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Laravel / PHP / AI

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I write about Laravel, PHP, AI and building better software.

Every two weeks, I share practical tips, tutorials, and behind-the-scenes insights from maintaining 300+ open source packages. Join thousands of developers who read along.

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Hand-written service containers

Link – – matthiasnoback.nl

Matthias Noback makes the case for writting your own service containers.

Dependency injection is very important. Dependency injection containers are too. The trouble is with the tools, that let us define services in a meta-language, and rely on conventions to work well. This extra layer requires the "ambient information" Paul speaks about in his tweet, and easily lets us make mistakes that we wouldn't make if we'd just write out the code for instantiating our services.

Read more [matthiasnoback.nl]

We’re optimizing ourselves to death

Link – – medium.com

Zander Nethercutt provides some great insights in the mechanisms in play that can lead to burnout.

When we see long weekends and think “work before play,” when we see Friday nights and think “sleep before clubs,” when we see escalators as accelerators and not opportunities to “just take a second,” we’re nothing more than hyperrational prisoners making a decision that would be inaccurately characterized as a dilemma because the answer is obvious.

Read more [medium.com]

PHPStorm Inspections for your Continuous Integration Process

Link – – www.christianscheb.de

I was quite surprised to learn that it could make sense to run PhpStorm on the server too.

Did you know that PHPStorm (or any other Jetbrains IDE) can run inspections from command line and generate XML files for the results? This is a great “hidden” feature of those IDEs and machine-readable output means it can be somehow integrated with a continuous integration (CI) process. So let’s do this!

Read more [www.christianscheb.de]

HTTP Toolbox

Link – – lornajane.net

Lorna Jane gives a good overview of the tools available when working on an API.

As Web Developers, we need to know how to work with HTTP from every angle. I gave a 2-hour tutorial at PHP UK that included some of my most trusted tools - but it was sold out and a bunch of people asked me if there was video (there wasn't, tutorials make little sense when videoed). Instead, I thought I'd try to set out a self-study version of the workshop (I rarely teach these days so I'm unlikely to deliver it anywhere else).

Read more [lornajane.net]

The internet was built on the free labor of open source developers. Is that sustainable?

Link – – motherboard.vice.com

The issue of whether there is a generalized sustainability crisis in open source is a contentious one, but that doesn’t obviate the need to find a solution for open source projects that do struggle to find funding and volunteers to support development. Whether these are marginal examples or a rising epidemic, the fact that they continue to work on open source projects in spite of this shortcoming is a testament to their dedication to the goals of the project and open source development more generally. Yet most developers are in agreement that if there are ways to sustainably fund the open source community, this will ultimately lead to even better software.

Read more [motherboard.vice.com]

20 lines of code that will beat A/B testing every time

Link – – stevehanov.ca

In an older but still post, Steve Hanov explains a nice algorithm to test out new features on your audience. I don't now if this approach will yield better results, but it sure is an interesting idea.

In recent years, hundreds of the brightest minds of modern civilization have been hard at work not curing cancer. Instead, they have been refining techniques for getting you and me to click on banner ads. It has been working. Both Google and Microsoft are focusing on using more information about visitors to predict what to show them. Strangely, anything better than A/B testing is absent from mainstream tools, including Google Analytics, and Google Website optimizer. I hope to change that by raising awareness about better techniques.

Read more [stevehanov.ca]

Server-side apps with client-side rendering

Link – – reinink.ca

Jonathan Reinink proposes a new take on what Vue's role could be in a server rendered app.

What I have here is a classic server-side app, that uses server-side routing and controllers. There is no API. The controllers lookup the data from the database, and then pass it to the templates. Except, I'm not using any server-side (ie. Blade) templates. Instead I'm doing full client-side rendering using Vue.js. Confused yet? Let me explain.

Read more [reinink.ca]

Notes on PHP RFCs, and topics that occur repeatedly on PHP internals

Link – – github.com

Dan Ackroyd maintains this interesting repo on GitHub with thoughts on why some PHP RFC's are not implemented yet. High on on my wishlist: Briefer closure syntax and Generics

There are some notes on PHP RFCs, why some were declined, and what others might need for them to be implemented. The purpose of these documents is to avoid information from being lost and to try to avoid conversations needing to be repeated multiple times on PHP internals.

Read more [github.com]

Going deep on UUIDs and ULIDs

Link – – blog.honeybadger.io

Over at the Honeybadger blog, Starr Horne wrote an interesting article on the different types of UUIDs and ULIDs.

UUIDs are and will continue to be the standard. They've been around forever, and libraries are available in every language imaginable. However, new approaches are worth considering, especially as we enter a world that's increasingly run by distributed systems. New unique-id approaches may help us solve problems that weren't prevalent at the publication of RFC4122.

Read more [blog.honeybadger.io]

A package to handle enums

Link – – stitcher.io

Recently we released a new package called enum. In a new post on his blog Brent tells you what the benefit of working with enums is and how our package differs from the alternatives.

Today I want to explore some of the difficulties we encounter when solving problems like enums in userland. I'll talk about my personal take on enums, and we'll ponder on core support.

Read more [stitcher.io]