Freek.dev

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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Matthew Setter went to the rabbi.

I don’t have a specific conference in mind, but I’ve given myself the next 12 months. I think that’s a practical and realistic amount of time, yet still short enough to not lose sight of.

http://www.matthewsetter.com/path-first-php-conference-talk/

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A list of interesting conference talks and videos on PHP.

https://github.com/phptodayorg/php-must-watch

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HTTP2 will mean a change in how we should build websites. The best practices of HTTP1 are harmful in a HTTP2 world.

https://mattwilcox.net/web-development/http2-for-front-end-web-developers

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The accepted solution thus far has been to install newer versions of PHP alongside Apple’s version using Homebrew or MacPorts. This would likely require you to compile the MCrypt extension manually. I also found that Homebrew could leave your system in disarray if things went wrong (more than once I had to do a complete restore because of this).

However, there’s another method I came across while research some non-related issues: install the latest version of PHP from a binary that includes the MCrypt extension. It will not bork up your system if you want to remove it, either.

https://medium.com/@genealabs/run-allthecommands-outside-of-homestead-e2fc8d05251f

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Unit Testing gives you the what. Test-Driven Development gives you the when. Behavior Driven-Development gives you the how. Although you can use each individually, you should combine them for best results as they complement each other very nicely.

http://codeutopia.net/blog/2015/03/01/unit-testing-tdd-and-bdd/

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The next major release of PHP, version 7, is going to be an awesome release. Not only will performance be greatly improved, there probably will be lots of nice changes to the language.

The procedure on how PHP gets changed is easily readable and well documented. In short it comes down to this:

• Proposed changes are submitted on the PHP Wiki.
• There is a RFC (Request for comments) phase in which key members of the community and contributors can discuss the change.
• After this round of discussion, which lasts a minimum of two weeks, they can vote if the proposed change gets implemented in a next version of the language.

If you want to closely monitor the future of PHP here's a tool to monitor all activity on the current RFC's.

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Functions that operate on other functions, either by taking them as arguments or by returning them, are called higher-order functions. If you have already accepted the fact that functions are regular values, there is nothing particularly remarkable about the fact that such functions exist. The term comes from mathematics, where the distinction between functions and other values is taken more seriously.

http://eloquentjavascript.net/05_higher_order.html

Read the article for some clear examples to help you understand the concept.

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Michael Maclean demonstrates how a 2100% performance gain can be achieved when rendering a Mandelbrot fractal using Recki-CT, a PHP compiler written in PHP.

Recently, Anthony Ferrara (known throughout the Internet and beyond as @ircmaxell) and Joe Watkins (similarly well-known as @krakjoe) have been working on a new set of toys for solving this problem while staying on the “standard” PHP runtime. Recki-CT is a set of tools that implement a PHP compiler, in PHP. While this might you think of things like PyPy, which implements a Python virtual machine in Python, this is not Recki’s goal – it doesn’t provide a VM, so it can’t run PHP by itself. However, it can parse PHP code and generate other code from it.

http://mgdm.net/weblog/php-at-the-speed-of-c/

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Envoy is an easy to use task runner created by master artisan Taylor Otwell. It offers a simple blade-like syntax to create tasks. If you're not familiar with it, you can watch this free Laracasts-video. Chris Fidao recently showed, in his excellent Servers For Hackers newsletter, how you can create a light version of Capistrano with Envoy.

Up until a few hours ago a task could only run via ssh. But now that this pull request has been merged, you can also use envoy to locally run commands.

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Coming soon to a server near you.

http://http2.github.io/faq/

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Middleware is a series of wrappers around your application that decorate the request and the response. By wrapping the app in decorators you can add new behavious from the outside. This image explains the idea more visually:

[caption id="attachment_475" align="alignnone" width="726"] source: StackPHP.com[/caption]

 

The concept isn't new, solutions already exists for many languages (eg. Ruby, Python, Node, ...)

The PHP equivalent is StackPHP. Here's an excellent post by Richard Bagshaw explaining it. There are a lot of StackPHP style middlewares available that you can use in your applications.

Laravel 5 uses middleware for putting an application in maintenance mode, CSRF protection, authentication and more. Unfortunately Laravel 5 middleware isn't compatible with StackPHP-style middleware. Barry vd. Heuvel created at package to convert StackPHP middleware to Laravel 5 middleware and explained the inner workings on his blog.

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At Spatie we're currently looking for a back-end developer. Chances are that, as a reader of this blog, you might be a good candidate.

Read the job posting here (in Dutch):

https://spatie.be/vacature-back-end-developer

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Matt Stauffer shows how he built Gistlog in under two hours.

Gistlog is a blogging "platform" for people who want to quickly write and publish content, in Markdown, and don't want to bother with yet another platform and yet another login and yet another group hoarding their content. With Gistlog, you use your pre-existing Github login, you store the data in your own Github account, and you can publish with a single click.

A must see if you want to know how to get things done quickly in Laravel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4BbeHYCR1E

Also make sure you check out his blogposts on the new features of Laravel 5.

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Recently some of the Laravel-packages I built at Spatie were updated for Laravel 5.

spatie/laravel-glide This package enables you to generate image manipulations on the fly and generate URL's to those images. These URL's will be signed so only you will be able to specify which manipulations should be generated. Every manipulation will be cached. Under the hood, Glide is being used.

spatie/searchindex This is an opinionated package to store and retrieve objects from Elasticsearch. It was tailormade for a project I was working on and only provides the functionality that I needed. If you need full control over elasticsearch via PHP, take a look at the official low-level client.

spatie/googlesearch This package can fetch results from a Google Custom Search Engine. It returns an array with searchresults.

eloquent-sortable This package provides a trait that adds sortable behaviour to an Eloquent model. The value of the ordercolumn of a new record of a model is determined by the maximum value of the ordercolumn of all records of that model + 1.

 

A big thank you goes out to Matthias De Winter, who is helping me update these packages.

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For my own reasons, I have decided to cease my involvement with PHP development. This isn’t a judgement of the PHP community nor the internals mailing list, you’re all wonderful people and it’s really been a pleasure, and I mean that completely honestly. However, this has ended up taking up too much of my time (which is my own fault, and my own fault alone) and I can’t really justify it to myself anymore.

So, I’m no longer contributing to PHP, and all four active RFCs authored by myself are therefore withdrawn: Scalar Type Hints, Spaceship/Combined Comparison Operator, Void Return Type, Big Integer Support.

http://news.php.net/php.internals/82750

Damn.

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ECMAScript 6 is the upcoming version of the ECMAScript standard. This standard is targeting ratification in June 2015. ES6 is a significant update to the language, and the first update to the language since ES5 was standardized in 2009. Implementation of these features in major JavaScript engines is underway now.

Babel will turn your ES6+ code into ES5 friendly code, so you can start using it right now without waiting for browser support.

https://babeljs.io/

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Very impressive demonstration of Spot, the new robot by Google-owned Boston Dynamics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8YjvHYbZ9w

You may not be aware of it but we already are living in the future.

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