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Jordi Boggiano, co-creator of Composer / Packages, published some new stats on the usage of PHP versions. Great to see that PHP 7 overall now represents over 50%.

A quick note on methodology, because all these stats are imperfect as they just sample some subset of the PHP user base. I look in the packagist.org logs of the last month for Composer installs done by someone. Composer sends the PHP version it is running with in its User-Agent header, so I can use that to see which PHP versions people are using Composer with.

https://seld.be/notes/php-versions-stats-2017-1-edition

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Mohammed Said, Laravel employee #1 and diver, explains how you can avoid pushing unnecessary jobs to a queue.

How many customers will reach the 10K purchase milestone? does it make sense to push a Job to queue for every single purchase while there's a huge chance that this job will just do nothing at all? IMHO this is a waste of resources, you might end up filling your queue with thousands of unnecessary jobs.

It might be a good thing if we can check for that condition before queueing the listener.

http://themsaid.com/conditionally-queue-listeners-laravel-20170505/

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Bobby Bouwmann, a very helpful guy, created a new free service that can generate email markdown themes for use in a Laravel application.

https://markdownmail.com/

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Paul Redmond explains how you can use Guzzle 6' middleware to add a HMAC authorization header.

I prefer to keep my dependencies as up-to-date as possible so I decided to learn Guzzle 6 and become more familiar with the middleware. The concepts are pretty straightforward and I have a few patterns that I like to use when building out middleware within my Laravel applications.

https://medium.com/@paulredmond/using-guzzle-6-middleware-in-a-laravel-application-7fbd6d966235

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In a new video on his awesome Servers For Hackers site Chris Fidao explains the major differences between some popular Linux flavours.

https://serversforhackers.com/video/linux-server-families

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A few week ago we released a new major version of laravel-permission. This package makes it easy to store permission and roles in the database. Our package plays nice with Laravel's Gate and has support for multiple guards.

In a new post on his blog Saqueib Ansari shows how you can create an interface to assign permissions and roles to a user using our package.

Laravel comes with Authentication and Authorization out of the box, I have implemented many role and permissions based system in the past, using laravel, it’s peace of cake. In this post, we are going to implement a fully working and extensible roles and permissions on laravel 5.4. When we finish we will have a starter kit which we can use for our any future project which needs roles and permissions based access control.

http://www.qcode.in/easy-roles-and-permissions-in-laravel-5-4

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Peter O'Shaughnessy, a developer advocate for Samsung, explains that your idea on which browsers are the most popular is probably wrong.

Our traditional idea of the top five browsers may be over-simplified, outdated and skewed.

Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE/Edge, Opera… It is a common idea that these are the five “major browsers”. Our familiarity with them is comforting, but it might be a skewed and outdated view. Partly from our Western bubble and partly a hangover from the days of desktop dominance. Let’s take a look at some numbers so we can better represent the reality.

https://medium.com/samsung-internet-dev/think-you-know-the-top-web-browsers-458a0a070175

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Danny Van Kooten did an interesting experiment. He completely rewrote an Laravel app to a version in Go. In a post on his blog he shares some details about his project along with some benchmarks.

Earlier this year, I made an arguably bad business decision. I decided to rewrite the Laravel application powering Boxzilla in Go.

No regrets though.

Just a few weeks later I was deploying the Go application. Building it was the most fun I had in months, I learned a ton and the end result is a huge improvement over the old application. Better performance, easier deployments and higher test coverage.

https://dannyvankooten.com/laravel-to-golang/

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I don't think that less lines of code automatically means code is more readable, but I'm a big fan of ES6' arrow functions. In this article Eric Elliott dives deep into them.

I also supect that your team would become significantly more productive if you learned to embrace and favor more of the concise syntax available in ES6. While it’s true that sometimes things are easier to understand if they’re made explicit, it’s also true that as a general rule, less code is better. If less code can accomplish the same thing and communicate more, without sacrificing any meaning, it’s objectively better.

https://medium.com/javascript-scene/familiarity-bias-is-holding-you-back-its-time-to-embrace-arrow-functions-3d37e1a9bb75

Let's hope we'll soon have array functions in PHP too.

The future of #php (hopefully) - 2 RFCs in discussion right now: "Arrow Functions" and "Pipe Operator" pic.twitter.com/LVPiIHwGrZ

— Caleb Porzio (@calebporzio) April 19, 2017

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While working a little bit on laravel-sitemap I decided to refactor the tests to make use of our own snapshot assertions package. The snapshot package enables you to generate snapshots with the output of your tests. On subsequent runs of those tests it can assert if the output still matches the contents of the snapshot.

