Freek.dev

Frank de Jonge, creator and maintainer of Flysystem, recently started using Docker to test the FTP driver. On his blog he explains the why and how.

For Flysystem, an open source PHP package to deal with filesystems, I needed a way to test FTP (barf) interactions. FTP servers are notoriously bad at abiding by the spec. ... For Flysystem's FTP(d) adapter an integration test, using an actual FTP server, brought back the level of confidence it needed.

https://blog.frankdejonge.nl/regaining-trust-in-your-tests-with-docker/

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In a new article on his blog Ian Carroll shows that it's quite easy to trick users into thinking that they're connected to the right site.

Extended validation ("EV") certificates are a unique type of certificate issued by certificate authorities after more extensive validation of the entity requesting the certificate. In exchange for this more rigorous vetting, browsers show a special indicator like a green bar containing the company name, or in the case of Safari completely replace the URL with the company name. ... Today, I will demonstrate another issue with EV certificates: colliding entity names. Specifically, this site uses an EV certificate for "Stripe, Inc", that was legitimately issued by Comodo.

https://stripe.ian.sh/

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Dries Vints, maintainer of Laravel.io, posted a step-by-step guide on how to get started with Laravel Horizon on a Forge provisioned server.

I recently installed Horizon for Laravel.io and while it wasn’t that hard to install, I still had to figure some things out. Since this was the first time setting everything up I thought I’d write up the steps to take to get started with Horizon and set everything up with Forge and Envoyer.

https://medium.com/@driesvints/laravel-horizon-with-forge-and-envoyer-82a7e819d69f

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In a terrific talk given at JS.Conf Asia, Jake Archibald, developer advocate at Google, explains what's going on in the event loop of the browser.

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Small #PHP tip: Want to before sure multiple keys of an array are set? Define them in one isset() call, it's so much clearer!

if ( ! isset($a['q']) || ! isset($a['w']) || ! isset($a['e'])) {
// PANIC
}

# Becomes

if ( ! isset($a['q'], $a['w'], $a['e'])) {
// OH NO!
}

— Frank de Jonge (@frankdejonge) February 12, 2018

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Michael D. Hill posted a great new video on his blog where he makes the case for optimizing for scannability.

As programmers trying to ship more value faster, we want to optimize first around the part of the work that we spend the most time on, and that is scanning code– formulating little, tiny questions and flipping through the code looking for the answers. We optimize for scanning by focusing our attention on sizing, grouping, and, above all else, naming.

http://geepawhill.org/optimizing-a-program-and-programming/

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Laravel 5.6 will probably ship this wednesday. One of the cool new features is the ability to register Blade component aliases, which was PRed by my colleague Seb. On his blog Seb guides you through the new functionality.

Laravel 5.6 adds the ability to register alias directives for Blade components. Let's review some background information and examples.

https://sebastiandedeyne.com/posts/2018/blade-component-aliases-in-laravel-56

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At Spatie, we have created a dashboard powered by Laravel, Pusher and Vue that displays a lot of information useful for our company. We opensourced the dashboard a while ago.

In a new post on his company blog Chris Sherry explains how they customized our dashboard.

We use Laravel because its a well-known framework among backend developers, meaning there’s a bigger community (including lots of open source libraries), great documentation and a tonne of experience of using the framework.

Vue.js is our first choice because it lets our frontend developers build components for a project without being to be locked into building the whole project on the framework, meaning we can use the right tools for the right job.

The fact that the Spatie dashboard used these meant that all the developers at CUBE would be able to build their own components for it, which was one of my key objectives.

https://3sidedcube.com/blog/2018/02/building-dashboard-laravel-vuejs/

It's really great to see that people customize and use our stuff!

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Monica Dinculescu, an engineer at Google, shares on her blog how you can use Puppeteer, Mocha and Pixelmatch to create automated visual tests of a webpage.

I did a little song-and-dance that sets up Puppeteer* , takes screenshots of your app (like, all the routes you care about), and then compares them to the “golden” ones. If they match, your test passes! Yes, it only works on Chrome. No, it’s not actually unit testing. Yes, it’s literally just counting pixels but you know what? It counts them in both a wide and a narrow viewport size and any testing is better than no testing at all; fight me.

https://meowni.ca/posts/2017-puppeteer-tests/

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Together with Dries Vints and Frederick Vanbrabant I organise our local usergroup PHP Antwerp. We recently bought some A/V equipment to record all the awesome talks given at our meetup. Here's the first one: a fine talk by Bobby Bouwmann about some cool design patterns used in Laravel.

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Bram Van Damme wrote a new post with some good examples of cool stuff that will land in JavaScript soon.

At the latest TC39 meeting the new features that will make it into the “ECMAScript® 2018 Language Specification” (ES2018) have been selected. All proposals that have reached stage-4 since the consolidation of ES2017 got selected. This post gives one a quick look at the features that made it into ES2018.

https://www.bram.us/2018/01/30/whats-new-in-ecmascript2018/

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Laravel 5.5.29 introduced the ability to group a collection on multiple levels. In a new post on his blog, Christopher Rumpel demonstrates the new feature with some good examples.

https://christoph-rumpel.com/2018/01/groupby-multiple-levels-in-laravel

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Barry Van Veen shares how you can install a package from a local path into your project. This is extremely handy when developing a package because you can immediately toy with it in a full application.

This article explains how you can require a package from a local path into your project with Composer. This way you can run a local copy of a repository and test any changes you make. Because the local repo will be symlinked changes are shared in real-time, there is no need for intermediate committing and updating.

https://barryvanveen.nl/blog/44-package-development-run-a-package-from-a-local-directory

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The Vancouver PHP user group recently had a Q&A session with Laravel's creator Taylor Otwell.

Cool Nova tidbit revealed in the video: it'll be a package.

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In a new post on his blog Matthieu Napoli, creator of PHP-DI, explains how he made v6 much faster.

But the good thing is that, after 6 years of existence, the project has matured and is now quite stable. The original objectives are met, even though there is of course always room for improvements and innovation. There is room to push the container to be better on other levels. And the most obvious one is performances.

PHP-DI 6 will be much, much faster because it is a compiled container.

http://php-di.org/news/21-php-di-6-compiled-container.html

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My colleague Brent has some good thoughts on where to place curly brackets.

Dedicating a whole blogpost to curly brackets might seem like overkill but I believe it's worth thinking about them. Not just because of one curly bracket, but because there's a bigger message in all this. Thinking about how we read and write code not only improves the quality of that code, it also increases our own and others ease of mind when working with it. It can improve the fluency of your work and free your mind to think about real important stuff.

https://www.stitcher.io/blog/where-a-curly-bracket-belongs

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