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A recap of Laracon EU 2017

Devron Baldwin wrote down a few words on the excellent Laracon EU conference, edition 2017.

The awesome talks and the amazing people made Laracon EU 2017 an experience to remember. I’ll split this up into a few sections to talk about the non-technical and the technical talks. I found myself enjoying the non-technical talks slightly more than the technical this year.

https://medium.com/@devron/7-laracon-eu-2017-talks-and-the-people-i-met-381e55ebf898

I can't believe it' already over and am already looking forward to Laracon EU 2018.

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What Laravel 5.5 means for our packages original

by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

At Spatie we've released a plethora of Laravel packages. Now that Laravel 5.5 has been released most of our packages will get a new (major) version. In this blogpost I'd like to explain how we handle new releases of the framework and what it means for our packages. Preparing for release Laravel has…

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Generating IDE Stubs for IonCube-Encoded Classes

Here's a great story by Collin O'Dell, maintainer of league/commonmark amongst other things, on how he was able to extract the class definitions out of obfuscated PHP source files.

Per the framework's license, decrypting the IonCube-protected code was not allowed. This meant it was impossible to recover the original source code. However, I could require those files and execute them in PHP, which would cause those classes to become usable in code. So how does one figure out what code just got loaded & executed?

https://www.colinodell.com/blog/201708/generating-ide-stubs-ioncube-encoded-classes

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Theme-based views in Laravel using vendor namespaces

At Spatie, we're building a multi-tenant app. Seb figured out a great way to handle theme based views.

Laravel allows you register a view vendor namespace which points to a specific directory containing Blade files. This feature is intended for package development, but it's a perfect solution to our problem.

By registering a namespace with the current theme's location, we can drop all the dynamic parts of our view names when we're calling them.

https://sebastiandedeyne.com/posts/2017/theme-based-views-in-laravel-using-vendor-namespaces

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Open-sourcing our guidelines original

by Freek Van der Herten – 7 minute read

At Spatie we recently launched a new site: guidelines.spatie.be. It contains articles on how we go about setting things up at Spatie and a collection of styleguides. The source code of the site is available on GitHub. In this blogpost I'd like to share why and how we created our guidelines site. Why…

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Use your Laravel named routes in JavaScript

Daniel Coulbourne, an engineer at Tighten Co and co-host of the amazing Twenty Percent Time podcast, recently released Ziggy, a tool to share your Laravel named routes with JavaScript.

Ziggy creates a Blade directive which you can include in your views. This will export a JavaScript object of your application's named routes, keyed by their names (aliases), as well as a global route() helper function which you can use to access your routes in your JavaScript.

https://github.com/tightenco/ziggy

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Laravel/MySQL JSON documents faster lookup using generated columns

In an older post on his blog Mohamed Said demonstrates how you can leverage virtual columns to speed up queries on data stored as JSON.

Laravel 5.3 is shipped with built-in support for updating and querying JSON type database fields, the support currently fully covers MySQL 5.7 JSON type fields updates and lookups,

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Let's see how we may create a generated column to store users favorite color for later indexing.

https://themsaid.com/laravel-mysql-json-colum-fast-lookup-20160709

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Using global mixins in Vue.js original

by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Recently I needed to add some global functionality to nearly all Vue components in an app. My colleague Seb told me a good way to achieve this: global mixins. In this post I'd like share that knowledge. In Vue a mixin is some functionality bundled in a file that can be added to one or more Vue…

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What's in our .babelrc?

Sebastian De Deyne, my colleague and all round wizard at Spatie, wrote a new blogpost on how we use Babel.

A lot has been going in in JavaScript the past few years. One of my favorite things has been the usage of babel, which allows us to write future JavaScript syntax today. The babel ecosystem has tons of plugins and configuration options, I'd like to elaborate on our usage at Spatie.

https://sebastiandedeyne.com/posts/2017/whats-in-our-babelrc

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CSS Utility Classes and "Separation of Concerns"

In my day to day work I don't write any css at all, but I still very much enjoyed this blogpost by Adam Wathan where he shares some interesting things about how css should be structured and he makes the case for using utility classes to make visual tweaks.

When you think about the relationship between HTML and CSS in terms of "separation of concerns", it's very black and white.

You either have separation of concerns (good!), or you don't (bad!). This is not the right way to think about HTML and CSS. Instead, think about dependency direction.

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One of the biggest benefits of using small, composable utilities is that every developer on your team is always choosing values from a fixed set of options.

https://adamwathan.me/css-utility-classes-and-separation-of-concerns/

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The disadvantages of single page applications

Adam Silver lists a bunch of problems you need to solve if you opt to build a single page application.

Ironically, SPAs are harder to design and harder to build. And yet, they typically produce slow, disagreeable experiences for users. ... Javascript is never going to beat the browser at what it does best—browsing. We can still give users rich and enhanced experiences without cramming an entire site into one document.

We should let the browser manage the browsing experience, and spend our time solving real user problems.

https://adamsilver.io/articles/the-disadvantages-of-single-page-applications/

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Precision Through Imprecision: Improving Time Objects

Ross Tuck is probably one of my favourite bloggers. He doesn't publish something often (his previous post is from 2015), but when he does it's very much worth your time.

The important takeaway here isn’t “value objects, yay, inline juggling, boo!” It’s that we were able to remove several classes of errors by reducing the precision of the DateTime we were handling. If we hadn’t done that, the value object would still be handling all of these edges cases and probably failing at some of them too.

Reducing the quality of data to get a correct answer might seem counter-intuitive but it’s actually a more realistic view of the system we’re trying to model. Our computers might run in picoseconds but our business (probably) doesn’t. Plus, the computer is probably lying anyways.

http://rosstuck.com/precision-through-imprecision-improving-time-objects

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Calculating distance using MySQL

Logan Henson, a developer at Tighten, wrote a new post on the company blog about MySQL's cool ST_Distance_Sphere function.

On a client project recently, we had to make it easy to filter database query results based on the distance between a user and an entity in our database. It's easy to get overwhelmed in that context, worrying about the crazy amount of PHP calculations you're going to have to run. ... If you need to calculate this, you can actually get surprisingly far by just using MySQL!

https://tighten.co/blog/a-mysql-distance-function-you-should-know-about

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