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Josh Justice gives some solid advice on how to pick the right language for your next projects.

So to ask the question “should I use an OO or FP language (or style)” is to skip several steps. I think a better series of questions are: First, what properties would be beneficial for your application to have: concurrency? Immutability? Encapsulation? There are a lot of things you won’t know about your application at first, but you can at least know if it will be a backend app, JavaScript browser app, or native mobile app; if it will be CPU-bound or IO-bound; and if it will process data inputted by humans or automatically generated by machines. All of those factors can influence which properties you need.

Once that’s decided, the next question is, in a given language, are those properties guaranteed, easy, difficult, or not realistically achievable?

http://codingitwrong.com/2017/07/27/language-features-and-code-properties.html

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Grégoire Paris wrote down his opinion on why he dislikes Yoda conditions.

So how do Yoda conditions work? Well it is basically a knee-jerk reaction you have to develop: whenever you write a condition, put the operand that cannot be assigned on the left. This should give you an error message if you make an assignment when you actually meant to make a comparison.

https://dev.to/greg0ire/why-using-yoda-conditions-you-should-probably-not

Personally, I'm not a big fan of Yoda conditions either. My feeling is the the cost of decreased readability is just too high for the small value that Yoda conditions bring to the table.

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At this year's Laracon US Adam Wathan gave a talk titled "Cruddy By Design" on how to structure your controllers better. After the conference he published a new GitHub repo that contains the demo app he refactored on stage. The 4 main tips to improve your code come as PRs on the repo with a full description on why the change is valuable. Very cool stuff.

Using this convention as a "rule" is a good way to force yourself to keep your controllers from becoming bloated, and can often lead to learning interesting new things about your domain.

For the presentation, I put together a demo app called "CastHacker" that showcases podcasts about software development. It's not a "real" app by any means (lots of imaginary features, no tests, etc.); it's just enough code to demonstrate the concepts from the presentation. Feel free to clone it and play with it locally if you like though.

I've written up each refactoring I shared in the presentation as a detailed pull request.

https://github.com/adamwathan/laracon2017

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Christoper Pitt published another excellent piece over at Sitepoint. This time he describes how he built a watcher to automatically recompile his preprocessed code and rerun the tests.

In order to reduce the burden of invoking the transformation scripts, boilerplate projects have started to include scripts to automatically watch for file changes; and thereafter invoke these scripts.

These projects I’ve worked on have used a similar approach to re-run unit tests. When I change the JavaScript files, these files are transformed and the unit tests are re-run. This way, I can immediately see if I’ve broken anything.

https://www.sitepoint.com/write-javascript-style-test-watchers-php/

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Laravel Horizon is a kickass dashboard for viewing queued jobs. Co-creator Mohammed Said published two posts about the inner working of the tool. The first one on the Diving Laravel site highlights the overall configuration and how the master supervisor works.

Laravel Horizon is a queue manager that gives you full control over your queues, it provides means to configure how your jobs are processed, generate analytics, and perform different queue-related tasks from within a nice dashboard.

In this dive we're going to learn how Horizon boots up and handles processing jobs using different workers as well as how it collects useful metrics for you to have the full picture of how your application dispatches and runs jobs.

https://divinglaravel.com/horizon/before-the-dive

The second one, published on his own blog, shows how queued jobs can get tagged.

Laravel Horizon is shipped with many amazing features that help you understand what goes on with your queue workers, my personal favorite feature is the ability to tag jobs for further investigation.

https://themsaid.com/tagging-jobs-in-laravel-horizon-20170731

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Laracon US 2017 was an amazing conference. Sid published this excellent recap that contains many links to slides and related content.

I attended my first Laracon in person and I have to say I really enjoyed the experience — maybe more than I expected to. It was well organised and the talks were diverse, informative and actionable. Day 1 was all technical and mostly revolved around Laravel. Day 2 had a different mix of talks and the non-technical ones were thought-provoking and entertaining.

https://medium.com/koomai/laracon-2017-a-recap-and-links-galore-c233be2de670

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On his recently redesigned Servers For Hackers site Chris Fidao published a free 6 part series on how to use Nginx as a load balancer.

