Like previously mentioned we're currently building a new dashboard to display on our wall mounted TV at the office. One of the things we want to show on that dashboard are important events for our company. Things like when a site goes live, when there's a conference we're going to visit, when we're…
Over at Sitepoint Christoper Pitt shares some research he has done in finding differences in images using PHP.
I recently stumbled across a fascinating question: how could I tell whether an image had changed significantly? As PHP developers, the most troublesome image problem we have to deal with is how to resize an upload with an acceptable loss of quality.In the end I discovered what many before me have – that this problem becomes relatively simple given the application of some fundamental mathematical principles. Come along with me as we learn about them…
https://www.sitepoint.com/finding-differences-in-images-with-php
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At my work I'm currently creating a new dashboard. That's a fancy term for an html page sprinkled with some Vue magic that will be displayed on tv screen at the wall of our office. I won't say much about the dashboard itself on this post, but I'll make sure to write something on that in the near…
Mark Baker made some fascinating benchmarks on the performance of PHP 7's anonymous classes.
A week or so ago, I published an article entitled “In Search of an Anonymous Class Factory” about my efforts at writing a “factory” for PHP7’s new Anonymous Classes (extending a named concrete base class, and assigning Traits to it dynamically); and about how I subsequently discovered the expensive memory demands of my original factory code, and then rewrote it using a different and (hopefully) more memory-efficient approach.https://markbakeruk.net/2016/05/12/anonymous-class-factory-the-results-are-in/Since then, I’ve run some tests for memory usage and timings to assess just how inefficient my first attempt at the factory code was, and whether the new version of the factory really was better than the original.
Mohammed Said did some research on how run acceptance test for a javascript driven interface.
If you’re testing non-javascript driven interfaces then you may use Laravel’s built-in PHP Browser based testing library, it’s very powerful and the API is very readable as well. However if you need to test javascript driven interfaces then selenium is what you should be using.https://dotdev.co/acceptance-testing-a-laravel-and-vue-js-application-4160b8e96156#.j1ltb34zv
Over at the CloudFlare blog John Graham-Cumming wrote an interesting article on SQL injection attacks via http request headers.
SQL injection is a perennial favorite of attackers and can happen anywhere input controlled by an attacker is processed by a web application. It's easy to imagine how an attacker might manipulate a web form or a URI, but even HTTP request headers are vulnerable. Literally any input the web browser sends to a web application should be considered hostile.https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-sleepy-user-agent/
Jeremy Kendall dissects bad PHP code on his site csiphp.com.
It all began with a new gig and an amazingly horrific codebase. I began tweeting the most unbelievable, most frustrating snippets I could find. After quite a few of those tweets, Chris Hartjes replied with, “Looking at your tweets I cannot even fathom what your job is. CSI:PHP?” A concept was born.http://csiphp.com/Twitter’s 140 characters are rarely enough to share the horrors of bad code, and I don’t want to give short shrift to the nefarious and misguided scripts that I’ve found. Behold the CSI: PHP blog, where I investigate criminally bad codebases and share the evidence with you, my fellow developers.
A few weeks ago Gabriela D'Ávila helped a famous guy with getting an MySQL import down from 16 to 6 minutes. In a post on her blog she explains how that was done.
A few weeks ago my friend Frank de Jonge told me he managed to improve an import into a MySQL server down from more than 10 hours to 16 minutes. According to him it had something to do with one of the field types (too long fields to really small data) and the amount of indexes and constraints in the tables. We were talking about 1 million records here. He wondered if it was possible to make it even faster.http://gabriela.io/blog/2016/05/17/fast-data-import-trick/...
Turns out there are many ways of importing data into a database, it all depends where are you getting the data from and where you want to put it.
The Query Tracer package can help you find out where a specific database query is being called. It works with both Clockwork and the Laravel Debugbar. Here's a screenshot taken from the readme:
https://github.com/fitztrev/query-tracer
EDIT: turns out that Laravel Debugbar can do this out of the box:
Eric L. Barnes asked this question to people with several backgrounds.
I love questions that can’t be answered with a simple yes or no. One question that I have been thinking about recently is, just what does it take to be a great developer?https://dotdev.co/what-does-it-take-to-be-a-great-developer-a2eddb0c47e6#.sf8kwd8tvI came up with tons of answers but felt like mine are all through my own lens, so I decided to reach out to a few people from different walks of life and just ask them. What follows is the answer by each person and their profession so you can compare and contrast.
Michael Bromley on his blog:
http://www.michaelbromley.co.uk/blog/529/why-i-havent-fixed-your-issue-yetThere is an implicit agreement which needs to be understood by both consumers and creators of FOSS projects1. It goes something like this:
- I agree to provide you with some free code which solves your problem.
