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In the JavaScript world promises are a great way to deal with stuff that needs to happen asynchronously. But there's also another new way to go about it: async/await.

In case you missed it, Node now supports async/await out of the box since version 7.6. If you haven’t tried it yet, here are a bunch of reasons with examples why you should adopt it immediately and never look back.

For those who have never heard of this topic before, here’s a quick intro

• Async/await is a new way to write asynchronous code. Previous options for asynchronous code are callbacks and promises.
• Async/await is actually built on top of promises. It cannot be used with plain callbacks or node callbacks.
• Async/await is, like promises, non blocking.
• Async/await makes asynchronous code look and behave a little more like synchronous code. This is where all its power lies.

https://hackernoon.com/6-reasons-why-javascripts-async-await-blows-promises-away-tutorial-c7ec10518dd9

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You might thing that PHP is not able to automatically perform a type check on items in an array. But using variadic constructor this is possible. Bert Ramakers wrote a blogpost with some good examples on how to do this.

One of the language features announced back in PHP 5.6 was the addition of the “…” token to denote that a function or method accepts a variable length of arguments.

Something I rarely see mentioned is that it’s possible to combine this feature with type hints to essentially create typed arrays.

https://medium.com/2dotstwice-connecting-the-dots/creating-strictly-typed-arrays-and-collections-in-php-37036718c921

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Michael Dyrynda, one of the co-hosts of the Laravel News and the North Meets South podcasts, explains how to easily uptime your models with data coming from requests.

Instead of littering your controller method with multiple request()->has('field') checks, you can employ the request object's intersect method. The intersect method will return a new array containing only the keys that are present in both the specified list and the request itself.

Using intersect allows you to easily handle a PATCH request - one where you partially update a resource's data, rather than all of it as with a PUT - in a much more concise manner.

https://dyrynda.com.au/blog/partial-model-updates-in-laravel

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Recently I stumbled upon a page in the VueJs docs where Vue is compared against all other similar frameworks. I'm impressed with the fact that they reached out to authors of the other frameworks to get well balanced comparison.

This is definitely the most difficult page in the guide to write, but we do feel it’s important. Odds are, you’ve had problems you tried to solve and you’ve used another library to solve them. You’re here because you want to know if Vue can solve your specific problems better. That’s what we hope to answer for you.

We also try very hard to avoid bias. As the core team, we obviously like Vue a lot. There are some problems we think it solves better than anything else out there. If we didn’t believe that, we wouldn’t be working on it. We do want to be fair and accurate though. Where other libraries offer significant advantages, such as React’s vast ecosystem of alternative renderers or Knockout’s browser support back to IE6, we try to list these as well.

https://vuejs.org/v2/guide/comparison.html

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Every year Stack Overflow runs as survey where they asks their users about their favourite tools, languages, etc... A little while ago they published the results of the 2017 edition.

We learn something new every time we run our survey. This year is no exception:

- A common misconception about developers is that they've all been programming since childhood. In fact, we see a wide range of experience levels. Among professional developers, 11.3% got their first coding jobs within a year of first learning how to program. A further 36.9% learned to program between one and four years before beginning their careers as developers. - Only 13.1% of developers are actively looking for a job. But 75.2% of developers are interested in hearing about new job opportunities. - When we asked respondents what they valued most when considering a new job, 53.3% said remote options were a top priority. A majority of developers, 63.9%, reported working remotely at least one day a month, and 11.1% say they’re full-time remote or almost all the time. - A majority of developers said they were underpaid. Developers who work in government and non-profits feel the most underpaid, while those who work in finance feel the most overpaid.

https://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/

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There are multiple good ways to pass data from Laravel to Vue. In a new blogpost Jesse Schutt covers all the options.

It has been helpful to think of my application as "layers" or separate sections of code each with varying responsibilities. I like to think of Laravel as the intermediary between the persistent data in the database, and the Vue components comprising the front-end of the app.

Though the boundaries between Laravel and Vue may appear unclear at the outset, the only way one can know about the other's data is if it is explicitly passed. Blade templates implicitly know a lot about the application, but Vue operates on a different layer, so it only knows what we tell it. Fortunately, there are a number of ways to provide Vue with the data it needs.

https://zaengle.com/blog/layers-of-a-laravel-vue-application

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On the madewithlove blog Frederick Vanbrabant wrote a post on how he and colleague improved the PWA score of their company site.

So the first thing you should know about PWA (or progressive web apps) is that it’s an adaptation of your current site or web app. This means that if you want to have all the features of a progressive web app, you are going to need to change your current site/application. The good news here is that they are all changes you would want to have anyway.

https://blog.madewithlove.be/post/improved_pwa_score

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In an article on the Hackster.io site explains in detail how he made a nice visualization of unit test results. Pretty cool what you can do with a raspberry pi, some LEDS and a couple of scripts.

