Freek.dev

For the League's CommonMark parser, we chose to prioritize extensibility over performance. This led to a decoupled object-oriented design which users can easily and customize. This has enabled others to build their own integrations, extensions, and other custom projects.

The library's performance is still decent - the end user probably can't differentiate between 42ms and 2ms (you should be caching your rendered Markdown anyway). Nevertheless, we still wanted to optimize our parser as much as possible without compromising our primary goals. This blog post explains how we used Blackfire to do just that.

http://www.colinodell.com/blog/2015-11/optimizing-league-commonmark-blackfire-io

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Fluency on the command line is a skill often neglected or considered arcane, but it improves your flexibility and productivity as an engineer in both obvious and subtle ways. This is a selection of notes and tips on using the command-line that we've found useful when working on Linux. Some tips are elementary, and some are fairly specific, sophisticated, or obscure. This page is not long, but if you can use and recall all the items here, you know a lot.

https://github.com/jlevy/the-art-of-command-line/blob/master/README.md

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Jordi Boggiano, creator of Composer and it's main repository Packagist, posted some very interesting data regarding the most commonly used PHP versions.

It's that time of the year again, where I figure it's time to update my yearly data on PHP version usage. Last year's post showed 5.5 as the main winner and 5.3 declining rapidly. Let's see what 2015 brought.

http://seld.be/notes/php-versions-stats-2015-edition

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An awesome collection of Laravel tricks shared by Yitzchok Willroth aka Coderabbi at php[world]. He even includes some Laravel 5.2 specific tips.

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Anthony Ferrara gave a excellent "state of php"-talk at php[world].

PHP is experiencing a renaissance; old methodologies are everywhere under assault from advances in tooling and design. From Composer to HackLang, "the PHP way" of solving problems is dramatically evolving. Walls between projects are falling; interoperability and collaboration are happening on levels never thought possible. What do these accelerating changes mean for the future of the language? What might PHP8 look like? How will our communities continue to collaborate and evolve? And most pressing: what steps can we take to ensure PHP's continuing vibrancy in the face of future technical challenges?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWTe-iswnqc

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Phil Sturgeon, who has contributed to numerous valuable PHP related projects, is doing Ruby nowadays. In an article he wrote for Sitepoint compares Ruby with PHP.

... I thought it would be interesting to have a slightly more fair comparison, from the perspective of someone who really enjoys writing both PHP and Ruby, and has done so for years. The aim here is not to find out which is “better”, but to point out a few key things I like about Ruby and its ecosystem.

http://www.sitepoint.com/php-vs-ruby-lets-all-just-get-along/

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A fun talk by Christin Gorman.

Join me for some ranting about how best practices from open source development and project management school is making your sustaining team miserable.

https://vimeo.com/138774243

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Some good tips by Matthieu Napoli on how and why to use a good coding style.

The main point of this article is:

• it’s possible to think about coding style logically
• sometimes doing so forces us to challenge our habits
• when unsure or dubious: just try

http://mnapoli.fr/approaching-coding-style-rationally/

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Another great article by Maxime Fabre:

In this article I'm going to dive into the pthreads extension (short for POSIX Threads). It has been around for a while (since 2012) but I feel like too many people forget it exists or assume it is going to be painful to use – mostly because the official documentation is rather slim about it.

http://blog.madewithlove.be/post/thread-carefully/

Be sure to check out his previous post on Webpack and Blackfire too.

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Education. In a fast-changing environment such as the web industry, education is the single most important thing to survive. The things I learned about PHP when I started doing PHP 17 years ago would not even get me a job anymore today. Where traditional jobs mostly require just the standard education with a short course every once in a while, the web industry is vastly different.

...

In this article I’ll go into some strategies and some ways to keep the knowledge of you and your team current.

https://dutchweballiance.nl/techblog/continuous-learning/

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Facebook has recently launched a limited beta of its ground-breaking AI called M. M’s capabilities far exceed those of any competing AI. Where some AIs would be hard-pressed to tell you the weather conditions for more than one location (god forbid you go on a trip), M will tell you the weather forecast for every point on your route at the time you’re expected to get there, and also provide you with convenient gas station suggestions, account for traffic in its estimations, and provide you with options for food and entertainment at your destination. ... As many people have pointed out, there have been press releases stating that M is human-aided. However, the point of this article is not to figure out whether or not there are humans behind it, but to indisputably prove it.

https://medium.com/@arikaleph/facebook-m-the-anti-turing-test-74c5af19987c

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Jonathan Reinink made some very pretty slides with lots of good advice regarding templates.

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Climb checks your composer files to see which packages are outdated, regardless of your version constraints. Without Climb, there's no way of knowing if a package has a new major release unless you use a notification system like Gemnasium. Climb is one of those tools you just need to get on your tool belt.

http://jenssegers.com/78/check-outdated-composer-packages-with-climb

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Wes Bos released a series of videos on React.js.

Together, we will build “Catch of the Day” — a real-time app for a trendy seafood market where price and quantity available are variable and can change at a moments notice. We will build a menu, an order form, and an inventory management area where authorized users can immediately update product details.

Wes has released some really learning resources on, amongst others the terminal, sublime. A while ago he also appeared on Full Stack Radio. I'm pretty sure his new batch of videos will be top notch!

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Maxime Fabre has created the best RFC tracker out there. I'll probably use his tracker more than then the official pages.

The PHP internals need to be improved, it's not new, I know it, you know it. Between the wiki, the dozens of mailing lists, the Github repository and so on, information is spread out across the web; difficult to access, to comprehend, and to participate in. If you're not familiar with it, it's an unwelcoming world to whomever might want to know more about advances in the PHP language.

This tool aims to simplify this by unifying sources of information under one roof, and answer all the questions people might have about the PHP internals. Who voted on what? Who even are the people voting? What did they also vote on? What comments were made on a particular RFC? And so on.

http://why-cant-we-have-nice-things.mwl.be/

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