Mattias Geniar recently moved his excellent newsletter from MailChimp to Sendy. In a new post on his site he shares why and how he did that.
I recently moved away from MailChimp for the cron.weekly newsletter and chose a self-hosted newsletter app called Sendy in combination with Amazon SES. In doing so, I saved over 600$ a year.
Zalando, a large online fashion plaform, published it's guidelines around open source creation and usage.
Why Open Source? Because it can: improve quality, mitigate risk, increase trust, save us money, expand our technology choices, be fun, enable us to give back to the community, strengthen our tech brand, and attract talent. ... Do “Open Source First”: If your Zalando project can also be useful to non-Zalandos, release it as open source from the start.
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Inani El Houssain created a switch Blade directive. It's a good primer if you want to learn how to create Blade directives yourself.
One of the good points of Laravel’s framework is that it allows you to make your own components, macros and directives. so today we will make use of Laravel’s Custom Blade directives and make something good.
On the sitepoint blog Bruno Skvorc explains some of the inner works of the PHP version of snake created by Andrew Carter.
At a recent conference in Bulgaria, there was a hackathon for which Andrew Carter created a PHP console version of the popular “snake” game.I thought it was a really interesting concept, and since Andrew has a history of using PHP for weird things, I figured I’d demystify and explain how it was done.
https://www.sitepoint.com/howd-they-do-it-phpsnake-detecting-keypresses/
Alain Schlesser wrote an article on how to manage exceptions in a large codebase.
I seem to constantly work on improving my habits regarding the use of exceptions. I think it is an area that I haven’t yet fully explored, and it is very difficult to find anything more than very basic explanations and tutorials online. While the consensus is to use exceptions, there is very little information on how to structure and manage them in a larger codebase. The larger and more complex your projects become, the more important it is to start with a proper structure to avoid expensive refactoring later on.
https://www.alainschlesser.com/structuring-php-exceptions/
In my opinion a good exception message in most cases contains three things:
Named constructors for exceptions are the perfect place to build up such a message. Want to learn more? Ross Tuck wrote a good blog post on the subject too.
There are a lot of quality tagging packages out there. Most of them offer the same thing: creating tags, associating them with models and some functions to easily retrieve models with certain tags. But in our projects at Spatie we need more functionality. Last week we released our own - very…
Matthew Setter demonstrates PhpStorm's handy refactorings. Personally I use "extracting code to a new method" quite a lot.
Refactoring covers a range of different techniques, including moving, extracting, copying, deleting, and renaming. These cover all the types of changes which you are likely to make to your code on an ongoing basis.Gladly, PhpStorm’s refactoring functionality, which is included as part of the core package, has support for all of these. In this tutorial, I’m going to step through a couple of them; specifically:
- Extracting code to a new method
- Renaming a function
- Changing a function's signature
https://www.matthewsetter.com/refactoring-code-with-phpstorm/
Varnish is a piece of software that, amongst other things, can make your website much faster. In a new post on his blog, Mattias Geniar tells you all about it.
Varnish can do a lot of things, but it's mostly known as a reverse HTTP proxy. It brands itself as an HTTP accelerator, making HTTP requests faster by caching them. ... Varnish is usually associated with performance, but it greatly increases your options to scale your infrastructure (load balancing, failover backends etc) and adds a security layer right out of the box: you can easily let Varnish protect you from the httpoxy vulnerability or slowloris type attacks.
https://ma.ttias.be/varnish-explained/
Be sure to watch Mattias' excellent talk he gave at this years Laracon:
Eric L. Barnes of Laravel-news and dotdev fame, did a little research on the most used fonts for programming.
Everyone has their ideal development setup, and many have spent countless hours customizing it to perfectly suit their needs. Outside of a color scheme, the next typical change is the font in use and every year new fonts are introduced giving us more to choose from than ever before.To find out what everyone is using, I asked on Twitter and Facebook and had a ton of responses. Based on the answers here is a list of the top 5 programming fonts in use today
https://laravel-news.com/2016/10/top-5-programming-fonts/
I'm a big fan of Fira Code myself. It has some nice ligatures and it just looks very good. Here it is in action in my IDE:
Subhas Dandapni wrote an excellent overview of the most common over-engineering mistakes.
Few things are guaranteed to increase all the time: Distance between stars, Entropy in the visible universe, and Fucking business requirements. Many articles say Dont over-engineer but don’t say why or how. Here are 10 clear examples.
https://medium.com/@rdsubhas/10-modern-software-engineering-mistakes-bc67fbef4fc8
PHP does not support method overloading. In case you've never heard of method overloading, it means that the language can pick a method based on which parameters you're using to call it. This is possible in many other programming languages like Java, C++.
So, under normal circumstances, you can't do this in PHP:
class Foo
{
function bar(A $baz)
{
...
}
function bar(B $baz)
{
...
}
}
However, with some clever coding, Adam Wathan made a trait, aptly called Overloadable, that makes method overloading possible. It works by just accepting any parameters using the splat operator and then determining which of the given functions must be called according to the given parameters.