We cover how to use Nginx as a load balancer, and see how load balancing affects our application.

https://serversforhackers.com/s/load-balancing-with-nginx

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Sean Larkin, core team member of Webpack, will be leaving his current job at Mutual of Omaha for a new position at Microsoft. Because on his team he was the one most familiar with the webpack setup of the project, he looked for a way to transfer his knowledge. He landed on creating a video course on webpack that's free for everyone.

I decided to create Webpack Academy, a training and educational platform for those wanting to learn more about webpack. This was a perfect way to not only allow me to give back to my team — by giving them free access to all of the content — but to also benefit the community by sharing it with everyone.

https://webpack.academy/

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In a post on Sitepoint Allan MacGregor gives a good practical example on how to work with PHP-ML, a machine learning library for PHP.

As of late, it seems everyone and their proverbial grandma is talking about Machine Learning. Your social media feeds are inundated with posts about ML, Python, TensorFlow, Spark, Scala, Go and so on; and if you are anything like me, you might be wondering, what about PHP?

Yes, what about Machine Learning and PHP? Fortunately, someone was crazy enough not only to ask that question, but to also develop a generic machine learning library that we can use in our next project. In this post we are going take a look at PHP-ML – a machine learning library for PHP – and we’ll write a sentiment analysis class that we can later reuse for our own chat or tweet bot.

https://www.sitepoint.com/how-to-analyze-tweet-sentiments-with-php-machine-learning/

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On Scotch.io a new post by Julien Bourdeau was published that shows how you can easily import and search geographic data with Laravel Scout and Algolia.

Laravel Scout makes it very easy to setup an external search engine to create consumer-grade search quickly. The package comes with Algolia as a default search engine. I'd like to demonstrate how to make use of the geo-location search feature with Scout.

In this tutorial, you'll learn how to prepare your data for Algolia and Laravel Scout to retrieve items based on location.

https://scotch.io/tutorials/achieving-geo-search-with-laravel-scout-and-algolia

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?Combining query scopes with explicit model names will help keep code cleaner and easier to understand #laravel pic.twitter.com/ixzDdrZcRT

— Chris Gmyr (@cmgmyr) July 12, 2017

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I love this little “owns” trait/method that @michaeldyrynda & I came up with for Confomo.

Look at that expressiveness. :kisses fingers: pic.twitter.com/dE731Ko1Zw

— Matt Stauffer (@stauffermatt) July 7, 2017

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Marty Cagan, who held jobs at eBay, AOL, Netscape and HP, describes the most important differences between good and bad product teams.

What I’ve learned is that there is a profound difference between how the very best product companies create technology products, and the rest. And I don’t mean minor differences. Everything from how the leaders behave, to the level of empowerment of teams, to how the organization thinks about funding, staffing and producing products, down to how product, design and engineering collaborate to discover effective solutions for their customers.

http://svpg.com/good-product-team-bad-product-team/

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Let's have a little fun! Yitzchok Willroth, better know as Coderabbi, created a new package that can improve the output of PHPUnit.

Here's what the output of a testrun looks like with his package installed.

https://github.com/coderabbi/phpumoji

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David Négrier, CTO of the CodingMachine, wrote a nice article on why he likes and how his team uses typehints.

As a developer consuming this function, I know how to use it. And if I’m using it wrong, I’ll know right away because PHP will crash with a nice error message when the function is called rather than with a cryptic error some time later.

https://www.thecodingmachine.com/type-hint-all-the-things/

Personally I like typehints too, because the potential readability improvement the article touches upon.

Note: (I only include this paragraph because it's mentioned in the intro of the article, don't want to stir up a discussion) the fuzz about that "Visual Debt" video was overblown. Even though I didn't agree with all of it, it was nice to hear Jeffrey's way of thinking.

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Testing @spatie_be 's media library with the new #laravel upload fakes ? Trust, but verify ? #testing pic.twitter.com/Ss98rGloRf

— Christoph Rumpel (@christophrumpel) July 3, 2017

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