Freek.dev

James Long gives some solid advice: always keep in mind that there are a lot of things that are more important than coding.

The goal of free open source development is empowerment: everyone can not only use code for free but also contribute to and influence it. This model allows people to teach and learn from each other, improves businesses by sharing work on similar ideas, and has given some people the chance to break out and become well-known leaders.

Unfortunately, in reality open source development is rife with problems and is ultimately unsustainable. Somebody has to pay the cost of maintaining a project.

http://jlongster.com/Why-Frequently-Absent-Open-Source

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On his blog Frank De Jonge explains how he solved a performance problem in one of his projects.

Last week I took a deep dive into Symfony's Routing Component. A project I worked on suffered from a huge performance penalty caused by a routing mistake. This lead me on the path to discovering some interesting performance considerations. Some common practices align nicely with Symfony's optimisations, let's look into those.

https://blog.frankdejonge.nl/symfony-routing-performance-considerations/

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Chris Fidao, the hero behind serversforhackers.com, and Deploy PHP!, created a new video course called Shipping Docker. It's in early access right now and it covers everything from the basics to advanced topics like building a multi-server production environment.

I'm only a couple of videos deep in the course, and like expected, I'm liking a lot of what I'm seeing.

This is a comprehensive course in the many uses of Docker. From playing to developing, testing to deploying, we'll cover it all in a way that is easy to understand.

https://shippingdocker.com/

(In case you were wondering, I'm not being paid for posting this)

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Sebastian De Deyne, author of many Spatie packages, posted a new blog article on how to generate SEO Friendly Urls in Laravel.

When admins create or update an news item—or any other entity—in our homegrown CMS, a url slug is generated based on it's title. The downside here is that when the title changes, the old url would break. On the other hand, if we wouldn't regenerate the url on updates, titles that were edited later on would still have an old slug in the url, which isn't an ideal situation either.

https://sebastiandedeyne.com/posts/2017/non-breaking-seo-friendly-urls-in-laravel

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On his blog Jef Claes, organiser of DDDBE, shares some good tips on how to organize a meetup.

I've organized a few DDDBE meetups in the past, and always succeed in forgetting something. Either someone points it out well in advance, or I end up stressing last minute. This post partly serves as a checklist for myself, but it would be a welcome side effect to also see it encourage others to help out organizing future meetups. Organizing a meetup is not rocket science, having a list of what to take care of is a good start.

http://www.jefclaes.be/2017/02/how-to-organize-meetup.html

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Don't know what the difference between stateful and stateless is, or what higher order functions are? On the auth0.com site Sebastián Peyrott explains these terms and other modern JavaScript concepts.

Modern JavaScript has experienced massive proliferation over recent years and shows no signs of slowing. Numerous concepts appearing in JS blogs and documentation are still unfamiliar to many front-end developers. In this post series, we'll learn intermediate and advanced concepts in the current front-end programming landscape and explore how they apply to modern JavaScript.

https://auth0.com/blog/glossary-of-modern-javascript-concepts/

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A great feature of Laravel Spark is it's ability to impersonate other users. As an admin you can view all screens as if you are logged in as another user. This allows you to easily spot a problem that your user might be reporting. Laravel-impersonate is a package, made by MarceauKa and Thibault Chazottes that can add this behaviour to any Laravel app.

Here are some code examples taken from the readme.

Auth::user()->impersonate($otherUser); // You're now logged as the $otherUser.

Auth::user()->leaveImpersonation(); // You're now logged as your original user.

$manager = app('impersonate');

// Find an user by its ID
$manager->findUserById($id);

// TRUE if your are impersonating an user.
$manager->isImpersonating();

// Impersonate an user. Pass the original user and the user you want to impersonate
$manager->take($from, $to);

// Leave current impersonation
$manager->leave();

// Get the impersonator ID
$manager->getImpersonatorId();

It even includes some handy blade directives:

@canImpersonate
    <a href="{{ route('impersonate', $user->id) }}">Impersonate this user</a>
@endCanImpersonate

@impersonating
    <a href="{{ route('impersonate.leave') }}">Leave impersonation</a>
@endImpersonating

Want to know more, take a look at the package on GitHub.

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In a short blogpost Michael Dyrynda gives some good advice on why you should cache your routes and config values.

As part of the recommended production deploy process it is important to run the caching commands that Laravel affords us via Artisan. This means running config:cache and route:cache, which will compile the config and route files down into a single file each.

In doing so, Laravel aims to speed up parsing of these files by only needing to read a single, rather than multiple files.

https://dyrynda.com.au/blog/environment-variables-config-caching-and-laravel

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In the video below Wes Bos gives a tour of the tech stack of his home grown platform on which he sells and publishes his video courses.