- I recognize that in doing so, I have taken on a small portion of responsibility to you as a user of my code.
- I agree to try to help you if you have difficulty in using my code.
- I agree to try to fix bugs that you find in my code.
- Crucially, you agree that I, in acting without remuneration, am free to assign priority to the above points as I see fit.
The last point is the reason why I haven’t fixed your issue yet.
As a package consumer you should be grateful for the free code you're given. Keep in mind that when you use someone else's code, you are responsible for that code as well. If a package maintainer solves an issue for you that's great. If he or she doesn't, than that's your problem, not the maintainer's. You can always submit a PR with a fix. And if the fix or feature doesn't get accepted you can always maintain your own fork.
For our own packages we try to respond to every single issue in a timely manner. The users of our packages are generally very friendly and helpful. There's only one instance when things went sour. I do make a point of thanking everybody who takes the time to submit a PR. It's a small thing but I do believe it helps creating a positive vibe on our GitHub repo's.
Amo Chohan wrote a rundown of the big changes coming tot PHP 7.1
https://medium.com/@amo.chohan/upcoming-changes-in-php-7-1-76ebea53b820#.2udxw3qfe
- Catching multiple exception types
- Curl HTTP/2 server push support
- Support class constant visibility
- Void return types
- Generalize support of negative string offsets
- Allow specifying keys in list() and square bracket syntax for array destructuring
- Warn about invalid strings in arithmetic
- Deprecate and remove mcrypt()
On dotdev.co Eric L. Barnes explains a new feature that is coming in PHP 7.1
With the accepted proposal it creates an alternative to using “list” for destructuring an array. In all previous versions of PHP this works like this: list($a, $b, $c) = array(1, 2, 3); Now you can extract using a square bracket just as you do for assignment: [$a, $b, $c] = [1, 2, 3]; ["a" => $a, "b" => $b] = ["a" => a, "b", => 2];https://dotdev.co/php-unanimously-approves-short-list-syntax-for-array-destructuring-887208b661af#.58zwoz85l
Jack McDade, creator of Stamatic, designer of several Laravel ecosystem sites, on his blog:
I’ve been playing video games again. I feel fantastic and my head is clearer than it’s been in a while. Here are my thoughts on the topic and why I think video games are important and not even remotely a waste of time.http://jackmcdade.com/blog/why-i-play-video-games
Here is one performance setting in your PHP configuration you probably haven't thought about much before: How often does PHP perform random garbage collection of outdated session data in your application? Did you know that because of the shared nothing architecture PHP randomly cleans old session data whenever session_start() is called? An operation that is not necessarily cheap.https://tideways.io/profiler/blog/php-session-garbage-collection-the-unknown-performance-bottleneck
For a project I'm working on I needed to interact with a Google Calendar. If you've ever worked with some API's by Google then you know their documentation can be very confusing. It's not that they don't have documentation, but code examples of common use cases are simply not present. You must wade…
Brendan Gregg, a Netflix engineer, gave this talk at this years Percona Data Performance Conference.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbmEDXq7es0
Mohamed Said peeked behind the curtains and explains on his blog how Laravel Valet works behind the scenes.
The idea behind Valet is that it configures PHP's built-in web server to always run in the background when the operating system starts, then it proxies all requests to a given domain to point to your localhost 127.0.0.1http://themsaid.github.io/magic-behind-laravel-valet-20160506/
If you want to keep Homestead around for some projects, know that your can also use dnsmasq to point an entire domain to your Homestead installation.
Chances are that if you've been following the news in the Laravel ecosystem that you've heard of Laravel Valent. If not: Laravel Valet is a super easy way to serve your sites in a development environment. It's dead simple to setup and use. Here's the intro video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3Z4Gk9Wc0s
I think it's kinda amazing that it was built in just four days. Not everybody is a fan of the Valet approach be I sure do like it. At Spatie, we're going use Valet instead of Vagrant for most of our projects.
Need to know more about Valet? Check out this post on dotdev.co and the official documentation.
The venerable Uncle Bob makes the case for dynamic typing and TDD. Be sure to read the entire article to get a quick history lesson in computer languages.
The pendulum is quickly swinging towards dynamic typing. Programmers are leaving the statically typed languages like C++, Java, and C# in favor of the dynamically typed languages like Ruby and Python. And yet, the new languages that are appearing, languages like go and swift appear to be reasserting static typing? So is the stage for the next battle being set?http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2016/05/01/TypeWars.htmlHow will this all end?
My own prediction is that TDD is the deciding factor. You don't need static type checking if you have 100% unit test coverage. And, as we have repeatedly seen, unit test coverage close to 100% can, and is, being achieved. What's more, the benefits of that achievement are enormous.
