Freek.dev

... it’s important to remember that API design isn’t strictly about the practical implications on client and server software. The audience for an API is the developer who is going to consume it. Per the "principle of least astonishment," developers will have an easier time learning and understanding an API if it follows the same conventions as other APIs they’re familiar with.

https://blogs.dropbox.com/developers/2015/04/how-many-http-status-codes-should-your-api-use/

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A very nice post by Christopher Pitt about generators and how to use them to run code asynchronous.

https://medium.com/%2540assertchris/co-operative-php-multitasking-ce4ef52858a0

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Is a million lines of code a lot? How many lines are there in Windows? Facebook? iPhone apps?

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/million-lines-of-code/

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In PHP, variable allocation is really easy, you don’t really need to know how memory is managed to use the language. But if you want to be a good programmer, you NEED to know what happens when you write “$var = 10;”

http://blog.thedebian.com/post/79117048456/what-happens-when-i-allocate-a-php-variable

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Here's another cool piece of code by Matthias Verraes:

function it($m,$p){echo ($p?'✔︎':'✘')." It $m\n"; if(!$p){$GLOBALS['f']=1;}}function done(){if(@$GLOBALS['f'])die(1);}

Yep, that's the entire test framework. More info at:

https://gist.github.com/mathiasverraes/9046427

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Having documentation on your API is highly beneficial. If it is well written you're likely going to receive less questions by consumers of your API about how it works.

Aglio is a nice tool that I've been using to generate API documentation. In goes the Markdown, out comes the beautiful documentation.

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As you may know, the Scalar Type Wars are over. It has been decided that we will have scalar type hints in PHP7.

Here's a nice short write up on the three related accepted RFC's by Er Galvao Abbott.

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This tech demo of Unreal Engine 4 looks amazing. Keep in mind that it isn't pre-rendered but running in real time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6EMc6eu3c8

Everything in the open world Kite demo is running in real time in Unreal Engine 4 at 30fps. In addition to Unreal Engine 4 open world features, Kite features fully dynamic direct and indirect illumination, cinematic quality depth of field and motion blur, PBR photo modeled assets and procedural asset placement.

Here is the making of:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clakekAHQx0

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Socialite is a first party package that was introduced together with Laravel 5. It aims to provide a very convenient way to authenticate with OAuth providers. Natively it supports Facebook, Twitter, Google, GitHub and Bitbucket.

DraperStudio and Andy Wendt made a whole bunch of other Socialite providers.

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The `yield` keyword is used by generators, which provide a simple way to implement iterators without having to create a class that implements the `Iterator` interface. A generator allows you to write code that iterates over a set of data without needing to build an array in memory that is returned at the end.

http://jenssegers.be/blog/66/behold-the-power-of-yield

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On the internals mailing list Anthony Ferrara posted a plea for unity on scalar types. If you want to know why it's so difficult to add scalar type hints to PHP, you should read it.

Scalar types are a hard problem. Not technically, but politically, because so many people use PHP in different ways. And everyone thinks their way is "the one true way".

http://news.php.net/php.internals/84689

The RFC needs a 2/3 majority to pass. The yes-camp currently has 67%. Personally I really hope this proposal will get accepted.

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Recently I stumbled upon an interesting paper for implementing motion sensing requiring no special hardware, only a speaker and mic! Unfortunately the paper didn't include code to test it, so I decided to reproduce it here on the web!

https://danielrapp.github.io/doppler/

Cool!

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Dimitrios Savvopoulos, the creator of the laravel-translatable package (which I use in almost every project), shared a very nice tip on how to develop a package while it is installed as a requirement.

If you have write access to a composer package repository, you have the possibility to continue its development while it is installed as requirement in another project. Let's see how we can accomplish this.

http://dimsav.com/blog/9/git-repository-inside-composer-vendors

If you have another, possibly better, way to go about this, let me know in the comments.

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A handy list for when versioned shit hits the fan.

http://41j.com/blog/2015/02/common-git-screwupsquestions-solutions/

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Excellent post by Rafael Dohms on the The League Of Extraordinary packages.

“The League of Extraordinary Packages” is what I have dubbed a collective of composer packages. Its essentially a group of developers who have gathered under a single flag (or in this case a vendor name) and set standards for the packages that live there.

...

So these are a few reasons I like this effort:

• Imposed Quality, Curated List ...
• Reduced author fragility ...
• Extended reach ...
• Reduced duplication ...

http://blog.doh.ms/2015/03/10/why-i-support-the-league/

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In Angular 2 some of the template syntax and semantics will be different. At the recent ng-conf the father of Angular, Miško Hevery, explained the changes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dMBcqwvYA0

I guess next year the conference will have to be renamed to [conf].

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Junior developers bring in a fresh perspective. The junior devs in our community come from a huge diversity of backgrounds, which gives you the opportunity to add someone to your team with a different perspective from everyone else. These new perspectives will increase chaos in the short term, but in the longer term will push you towards better solutions.

https://devmynd.com/blog/2015-1-pairing-with-junior-developers

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https://twitter.com/taylorotwell/status/573496234847027200

Achievement unlocked.

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Under this scheme, version numbers and the way they change convey meaning about the underlying code and what has been modified from one version to the next.

...

Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, increment the:

1. MAJOR version when you make incompatible API changes,
2. MINOR version when you add functionality in a backwards-compatible manner, and
3. PATCH version when you make backwards-compatible bug fixes.

Additional labels for pre-release and build metadata are available as extensions to the MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH format.

http://semver.org/

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