Freek.dev

Laravel / PHP / AI

Why is everybody wearing headphones?

Andreas Creten, co-founder of madewithlove, wrote a good blogpost about a few aspects of their company culture.

There are three requirements for making good products: developers with the right skills, decent product management and ideal working conditions. The reason why so many of us wear headphones has to do with the latter. As a software developer, the last thing you want is distraction: colleagues talking to each other, the sound of a coffee machine, a printer and so on. Distraction prevents you from getting “in the zone”, a state of mind in which you deliver your best work.

https://medium.com/we-are-madewithlove/why-is-everybody-wearing-headphones-522a61de27ca

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Project from Hell

Project failures is a WordPress blog with horror stories of project that have terribly gone wrong. I recently stumbled across this particularly juicy story.

A few years ago, I was hired to work as a consultant on a software project for a large French tech company. What I have witnessed there is beyond everything I could possibly have imagined in terms of software engineering. Far more serious than just a lack of professional competence was the utmost contempt for human dignity which at some point made me compare the whole experience to (what I imagine can be) jail. What I relate here is a selected list of topics that should illustrate my point, but check out by yourself.

https://projectfailures.wordpress.com/2008/06/24/project-from-hell/

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Uploading avatar Images with Spatie’s medialibrary

Over at Laravel News Povilas Korop wrote a nice tutorial on how to use our medialibrary (we released a new major version a couple of days ago).

By default, the Laravel registration form contains only the name, email, and password, but often it’s useful to allow the user to upload a photo or an avatar. In this tutorial we will show you an easy way to add it, using Spatie’s Media Library package.

https://laravel-news.com/uploading-avatar-images

It's a good tutorial but there's a few things not mentioned. At the end of the post you'll see this line of code:

Auth::user()->getMedia('avatars')->first()->getUrl('thumb');

That can be written a bit shorter as :

Auth::user()->getFirstMediaUrl('avatars', 'thumb');

The new v7 of the medialibrary has a new feature called "single file collections", which is just perfect for this example. Take a look at the docs: https://docs.spatie.be/laravel-medialibrary/v7/working-with-media-collections/defining-media-collections#single-file-collections

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Renderless Components in Vue.js

At this year's Laracon Online Adam Wathan gave a fantastic talk on creating reusable view components. The excellent new post on Adam's blog is basically the written down version of talk. Amazing stuff!

Splitting a component into a presentational component and a renderless component is an extremely useful pattern to master and can make code reuse a lot easier, but it's not always worth it. Use this approach if:

  • You're building a library and you want to make it easy for users to customize how your component looks
  • You have multiple components in your project with very similar behavior but different layouts

https://adamwathan.me/renderless-components-in-vuejs/

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Separate Interactive Test Suites

If you find yourself having a bunch of slow tests that don't need to execute every time you run the tests, take a look at PHPUnit's defaultTestSuite setting. TJ Miller explains it in a blog post he wrote last year.

To avoid running the interactive test suite with the rest of my tests, manually or via a CI job, I had to explicitly include all the other suites using phpunit --testsuite Api,Feature,Unit. This felt a bit grim and I would rather exclude just that one suite. So I did some digging and found the defaultTestSuite configuration for phpunit.

https://medium.com/@sixlive/separate-interactive-test-suites-f6fd59316ec2

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laravel-medialibrary v7 has been released ? original

by Freek Van der Herten – 14 minute read

laravel-medialibrary is a powerful package that can help handle media in a Laravel application. It can organise your files across multiple filesystems, generate thumbnails, optimize images and much much more. At Spatie we use this package in nearly every project. The last few months our team has…

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First Experiences with Symfony 4 & the Symfony Community

Getting to know another framework and community can be a daunting task. But in case of Symfony it proves not to be that hard. On his blog Matthew Setter shares his first steps into Symfony.

Recently, I decided to learn the basics of the Symfony (4) framework, so that I could better understand one of my client's applications, and provide better support to it. I never expected to use such a well-rounded framework. Nor did I expect to encounter such an engaged and supportive community. Here's the story.

https://www.matthewsetter.com/first-experience-with-symfony/

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Laravel Excel — Lessons Learned

Last week Laravel Excel v3 was released. In a post on his company blog Patrick Brouwers writes the story of why and how v3 was released.

Laravel Excel (https://github.com/Maatwebsite/Laravel-Excel) turned 4 years last November and has reached almost 6 million Packagist downloads. A good time to reflect on 4,5 years of open source development.

https://medium.com/@maatwebsite/laravel-excel-lessons-learned-7fee2812551

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Nothing is Something

Here's a video of a great talk by Sandi Metz she gave at RailConf 2015.

Our code is full of hidden assumptions, things that seem like nothing, secrets that we did not name and thus cannot see. These secrets represent missing concepts and this talk shows you how to expose those concepts with code that is easy to understand, change and extend. Being explicit about hidden ideas makes your code simpler, your apps clearer and your life better. Even very small ideas matter. Everything, even nothing, is something.

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Server side rendering JavaScript from PHP

My colleague Seb did some amazing work with the creation of two packages that make it easy to get started with server side rendering in PHP. In a new post on his blog he'll tell you all about it.

Server side rendering is a hot topic when it comes to client side applications. Unfortunately, it's not an easy thing to do, especially if you're not building things in a Node.js environment.

I published two libraries to enable server side rendering JavaScript from PHP: spatie/server-side-rendering and spatie/laravel-server-side-rendering for Laravel apps.

Let's review some server side rendering concepts, benefits and tradeoffs, and build a server renderer in PHP from first principles.

https://sebastiandedeyne.com/posts/2018/server-side-rendering-javascript-from-php

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Today we hit 10 million PHP package downloads original

by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

For the past few years Spatie, the company where I work, has released many Laravel and PHP packages. Those packages are primarily built to be used in our own projects. We do not operate in a void. We have a community around us. They use our work. They help to make our packages better by submitting…

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Responsive images done right

Our team is currently prepping a new version of our medialibrary. One of the highlights is support for responsive images. On his blog my colleague Brent explains what it entails and why it is important.

I want to share some thoughts on responsive images. I'll write about a certain mindset which many projects could benefit from: small- and mid-sized web projects that don't need a full blown CDN setup, but would enjoy the performance gain of responsive images.

https://www.stitcher.io/blog/responsive-images-done-right

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