Freek.dev

Thomas Byttebier wrote down some of his thoughts on copywriting.

... copywriting is an often overlooked aspect of UI design. That’s a serious shortcoming, because if you come to think of it: most of an app’s user interface simply is text. Hide the icons, imagery or colors and every app or web site is basically just letters and numbers. There may be some data in there, a significant part of it is UI. It would be stupid not to take excellent care of it.

http://thomasbyttebier.be/blog/copywriting-is-interface-design

Be sure to also check out his posts on icons and typography.

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If you're interested in some dark magic you should watch this talk by Marco Pivetta on Voodoo PHP. I really like these show-me-the-code type of talks.

We've often seen "magic" code, but how does it even work? Let's explore some arguably bad PHP coding techniques that are actually used in real world libraries to solve problems that would otherwise be a huge burden for all of us.

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It safe to say that UNIX is pretty much everywhere. Here's a promo movie about the OS from 1982 featuring the creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie.

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This essay explains how Git works. It assumes you understand Git well enough to use it to version control your projects.

The essay focuses on the graph structure that underpins Git and the way the properties of this graph dictate Git’s behavior. Looking at fundamentals, you build your mental model on the truth rather than on hypotheses constructed from evidence gathered while experimenting with the API. This truer model gives you a better understanding of what Git has done, what it is doing, and what it will do.

https://codewords.recurse.com/issues/two/git-from-the-inside-out

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The sublime Laravel newsletter added a new section to spotlight a developer in a short interview. I had the honor of being the first interviewee.

https://laravel-news.com/2015/06/developer-spotlight-freek-van-der-herten/

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While packages are great for re-use outside of frameworks, dependencies are still an issue. Namespaces resolve conflicts between classnames, but they do not offer a solution to package versioning. Especially in a framework-context, this can become very problematic. A real-world-example for this is Guzzle.

http://blog.frankdejonge.nl/packages-vs-components/

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Watch a very instructive live coding session with Matthias Verraes.

Under the pressure of deadlines and endless change requests, under the weight of years of legacy, code becomes unmaintainable. With the right tools, techniques, and mindset, any codebase can be brought under test, and be refactored towards a better architecture. Let's skip the theory and dive straight into the spaghetti code. In a live coding session, I will demonstrate how you can start refactoring your way out of a mess today.

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Here's a quick composer tip. The next time you require a dependency, use --sort-packages to alphabetically sort the dependencies in your composer.json. For example:

composer require spatie/string --sort-packages

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Mister community explains some shiny new features of PHP7 regarding errors and exceptions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNezpSU9toQ

I'm really glad we won't have to work with the clumsy BaseException.

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Data binding to the DOM is just one of those things that's damn handy when you've got it and super laborious when you don't. The problem is that it usually comes at a price of a hefty framework (hefty can apply to byte-size, but more often: the learning curve to use said framework).

https://remysharp.com/2015/06/02/bind

(found this via excellent Bram.us-blog)

 

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Christopher Pitt experimented a bit with generators and wrote down the thought process on his blog.

Generators are awesome. If they’re new to you then take some time to read where they come from and what they do. If you’ve come from a particular programming language background, they may be difficult for you to understand.

They were, and continue to be, tricky for me to grasp. So I’ve spent loads of time trying to understand them, and what they can do for my code.

https://medium.com/@assertchris/recursion-and-generators-d56f513ea6ab

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PHP 7 has been slated for release in November of this year (2015). It comes with a number of new features, changes, and backwards compatibility breakages that are outlined below.

https://github.com/tpunt/PHP7-Reference

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Developers and their employers are often at odds over matters like clean or beautiful code and with good reason: neither ships a product or increases sales. Most end users don’t care what the code looks like, as long as the product works and meets their needs. That means that beautiful code goes out the window when the rubber meets the road and crunch time sets in.

The fact of the matter is that framing code discussions in terms of beauty or attractiveness doesn’t help the case for getting code that’s clean. But there’s another way to frame the discussion that makes more sense, and achieves both the goal of writing clean code and meets the needs of most businesses: the concept of maintainable code.

http://www.brandonsavage.net/the-case-for-maintainable-code/

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There are many ways to modify the behavior of existing code with actually changing the core logic. Some patterns you might be familiar with are the decorator pattern or the observer pattern. Both allow you to take another object and modify the behavior by wrapping your modifications around the original code. One pattern you might not be familiar with though, is the interceptor pattern.

The interceptor pattern is a core concept of what is called aspect oriented programming (AOP). AOP aims to improve the modularity of your code by allowing you to separate cross-cutting concerns from the rest of your code.

http://www.edzynda.com/aspect-oriented-php-and-the-interceptor-pattern/

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Alan Klein created a Laravel 5.1 package that leverages Nginx HTTP Pushstream module to broadcast events. The commenting platform Disqus uses that Nginx module to handle comments in realtime.

You can find Alan's package on GitHub: https://github.com/cmosguy/laravel-http-pushstream-broadcaster

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Edd Mann demonstrates a nice trait to add OrElse functionality to a class via a trait. With it you can do things like:

[code]

$cart = $repository->findByIdOrElse(1, new ShoppingCart); $cart = $repository->findByIdOrElse(1, function () { return new ShoppingCart; });

<a href="http://tech.mybuilder.com/optional-value-control-flows-in-php-using-traits-and-magic-methods/">http://tech.mybuilder.com/optional-value-control-flows-in-php-using-traits-and-magic-methods/</a>

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When working on projects I found myself, over time, needing the same string functions over and over again. Things like how to shorten a string but still let it end on entire word, replace the last occurrence of string in a string, ...

Instead of keeping these functions in a helper file locally in the project, I made a package out of it. It was a good opportunity to spice it up with bit of OO to make them chainable. An example:

[code] // outputs "MIDDLE" echo string('StartMiddleEnd')->between('Start', 'End')->toUpper();

In addition to it's own methods, the package provides <a href="https://github.com/spatie/string#integration-with-underscorephp">an integration</a> with <a href="https://github.com/Anahkiasen/underscore-php">Maxime Fabre's underscore package</a>.

You are very welcome to submit pull requests to add functions that you feel are missing. Be sure to include some unit tests to ensure everything working as intended.

Granted,  it isn't the most sexy package in the world, but it sure is handy.

<a href="https://github.com/spatie/string">https://github.com/spatie/string</a>

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