Some good tips by Matthieu Napoli on how and why to use a good coding style.
The main point of this article is:http://mnapoli.fr/approaching-coding-style-rationally/
- it’s possible to think about coding style logically
- sometimes doing so forces us to challenge our habits
- when unsure or dubious: just try
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.https://dutchweballiance.nl/techblog/continuous-learning/...
In this article I’ll go into some strategies and some ways to keep the knowledge of you and your team current.
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
Jonathan Reinink made some very pretty slides with lots of good advice regarding templates.
Climb checks your composer files to see which packages are outdated, regardless of your version constraints.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
When Spatie unleashes a new site on the web we want to make sure that all, both internal and external, links on it work. To facilitate that process we released a tool to check the statuscode of every link on a given website. It can easily be installed via composer: composer global require…
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!
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.http://why-cant-we-have-nice-things.mwl.be/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.
We think syntax highlighting makes the structure of code easier to understand. But as it stands, we highlight the obvious (like the word function) and leave most of the content in black. Rather than highlighting the differences between currentIndex and the keyword function, we could highlight the difference between currentIndex and randomIndex. Here’s what that might look like:https://medium.com/@evnbr/coding-in-color-3a6db2743a1e
At Spatie we're constantly improving our application template called Blender. We love using packages to pull in functionality. Creating and using packages has many benefits. Though we try to create public packages that benefit the community, there are some packages that are very specific to Blender.…
You may be asking yourself "Why PostgreSQL?" There are several choices for open source relational databases out there (we looked at MySQL, MariaDB and Firebird for this article), but what does PostgreSQL have that they don't? PostgreSQL's tag line claims that it's: "The world's most advanced open source database." We'll give you a few reasons why PostgreSQL makes this claim.https://www.compose.io/articles/what-postgresql-has-over-other-open-source-sql-databases/
Custom elements give us the tool to extend HTML's vocabulary, teach it new tricks, and jump through the wormholes of the web platform. Combine them with the other new platform primitives like Shadow DOM and , and we start to realize the picture of Web Components. Markup can be sexy again!http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/webcomponents/customelements/
At Spatie we use a homegrown Laravel template called Blender. It's being used on nearly all our projects. When starting with a greenfield project we take a copy of Blender and make project specific changes in that copy. We built it because we want maximum flexibility and don't want to be hampered by…
Ross Tuck does not blog often, but when he does you probably are going to learn something useful. In his latest post he shares some techniques regarding exceptions.
Over the last couple years, I’ve started putting my Exception messages inside static methods on custom exception classes. This is hardly a new trick, Doctrine’s been doing it for the better part of a decade. Still, many folks are surprised by it, so this article explains the how and why.http://rosstuck.com/formatting-exception-messages/
A really great talk by Sandi Metz in which she refactors a nasty block of conditional code to a few small, understandable objects.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bZh5LMaSmE
If you have a form on your website where one of the fields is of the `type="password"`, the page will now be marked as insecure in your browser if it is served over a plain HTTP connection.https://ma.ttias.be/firefox-nightly-starts-marking-login-forms-in-http-as-insecure/
"Password must contain 1 uppercase letter, 1 lowercase letter, and 1 number."http://ryanwinchester.ca/post/stop-forcing-your-arbitrary-password-rules-on-meWith a rule like that, the password
Abcd1234would pass your validation, butmu-icac-of-jaz-doadwould not.
Ryan makes an excellent suggestion to replace password rules by an entropy estimator like Zxcvbn.
One of the most important endeavors in the PHP universe is the PHP Framework Interop group. The group consists of several maintainers of big PHP projects. Their aim is to find commonalities between their projects and find ways to work together. They do this by proposing and accepting PSR's, short for PHP Standard Recommendation.
One of the most important PSR's is PSR-4 (and the now deprecated PSR-0) which describes a way to autoload classes. Thanks to this standard packages can be easily be reused in many frameworks and projects. PSR-2 is another important one. It is a coding style guide and greatly improves readabiltiy of code when working with a bunch of developers. There are several other PSR's that have been accepted.
Today PHP-FIG published their new site. It features a beautiful design by Jonathan Reinink (he's the designer of the PHP League sites, author of Glide, and creator of the PHP Package checklist). If you use PHP in any way you owe it to yourself to check it out the new site.
