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On his blog Frank De Jonge, member of the PHP League and creator of Flysystem, explains a cool pragmatic solution how to ensure queued processes for the same user complete in the right order.

The use of multiple workers allows for much higher throughput, but it also allows for race conditions during processing. When messages for the same user are sent to different workers, handling order can no longer be guaranteed. Therefore we have failed to fulfil our business rule.

If we were able to ensure every message from the same user were sent to the same worker, the worker could ensure those messages are handled in order while the system as a whole would still benefit from the degree of parallelism. But how do we make this happen?

https://blog.frankdejonge.nl/parallelise-synchronous-business-processes/

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The awesome Roave team has recently released v2 of their BetterReflection package. It can do anything PHP's native reflection API can, but without actually autoloading the code.

The operational concept is quite simple, really:

1. We scan your codebase for files matching the one containing your class. This is fully configurable, but by default we use some ugly autoloader hacks to find the file without wasting disk I/O.
2. We feed your PHP file to PHP-Parser
3. We analyse the produced AST and wrap it in a matching Roave\BetterReflection\Reflection* class instance, ready for you to consume it.

Read all about it on Marco Pivetta's blog: https://ocramius.github.io/blog/roave-better-reflection-v2.0/

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JMac, the creator of Laravel Shift, shared how he can very easily spin up a new job on his service by sending a simple SMS message.

In the end, all I need is a quick way to run a Shift on the go. Looking back on almost two years of support, I often have the Shift number readily available. Creating the job and adding it to the queue is at most two lines of code. So the steps are not the pain point.

The pain point is connecting to the server. Unless I want to carry my laptop around, I can’t connect to the server to run the Shift. (I actually have taken my laptop with me during peak times.)

What do I carry around with me all the time? My phone. I’m already reviewing the support emails from my phone. Wouldn’t it be great when I need to run a Shift manually to just reply or send a text.

https://jason.pureconcepts.net/2017/09/nexmo-sms-admin-laravel/

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Laracon EU 2017 was, like the previous years, an excellent event. Together with 700+ fellow artisans I very much enjoyed watching the talks and meeting people between them. All video's of this edition have recently been made available on YouTube. Here's a handy playlist that contains them all.

I had the honor of speaking at the event as well, here's the video of my talk:

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Jens Segers, developer at Teamleader and author of the popular Optimus and laravel-mongodb packages, wrote about an alternative to controllers.

Let me introduce you to request handlers. The concept is very simple, yet very unknown to a lot of PHP developers. A request handler is basically a controller, but limited to one single action. This concept is very similar to the Action-Domain-Responder pattern which was proposed by Paul M. Jones, an alternative for the MVC pattern that focuses on a more clear request to response flow for web applications.

https://jenssegers.com/85/goodbye-controllers-hello-request-handlers

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? Another newly documented Laravel 5.5 feature: "json" directive in Blade! pic.twitter.com/PbeAfZlzoF

— Taylor Otwell (@taylorotwell) September 18, 2017

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iTerm2, a populair terminal app, contained a very bad security issue. Everything you hover over was being checked if it was a clickable url. To determine if it's a valid url, the hovered over string was being checked against DNS server. So if you hover over a password, or a secret key or whatever it sent out to the internet. Obviously this is a big problem. It's fixed in the latest version. So if you use iTerm2 and haven't updated it recently, be sure to do it now! The problem is fixed in version 3.1.1.

iTerm2's leak issue was first discovered ten months ago. iTerm2's creator initially reacted by adding an option to iTerm 3.0.13 that allowed users to disable DNS lookups. The feature remained turned on by default for new and existing installations.

Dutch developer Peter van Dijk, software engineer for PowerDNS, a supplier of open-source DNS software and DNS management service, re-reported this feature and this time around, he pointed out some of the severe privacy leaks not included in the first bug report.

"iTerm sent various things (including passwords) in plain text to my ISP's DNS server," van Dijk wrote flabbergasted in a bug report he filed earlier today.

This time around, George Nachman, iTerm2's maintainer, understood the severity of the issue right away and released iTerm2 3.1.1 to fix the problem within hours. He also apologized for enabling this feature by default without analyzing possible consequences in more depth.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/iterm2-leaks-everything-you-hover-in-your-terminal-via-dns-requests/

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If you haven't heard about event sourcing or are unsure about what it is, Barry O Sullivan has got you covered. Recently he wrote up a blogpost that explains it very clearly.

Event Sourcing (ES) is opposite of this. Instead of focussing on current state, you focus on the changes that have occurred over time. It is the practice of modelling your system as a sequence of events. ... It solves all the big problems our team has faced when building large scale distributed business software. It allows us to talk to the business in their language, and it gives us the freedom to change and adapt the system with ease.

https://dev.to/barryosull/event-sourcing-what-it-is-and-why-its-awesome

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On the vuejsdevelopers.com blog Anthony Gore suggested a few cool Vuex plugins that could come in handy.

There are a lot of good reasons to use Vuex to manage the state of your Vue.js app. For one, it’s really easy to add super-cool features with a Vuex plugin. Developers in the Vuex community have created a tonne of free plugins for you to use, with many of the features you can imagine, and some you may not have imagined.