I wanted to create a desktop gadget to visualize the progress of unit tests run via PHPUnit.I've named this project PHPUnicorn (by combining "PHPUnit" with "Unicorn pHAT").

https://www.hackster.io/colinodell/phpunicorn-visualizing-phpunit-tests-896208

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On the JetBrains blog Gary Hockin explains how to easily run a single PHPUnit test.

To run all the tests in a single file, right-click the test in the Project Pane (the left-hand navigation pane), and select Run .

To run all the tests in a single class, right-click the class name in the editor, and select Run .

To run the tests in a single method, right-click the method name, and select Run .

https://blog.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/2017/01/working-with-phpunit-and-phpstorm/

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One of my favourite features that was introduced in Laravel 5.4 are the higher order collection functions. It allows you to rewrite

collect($models)->filter(function(Model $model) {
   $model->passesFilter();
});

to:

collect($models)->filter->passesFilter();

This works with the filter method an a bunch of other collection methods.

In a new post on his blog Nicola Malizia explains how these methods work under the hood.

A new version of Laravel is available from 24 January 2017 and, as usual, it comes with a lot of new features. Among them, there is one that takes advantage of the dynamic nature of PHP. Some out of there will contempt this, but I find it awesome!

https://unnikked.ga/understanding-laravels-highorder-collections-ee4f65a3029e

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On his blog Mark Baker shares some thoughts on how to use closure binding to avoid having import variables with the use keyword.

You'll learn how to rewrite

$filteredArrayData = array_filter(
    $arrayData,
    function($value) use ($minimumPrice, $maximumPrice) {
        return $value->price >= $minimumPrice &amp;&amp; $value->price < $maximumPrice;
    }
);

to

$filteredArrayData = array_filter(
    $bookData,
    $priceFilter->inRange(5.00, 15.00)
);

https://markbakeruk.net/2017/03/12/closure-binding-as-an-alternative-to-use-variables/

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For a client project I've been doing some vue.js lately and I just love it. So you might see a few more vue.js related stuff appear on this blog in the future. Here's a nice site I stumbled across that contains a lot of useful components.

http://vuejsexamples.com/

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In the JavaScript world Lodash is a pretty popular and awesome package with lots of handy array, collection and object methods. In this article Dan Prince explains that some of those methods do have a nice ES6 equivalent.

Lodash is the most depended on npm package right now, but if you’re using ES6, you might not actually need it. In this article, we’re going to look at using native collection methods with arrow functions and other new ES6 features to help us cut corners around many popular use cases.

https://www.sitepoint.com/lodash-features-replace-es6/

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Andrew Welch of the New York based agency nystudio107 wrote a good overview of the options agencies & freelancers have regarding hosting.

Web hosting is something that many agencies and freelancers don’t give a whole lot of thought to. They just use whomever they’ve had a long-standing relationship with, and call it a day.

However, choosing the right host—and the right type of host—can be crucial to the success of a project. And the hosting world has changed a whole lot in the past few years, so let’s dive in.

https://nystudio107.com/blog/web-hosting-for-agencies-freelancers

At my company Spatie we're pretty happy with our choice to hosts our client projects on VPSes. We provision them using Laravel Forge and some custom ansible scripts.

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A few days before Breath of the Wild was released Nintendo's Hidemaro Fujibayashi, Satoru Takizawa, and Takuhiro Dohta (who all three working on various Zelda games in the past) gave at talk at the Game Developers Conference. They provide a unique look behind the scenes of this fantastic game.

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On css-tricks David Khourshid wrote a good introduction to RxJS.

According to ReactiveX.io: "ReactiveX is a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs by using observable sequences."

That's a lot to digest in a single sentence. In this article, we're going to take a different approach to learning about RxJS (the JavaScript implementation of ReactiveX) and Observables, by creating reactive animations.

https://css-tricks.com/animated-intro-rxjs/

If you want to toy around with the same ideas in PHP check out RxPHP

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Ondřej Mirtes, author of PHPStan lists some great tips to make a side project succesful.

Most developers have side projects. That's how we try out new things or make something that we miss on the market or in our dev stack. But most side projects end up unfinished and never actually see the light of day. And even if a developer builds up the courage to show his work to the public, he quickly finds out that just publishing a repository doesn't actually bring the masses to his doorstep. ... In this article, I'd like to share with you what I did to make sure that the project doesn't end up in the dustbin of history. I will concentrate on open source software, but the following advice may as well apply to any creative endeavour.

https://medium.com/@ondrejmirtes/how-i-got-from-0-to-1-000-stars-on-github-in-three-months-with-my-open-source-side-project-8ffe4725146#.211n6vihd

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