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If you want to learn Varnish Thijs Feryn wrote a book for you. It's free to download until 7th March 2017.

Getting Strated with Varnish Cache is a technical book about the Varnish caching technology. Varnish is a so-called reverse caching proxy that acts as an intermediary between the browser and the webserver. Varnish stores HTTP responses and serves them to the browser, without accessing the backend for every request. This causes a massive speed increase.

https://blog.feryn.eu/my-varnish-book-is-now-available/

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Nicola Malizia wrote a short blog post on how Laravel's handy Macroable trait can be used and how it works under the hood.

If you check the Laravel codebase I’m sure that you can observe that Laravel makes use of traits.There is one trait in the source code that pulls my attention. I’m talking about the Macroable trait. ... The purpose of this trait is to extend (not in an OOP sense) a class at run-time. This way, you can add behavior without editing the original class source code.

https://unnikked.ga/understanding-the-laravel-macroable-trait-dab051f09172

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David Gilbertson tells you all about polyfills.

Faced with the reality that you can’t write modern code and expect it to work for all users, you have exactly two choices:

1. Only use language features available in all the browsers you support
2. Write modern code, then do something to make it work in older browsers

If you have decided on option one then I respectfully suggest that you are bonkers, and insist that you state your case in the comments. I believe that developers who are able to explore all the new stuff and use it in their day-to-day jobs stay happy, and being happy is important.

https://hackernoon.com/polyfills-everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-or-maybe-a-bit-less-7c8de164e423

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Matt Stauffer wrote down his experiences with creating a simple app on Gomix, a platform to easily create node powered sites right in your browser.

Gomix is a platform that makes it absurdly easy to spin up a new app (static HTML or Node) and see it online instantly. You can also invite your friends to collaborate, and the moment you make a change in the editor, your site updates. So, at this point I'm using Gomix and Node, and Express is an easy pick.

I strongly considered using Firebase for data storage, but the Gomix team linked me to this Gomix site using Google Spreadsheets as the backing data source and I really wanted to try it out.

So we've now settled: I'll take my old HTML and JavaScript, but instead of the JavaScript loading its data from JSON files, I'll run an Express app on Gomix pulling the data from Google Spreadsheets and output its data in a JSON format. No big deal.

https://mattstauffer.co/blog/moving-tech-forward-with-gomix-express-and-google-spreadsheets

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If you want to know how a visitor got on your site you can check the referer request header. Yeah, it's misspelled. That header contains the url of the previously visited page. Unfortunately browsers will fill that header regardless of the previous url was an internal or external one. So after the first click on an internal link you won't know anymore on which site a visitor was on previously.

Our new laravel-referer package aims to fix that problem. Once the package is installed it will remember the original referer in session. So even after a users clicks around on your site, you are still able to detect which site he or she visited previously.

Because users are also often tracked using UTM Codes the package will also remember the utm_source query parameter.

The easiest way to retrieve the referer is by just resolving it out of the container:

use App\Spatie\Referer\Referer;

$referer = app(Referer::class)->get(); // 'google.com'

Or you could opt to use Laravel's 5.4 fancy new automatic facades:

use Facades\Spatie\Referer\Referer;

$referer = Referer::get(); // 'google.com'

To know more take a look at the readme of the package on GitHub.

https://github.com/spatie/laravel-referer

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In an awesome article at Sitepoint Christopher Pitt explains how he used the yay macro library to build up plugin framework to add new language features to PHP.

Chris made plugins that allows this syntax in PHP.

// short closure syntax
$items = ["one", "two", "three"];
$ignore = "two";

array_filter($items, ($item) => {
    return $item !== $ignore;
});

//class accessors

class Sprocket
{
    private $type {
        get {
            return $this->type;
        }

        set {
            $this->type = $value;
        }

        unset {
            $this->type = "type has been unset";
        }
    }
}

As with all things, this can be abused. Macros are no exception. This code is definitely not production-ready, though it is conceptually cool.

Please don’t be that person who comments about how bad you think the use of this code would be. I’m not actually recommending you use this code, in this form.

Having said that, perhaps you think it’s a cool idea. Can you think of other language features you’d like PHP to get? Maybe you can use the class accessors repository as an example to get you started. Maybe you want to use the plugin repository to automate things, to the point where you can see if your idea has any teeth.

https://www.sitepoint.com/how-to-make-modern-php-more-modern-with-preprocessing/

Check out some more examples on preprocess.io

Very cool stuff.

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