In this article, I will show you five feature that you can easily add to your next project with a Vuex plugin.

https://vuejsdevelopers.com/2017/09/11/vue-js-vuex-plugins/

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The HTTP specification says that status codes should be three digits integers, but what happens if they are not? April King, head of website security at Mozilla, did some fun experiments to find out.

While it is easy to create test cases for conditions that don't satisfy this requirement, it is somewhat more difficult to determine how third-party libraries will handle HTTP requests that fall outside this constraint. I looked around the internet for websites to help me test weird status codes, but most of them only let me test with the known status codes. As such, I decided to add arbitrary HTTP status codes to my naughty httpbin fork, called misbehaving.site.

What I discovered is that the various browser manufacturers have wildly different behavior with how they handle unknown HTTP status codes.

https://pokeinthe.io/2017/09/14/http-status-code-handling/

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Last week Apple introduced their new fancy iPhone X. It's screen has a top notch that might cause some problems in landscape mode. Stephen Radford explains how to properly handle it.

The new iPhone X features a beautiful edge-to-edge display. Well, almost. There is the small issue of a notch at the top of the browser which doesn't cause an issue when viewing websites in portrait but by default does cause some issues in landscape.

To accommodate the notch iOS 11 constrains websites within a "safe area" on the screen. On most websites this results in letterboxing on the left and the right.

http://stephenradford.me/removing-the-white-bars-in-safari-on-iphone-x/

We've already implemented the fix in our Laravel application template.

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Kotlin is a workhorse language built by the folks at JetBrains (you know, the company that gave the world PHPStorm). It's a superset of Java. In this video by Ross Tuck he tells you more about it and walks you through some of it's nice features.

If want to learn the language I'veen told by Ross that the Kotlin Koans repo is an excellent way to get started.

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Nice hidden @laravelphp Eloquent feature: you can specify the columns to eager load directly in the 'with' call! pic.twitter.com/vQT8CaRqGC

— Stidges (@stidges) September 13, 2017

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This works in Laravel 5.5 because $request->validate() only returns the validated data. Beautiful.

Yeah. I had originally sent that PR. I love it. Makes for these lovely controller methods. Just look at this❗ pic.twitter.com/FlxIlJVQXN

— Joseph Silber (@joseph_silber) September 14, 2017

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Colin DeCarlo, a developer at Vehikl, wrote some thoughts on why PHP has a bad reputation in some circles.

People shitting on PHP isn’t going to go away, it’s a symptom of a few things. PHP has a ridiculously flat learning curve so just about anyone can write code using it, this means a lot of amateurs and ‘get it done’ developers will choose php but won’t really ever level up their skills when it comes to software development.

https://medium.com/@colindecarlo/who-uses-php-anyway-672115ab81de

I agree with Colin on everything he writes in his post. I'm also thinking that the some of the reasons on why people don't like PHP apply to Laravel as well. In my mind Laravel is to PHP frameworks what PHP is to other programming languages. Both Laravel and PHP might not do everything by the "real programming rules", but it sure is easy to use. And when handled properly powerful and maintainable stuff can be built with it.

Because Laravel is an easy framework to get started with, it's a popular choice for newcomers. Even with almost no experience you can build an app. Some of those projects will go to production. If an experienced developer that uses another framework comes by and sees that Laravel app, it might be easy to conclude that the problem lies with Laravel, and not with the inexperience of the junior programmer who just begon his/her journey in coding.

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Most of work is done in PHPStorm. On my current project I do a lot of Vue stuff. Regularly use PHPStorm auto format feature to make the code look nice. One thing that was bothering is that by default it will use 8 characters of indentation for Vue component properties. So you get this horrible code:

<br /><template>
    <!-- ? -->
    <my-component
            myProp="myValue"
            anotherProp="anotherValue"
    ></my-component>
</template>

Today a golden tip by Christopher Pitt helped me find the solution. In the preferences of PHPStorm you need to set continuation indent of the html to 4 characters.

And after that the PHPStorm will reformat the code right according to our guidelines for Vue templates.

<template>
    <!-- ? -->
    <my-component
        myProp="myValue"
        anotherProp="anotherValue"
    ></my-component>
</template>

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Steve Schoger, a well known designer in the Laravel community, wrote down some good, actionable tips to improve your typography.

When I say typography, I’m not just referring to the font selection (although that is one important factor), I am referring to the entire composition of it. In this post, I’ve compiled a list of some important elements you can consider to create beautiful typography.

Let's get started!

http://www.steveschoger.com/2017/07/19/6-tips-that-will-improve-your-typography-on-your-ui/

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Caleb Porzio, co-presenter of the Twenty Percent Time podcast, published a new article on the Tightenco blog. This time he guides us through a nice use case for extending Eloquent models.

Let’s explore another alternative that can be used as a stand-in for repetitive where statements and local scopes. This technique involves creating new Eloquent models that extend other models. By extending another model, you inherit the full functionality of the parent model, while retaining the ability to add custom methods, scopes, event listeners, etc. This is commonly referred to as “Single Table Inheritance,” but I prefer to just call it “Model Inheritance”.

https://tighten.co/blog/extending-models-in-eloquent

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