In this video I demonstrate how the refactor of the tests of laravel-sitemap was done. (double-click on it to view it full-screen)

If you want to know more about snapshot testing, then read this blog post written by my colleague Sebastian. The refactor of the tests can be viewed in this commit on GitHub.

(Little note on the video itself: this is my first tutorial video I ever made. After recording it I noticed that I used a wrong ratio resulting in those black bars on the side. Ah well, you live you learn. Next time it will be better. For those interested, I used a Blue Yeti Pro mic to record my voice and ScreenFlow to record and edit the video.)

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Simon Yousoufov argues that PHP is going the way of the dodo.

It’s well known that PHP is a dead programming language and that its 22-year-old ecosystem is effectively useless now that we have Node and its fancy new asynchronous frameworks. Node’s superiority is evident because everyone knows that single-threaded, asynchronous, programs are better by default. Faster. Stronger, even.

https://medium.com/fuzz/php-a0d0b1d365d8

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Electron is a library that enables you to create desktop apps with JavaScript, Html and css. If you're interesting in playing around with this cool technology check out this tutorial by Kristian Poslek.

In this article, I’ll try to guide you through the process of building a simple desktop application and touch on important concepts for building desktop application with JavaScript.

https://medium.com/developers-writing/building-a-desktop-application-with-electron-204203eeb658

Together with Marcel Pociot and the help of Alex Vanderbist I'm currently building my first Electron app. It's a bit too early to share any details about it except that we'll open source it (and it'll be free).

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PHP Uk Conference is an excellent conference where I had the pleasure of speaking this year. All sessions were recorded. Last week the organizers released all the videos. Here's the entire playlist:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_aPVo2HeGF-_djRi_UVWWLdkVpYQFnFm

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If you need a free SSL certificate Let's Encrypt seems like the obvious way to go. But the installation and renewal process of Let's Encrypt surely has it's caveats. An alternative to Let's Encrypt is to use a free certificate issued by Cloudflare. On his blog Taylor Otwell published a post explaining how to request and install such a certificate.

I personally prefer to use Cloudflare, another service that offers free SSL certificates, as well as a variety of other free and paid services that are useful for web developers. I prefer Cloudflare because: - Cloudflare doesn’t require any renewal process to ever run on my server. LetsEncrypt renewals must run on my server at least every 3 months and that’s just one more thing that sometimes can (and does) go wrong. - Cloudflare supports wildcard sub-domains.

https://medium.com/@taylorotwell/free-wildcard-ssl-using-forge-cloudflare-ab0ebfbf129f

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Jarek Tkaczyk demonstrates how you can use a helper relation to eager load specific models.

Have you ever needed to show only single related model from the hasMany relationship on a set of parents?

Being it latest, highest or just random, it’s not very clever to load whole collection using eager loading, just like running query per every parent.

Of course you can do that better, and now let me show you how.

https://softonsofa.com/tweaking-eloquent-relations-how-to-get-latest-related-model/

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My colleague Sebastian recently released a new package called phpunit-snapshot-assertions. In a new post on his blog he tells all about it.

The gist of snapshot testing is asserting that a set of data hasn’t changed compared to a previous version, which is a snapshot of the data, to prevent regressions. The difference between a classic assertEquals and an assertMatchesSnapshot is that you don't write the expectation yourself when snapshot testing. When a snapshot assertion happens for the first time, it creates a snapshot file with the actual output, and marks the test as incomplete. Every subsequent run will compare the output with the existing snapshot file to check for regressions.

https://medium.com/@sebdedeyne/a-package-for-snapshot-testing-in-phpunit-2e4558c07fe3

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On his blog Matt Stauffer published a new post explaining the steps required to deploy your app without any downtime.

The reason you're getting zero-downtime deploy from these tools is because the entire deploy process—clone, composer install, etc.—doesn't happen in the directory that is currently serving your site. Instead, each new release gets its own separate "release" directory, all while your site is still being served from its current "release" directory.

https://mattstauffer.co/blog/how-to-set-up-your-laravel-application-for-zero-downtime-envoyer-capistrano-deploys

In my own projects I handle these capistrano like deploys using a custom Envoy script: https://github.com/spatie/blender/blob/master/Envoy.blade.php

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