gives us a powerful new set of primitives for addressing longstanding problems in UI development. I'll discuss React's vision for how async rendering can improve data fetching, code delivery, prefetching, view transitions, and more.

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Christopher Rumpel created a cool BotMan powered quiz on Laravel take you can take via Telegram. In a new blogpost he shares how it was built.

Hey everyone. In this article, I want to show you how I built the LaravelQuiz Chatbot. If you haven't tried it yet, it is a good idea to check it out before reading this article. This will help to understand what I am talking about. Right now it only supports Telegram. The chatbot provides a quiz with all kinds of questions about the Laravel framework. Every question comes with up to three possible answers. You need to pick the right one to collect points and make it to the highscore. But besides the ranks, the quiz is about having a good time. Enjoy the questions and see what you know about Laravel. Have fun!

https://christoph-rumpel.com/2018/05/how-i-built-the-laravelquiz-chatbot-with-botman-and-laravel

I took the quiz and scored pretty good.

? Day2 of LaravelQuiz: We still got 3 players in the top10 who reached the score with their first try ? Nice @freekmurze @adamwathan @ClaudioDekker Can you beat them? https://t.co/AGkBphJWtj pic.twitter.com/bQpKfTg2Z1

— Christoph Rumpel (@christophrumpel) May 25, 2018

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In an older but still relevant blogpost Matt Stauffer explains how you can extend PHPUnit's native @requires annotation. It's pretty handy if you want to only run certain tests in certain environments.

I was primarily interested in learning—how do PHPUnit annotations work? What does it look like to extend a pre-existing annotation? How do you not just check for the annotation, but also check its value? I'll show you what I found and then you can run willy-nilly with your own naming schemes.

Read more [mattstauffer.com]

At the Devoxx UK conference Michiel Rook gave a good intro talk on Event Sourcing.

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? Killing conditionals with Eloquent's "firstOr" method. If firstOrCreate, firstOrFail, or firstOrNew don't quite cut it. pic.twitter.com/PKrtqDc0vl

— Caleb Porzio (@calebporzio) 22 mei 2018

Read more [twitter.com]

? Laravel Quick Tip: Did you know that you can change the keys of a collection to a given value of the collection? ? Perfect for removing items of a collection by the model id. #laravel pic.twitter.com/kgsVnkFCBe

— Christoph Rumpel (@christophrumpel) 24 mei 2018

Read more [twitter.com]

Marcel Pociot, the mind behind BotMan, has released a cool package to create visual diff in your PHPUnit tests. Under the hood it uses our Browsershot package.

I'm not sure how you feel, but I consider myself a backend developer. Sure - I know my way around Vue.JS and really enjoy working with it, but writing CSS has never been my strong point. At one of our companies recent projects, we are working together with another development team, which is mostly taking care of frontend development. So we build controllers, repositories, services, etc. and hand it over to some basic views. They handle the rest. We introduced continuous integration to them and showed them our usual workflow, when I thought that it would be excellent to also have some kind of visual CI for frontend changes.

Read more [marcelpociot.de]

My colleague Sebastian has been busy creating some low level Vue components for a client project. For these components he use JSX.

In my most recent project at work, I'm experimenting with JSX templates in Vue. Vue offers first-party support for JSX with near-zero configuration, but it doesn't seem to be commonly used in the ecosystem. I'm going to share my initial thoughts on using JSX with Vue. I'll be posting side-by-side examples of Vue templates and their JSX counterparts.

Read more [sebastiandedeyne.com]

? When linking to a file on @github, press 'y' to transform the URL to a SHA-based reference. That way, the link will remain stable even if the underlying file changes in future commits. pic.twitter.com/cAsupEk7tV

— Derrick Reimer (@derrickreimer) 30 mei 2018

Read more [twitter.com]

Like he already did a few times in the past, Composer co-creator Jordi Boggiano published some interesting statistics on PHP version usage as measured by Packagist.

A few observations: PHP 7.1 is still on top but 7.2 is closing real quick with already 1/5th of users having upgraded. That's the biggest growth rate for a newly released version since I have started collecting those stats. Ubuntu 18.04 LTS ships with 7.2 so this number will likely grow even more in the coming months.

https://seld.be/notes/php-versions-stats-2018-1-edition

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