Freek.dev

Sara Soueidan shares valueable insights on the importance of accessibility.

A few years ago I didn’t know what the term “accessibility” meant. I built Web sites that were partially inaccessible because I didn’t know better. Fast forward to today, I know enough to be able to write, speak and run workshops on accessibility, helping others build more a accessible and inclusive Web. Much like everyone else in our field, I am still learning. But since I started, I learned a lot of valuable lessons and core values that drive my work today. Here are a few of them.

Read more [www.24a11y.com]

David Khourshid explains how you can use state machines to make your logic more resilient.

Disabling a button is not logic. Rather, it is a sign that logic is fragile and bug-prone. In my opinion, disabling a button should only be a visual cue to the user that clicking the button will have no effect.

Read more [dev.to]

JMac, the creator of Laravel Shift, has a few interesting ideas on how to make the framework better.

Every so often a revolutionary change is required. This provides a chance to revisit goals. One of the primary goals of Laravel is developer experience. And maintainability, freshness, and approachability all improve developer experience. So, with all this in mind here are the top five things I would change in Laravel.

Read more [jasonmccreary.me]

Kevlin Henney wrote a good post on the importance of naming things well.

Good naming is part of design. It sets expectations and communicates a model, showing how something should be understood and used. If you mean to tell the reader getMillisSince1970, don’t say getTime.

Read more [medium.com]

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]

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]

Tim MacDonald shares an interesting technique.

Action scopes are...well...just query scopes really, but instead of filtering they take an action. It's just a random name I've given them to differentiate them from regular filtering based query scopes in my projects.

Read more [timacdonald.me]

Not adding an API until absolutely necessary lets us keep our model internal and lets us iterate as needed.

— Matthieu Napoli (@matthieunapoli) October 10, 2019

Read more [twitter.com]

Gergely Orosz argues that you should start with a simple design and try your best to keep it simple. I don't necessarily agree with everything in the post, but it's an interesting opinion nonetheless.

Software architecture best practices, enterprise architecture patterns, and formalized ways to describe systems are all tools that are useful to know of and might come in handy one day.

Read more [blog.pragmaticengineer.com]

? Don't use magic numbers when defining any TTL (like cache or cookies) in PHP. Use human-readable intervals instead. pic.twitter.com/ZC6S6BVMUi

— Marcel Pociot ? (@marcelpociot) September 23, 2019

Read more [twitter.com]

I don't necessarly agree with every detail in this post, but it's very interesting to see how others structure larger projects.

In this article, I would like to show you an alternative way to organize your Laravel directory structure. I think the default structure is fine for the most projects. But when it comes down to larger projects I was looking for a different structure.

Read more [stefanbauer.me]

? In many cases avoiding `else` and using early returns will greatly improve readability of your code.

I wish somebody would have told me this sooner in my career.

Contrived example in the image. Real world example: https://t.co/oOsSGAJLZm#bestpractices pic.twitter.com/YgqB0kMIpg

— Freek Van der Herten (@freekmurze) 17 september 2019

Read more [twitter.com]

In this old, but still relevant, blog post Craig Davis explains what guard clauses are and how they can be used to clean up your code.

We’ll first explore several versions of a sample method from a hypothetical billing system. For these purposes, we’ll assume this is code in an existing system and we’ll look at refactoring it to reduce complexity and make it easier for a programmer to understand. The first example will be trivial enough to easily understand, but we’ll build on it in the final examples.

Read more [engineering.helpscout.com]

Here a some great tips on how to write robust software.

NASA's JPL, which is responsible for some of the most awesomest science out there, is quite famous for its Power of 10 rules (see original paper). Indeed, if you are going to send a robot on Mars with a 40 minutes ping and no physical access to it then you pretty damn well should make sure that your code doesn't have bugs.

Read more [dev.to]

Patrick Brouwers, the creator of Laravel Excel, explains how to handle failing jobs in Laravel

When designing software, don’t only think about the happy path. Write down (preferably with (unit) tests) what all the things are that could go wrong. Then design your solution to be able to recover those situations. (Wether or not automatic.) There isn’t a single solution to rule them all, some processes might need to have specific failure handling while others are fine with the default approach.

Read more [medium.com]

Laravel Shift creator JMac did a write up of the talk he gave at this year's Laracon US

I received a lot of valuable feedback from these talks. So I combined them by using analytics from Shift to identify underutilized features of Laravel and demonstrate them with code.

Read more [jasonmccreary.me]

In an older but still relevant post, Jeff Atwood shares why you shouldn't use boolean parameters and how this translation to UI.

Read more [blog.codinghorror.com]

Matthew Rocklin reminds us that sometimes you shouldn't extract code.

However, there is also a cost to this behavior. When a new reader encounters this code, they need to jump between many function definitions in many files. This non-linear reading process requires more mental focus than reading linear code.

Read more [matthewrocklin.com]