Let's rewrite that example above using the Overloadable trait.
class Foo
{
use Overloadable;
function bar(...$arguments)
{
return $this->overload($arguments, [
function (A $baz) {
$this->functionThatProcessesObjectA($baz);
},
function (B $baz) {
$this->functionThatProcessesObjectB($baz);
},
]);
}
}
Pretty cool stuff. In a gist on GitHub Adam shares a couple of examples, the source code of the trait and the tests that go along with it. Check it out!
https://gist.github.com/adamwathan/120f5acb69ba84e3fa911437242796c3
Jani Tarvainen explains where PHP is heading performance-wise.
PHP 7.0 was a leap in performance that came with very easy adoption. Simply verify compatibility with the version and upgrade your server environment. Speeding up many older architecture apps like WordPress and Mediawiki by a factor of two is a testament to backwards compatibility.In 7.1, the language runtime will continue to make modest improvements, but bigger gains will have to wait. One of these opportunities for a bigger improvement is the JIT implementation that is now bound for PHP 8.0
https://www.symfony.fi/entry/whats-in-store-for-php-performance
Generated columns where introduced in MySQL 5.7. In the latest post on her blog Gabriela D'Ávila explains the feature.
There are two types of Generated Columns: Virtual and Stored. ... Consider using virtual columns for data where changes happens in a significant number of times. The cost of a Virtual Column comes from reading a table constantly and the server has to compute every time what that column value will be. ... You should consider using Stored Columns for when the data doesn’t change significantly or at all after creation,
https://blog.gabriela.io/2016/10/17/understanding-generated-columns/
If you like the post, be sure to check out Gabriela's excellent talk at Laracon EU as well:
In the beginning of the year we released a package to notify you when a queued job in your Laravel application fails. Today we tagged v2 of that laravel-failed-job-monitor package. The big change is that it now uses Laravel 5.3's native notification capabilities. So it's a cinch to modify the…
Keith Adams, Chief Architect at Slack, gives some background on how PHP is used at his company.
Slack uses PHP for most of its server-side application logic, which is an unusual choice these days. Why did we choose to build a new project in this language? Should you?Most programmers who have only casually used PHP know two things about it: that it is a bad language, which they would never use if given the choice; and that some of the most extraordinarily successful projects in history use it. This is not quite a contradiction, but it should make us curious. Did Facebook, Wikipedia, Wordpress, Etsy, Baidu, Box, and more recently Slack all succeed in spite of using PHP? Would they all have been better off expressing their application in Ruby? Erlang? Haskell?
Laravel employee #1, Mohammed Said, recently gave an interview at codeforaliving.io on his career and how he started with open source. Terrific story. A lot of what he says resonates with how I feel about working on open source.
Said believes many developers, in the Middle East and elsewhere, are interested in the open source community, but not sure how to get started: “They think they have to wait until they have something perfect.” That’s simply not the case, Said maintains. He encourages developers to dig deep into their favorite projects, especially into software they work with on a daily basis, and look for places they can offer “enhancements” to existing code.Open source, he believes, is the best experience a developer can show in an interview. “Tech interviewers want one thing,” he says: “Show me your code.” You can share code you’ve written for your day job, but it’s probably impersonal or boring or even proprietary and closed source, so you can’t share it at all. Some code at work is done as part of a team and you can’t pick out what you did and what Jane down the hall did. Open source, on the other hand, is all you. It’s your passion, it’s publicly accessible, and it has your name on it.
http://www.codeforaliving.io/how-i-open-sourced-my-way-to-my-dream-job-mohamed-said
When transitioning from a old site to a new one the URLs of your site may change. If your old site was popular you probably want to retain your SEO worth. One way of doing this is by providing permanent redirects from your old URLs to your new URLs. Our new spatie/laravel-missing-page-redirector…
Generally I don't like to abbreviate variable names. This answer on Quora lists a few situations where an abbreviation is probably ok.
There is a simple (but unsatisfying) answer to all questions of this form: they are acceptable when they would make the code clearer.This can happen in a few ways. The most common, as you noted, is convention: i, j, k for loop variables, x and y for coordinates, e for exceptions, f and g for functions and so on.
Another is structure. Often, the broad structure of an expression is more important than its contents. Using shorter variable names makes it easier to read at a glance. I think this is often more important than being easy to read in detail!
If a variable has a very small scope—say one or two lines at most—and it's easy to see where it comes from, having a long name is just noise.
https://www.quora.com/When-are-single-character-variable-names-acceptable/answer/Tikhon-Jelvis
For several projects and other packages we need to manipulate URL's. Instead of coding the same URL class over and over again, we extracted URL manipulation to it's own package. Here are some code examples on how you can use it. $url = Url::fromString('https://spatie.be/opensource'); echo…
For several different clients we needed to display a schedule of opening hours on their websites. They also wanted to display if a department / store / ... is open on the moment you visit the site. My colleague Seb extracted all the functionality around opening hours to the newly released…
