What's new in PHP 7.4

stitcher.io

PHP 7.4 will probably be released this week. My colleague Brent wrote a good post on all the shiney new things this release brings.

PHP 7.4, the latest version before PHP 8, brings lots of new features, syntax additions and fixes. We need to wait a little longer though: PHP 7.4 will be released on November 28, 2019. In this post you'll find a list with everything that's new and changed to help you prepare for the upgrade.

Read more [stitcher.io]

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Exciting new features in Vue 3

vueschool.io

Filip Rakowski goes over all the shiney new feature that are coming in Vue 3

As you could expect, Vue 3 brings a lot of new exciting features. Thankfully Vue team mostly introduced additions and improvements over current APIs rather than major changes so people that already know Vue 2 should quickly feel comfortable with new syntaxes.

Read more [vueschool.io]

My Alfred workflows original

by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Alfred is a fantastic tool for macOS that allows you to be more productive. The app allows you to install workflows to make it more powerful. In this short blog post, I'd like to share the workflows that I have installed.

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Thoughts on pricing for Mailcoach

www.sigerr.org

At Spatie we currently building Mailcoach: a solution to self-host newsletters and email campaigns. It can be used a stand alone app or as a laravel package. We'll also create a video course that explains the internals of the package. We're not going to make this software open source, but sell it. We're still are deciding on our pricing model.

Julien Bourdeau, engineer at Algolia, shares his thoughts on how it should be priced.

Today, Freek announced that they're going to release the pricing model soon and opened a conversation about what it could be. It got me thinking, and unfortunately, I couldn't fit my thought in 280 characters. First, it's important to understand that MailCoach will be 2 main things: a full-fledged app and a Laravel package.

Read more [www.sigerr.org]

Databases: how they work, and a brief history

seldo.com

Laurie Voss, co-founder of npm, explains how databases work, what the difference is between MySQL and something like Redis, why MySQL is popular and much more!

My twitter-friend Simon had a simple question that contained much complexity: how do databases work? The result was an absurdly long thread of 70+ tweets, in which I expounded on the workings and history of databases as used by modern web developers, and Simon chimed in on each tweet with further questions and requests for clarification. The result of this collaboration was a super fun tiny explanation of databases which many people said they liked, so here it is, lightly edited for clarity.

Read more [seldo.com]

Happy Dev: a podcast on mental health

happy-dev.transistor.fm

James Brooks recently started a podcast on mental health. In the second episode Matt Stauffer was interviewed.

This week I’m speaking to Matt Stauffer. Matt is a partner at the web agency Tighten, developer, teacher, podcaster and author. Matt and I speak about his experiences with anxiety and depression, being a great employer and other things!

Read more [happy-dev.transistor.fm]

Sending a welcome notification to new users of a Laravel app original

by Freek Van der Herten – 7 minute read

My team and I currently building Mailcoach, a solution to self-host newsletters and email campaigns. In Mailcoach you can create new users to use the app.

How should these new users be onboarded? The easy way out would be to send these new users a default password reset notification to those users, but that isn't a good first experience. The default auth scaffold by Laravel doesn't help us here: it only contains functionality to log in and to let users register themselves.

To onboard new users created by other users, I've created a package called laravel-welcome-notification which can send a welcome notification to new users that allows them to set an initial password.

In this blogpost I'd like to explain how you can use the package).

Read more

Build your own React

pomb.us

In a very cool post, Rodrigo Pombo explains the internals of React by rewriting it's core from scratch.

We are going to rewrite React from scratch. Step by step. Following the architecture from the real React code but without all the optimizations and non-essential features.

Read more [pomb.us]

Closing Modals with the Back Button in a Vue SPA

jessarcher.com

Jess Archer recently gave an excellent talk at Laracon AU. In a new blogpost she explains one one tips given during her talk: how to close modals in a Vue app by using the back button.

On most web apps, pressing the back button while a modal dialog is open will navigate to the previous page, rather than closing the modal. This can be very frustrating! It might not seem like a huge deal on a desktop app, but on a mobile, where a modal like this will often be full-screen, and with phones having back buttons and back gestures, I believe it's a huge user experience improvement.

Read more [jessarcher.com]

Creating custom relations in Laravel

stitcher.io

My colleague Brent solved a performance by creating a custom relation

One last solution that came to mind was to load all people, all contracts, and map them together manually. In the end that's exactly what I ended up doing, though I did it in the cleanest possible way: using custom relations.

Read more [stitcher.io]

Crafting maintainable Laravel applications

jasonmccreary.me

At Laracon AU, Jason McCreary gave an excellen talk on how to create maintainable Laravel apps. On his blog he published a written down version of the talk.

Being the author of BaseCode and creator of Shift gives me a unique insight into writing Laravel applications. I combined 20 years of writing code with supporting over 20,000 Laravel upgrades into 10 tips for crafting maintainable Laravel applications.

Read more [jasonmccreary.me]

Writing open source software, and staying sane while at it

sebastiandedeyne.com

My colleague Seb lists a few very good actionale tips that help you maintaining open source software.

In the 4.5 years I’ve been a developer at Spatie, over 200 packages have been built and released by our team. I’ve done quite some authoring and maintenance over the years, and I’d like to share 8 actionable tips on writing and maintaining open source software without going insane.

Read more [sebastiandedeyne.com]