Freek.dev

Like at most previous editions, DHH delivered a keynote at RailsConf 2017. This year he spoke on the importance of belong to a group, programmer values, and belief systems. I love being in the Laravel community, but one thing that annoys me sometimes is the "us" vs "them" mentality you feel here and there. What I find great about DHH's talk is that is a positive approach to the values of Ruby community. He doesn't say that the other communities are bad, or lesser then them.

Anyways, go watch this keynote, it's great.

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On April 22nd Laravel Nigeria held its first meetup. It was a big success with over 150 developers showing up.

Here's a recap written by Neo Ighodaro, the organiser of the meetup: https://blog.devcenter.co/building-the-laravel-nigeria-community-with-over-150-attending-the-first-meetup-c919d5ca373c

The talks of the meetup were recorded, you can watch them here:

• Learn Frontend with Vue.js
• Deploying Your Laravel Application
• Surviving With "Thin" Controllers and Models

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Ondřej Mirtes, author of PHPStan lists some great tips to make a side project succesful.

Most developers have side projects. That's how we try out new things or make something that we miss on the market or in our dev stack. But most side projects end up unfinished and never actually see the light of day. And even if a developer builds up the courage to show his work to the public, he quickly finds out that just publishing a repository doesn't actually bring the masses to his doorstep. ... In this article, I'd like to share with you what I did to make sure that the project doesn't end up in the dustbin of history. I will concentrate on open source software, but the following advice may as well apply to any creative endeavour.

https://medium.com/@ondrejmirtes/how-i-got-from-0-to-1-000-stars-on-github-in-three-months-with-my-open-source-side-project-8ffe4725146#.211n6vihd

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James Long gives some solid advice: always keep in mind that there are a lot of things that are more important than coding.

The goal of free open source development is empowerment: everyone can not only use code for free but also contribute to and influence it. This model allows people to teach and learn from each other, improves businesses by sharing work on similar ideas, and has given some people the chance to break out and become well-known leaders.

Unfortunately, in reality open source development is rife with problems and is ultimately unsustainable. Somebody has to pay the cost of maintaining a project.

http://jlongster.com/Why-Frequently-Absent-Open-Source

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On his blog Jef Claes, organiser of DDDBE, shares some good tips on how to organize a meetup.

I've organized a few DDDBE meetups in the past, and always succeed in forgetting something. Either someone points it out well in advance, or I end up stressing last minute. This post partly serves as a checklist for myself, but it would be a welcome side effect to also see it encourage others to help out organizing future meetups. Organizing a meetup is not rocket science, having a list of what to take care of is a good start.

http://www.jefclaes.be/2017/02/how-to-organize-meetup.html

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Probably because I'm a heavy user of Laravel I read a lot of Laravel focused blogs and follow a lot people on Twitter who also are heavy users of the framework. But more than a Laravel developer, I consider myself a PHP developer first. One of the ways I try to stay in touch with what is happening in the larger PHP community is following this excellent link blog maintained by Chris Cornutt.

http://www.phpdeveloper.org/

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On the Laravel Daily blog Povilas Korop published an interview with Bobby Bouwmann. In the past two years Bobby earned almost a thousand best reply awards, an amazing accomplishment.

In recent years, Laracasts has become a no.1 resource for learning Laravel. Also, there’s a really active discussion forum on the website, so we decided to chat with one of the most active members there. Bobby Bouwmann has almost 1000 “Best Reply” awards on the forum, which is a huge number. So what is it like to be so active on Laracasts? Let’s find out.

http://laraveldaily.com/bobby-bouwmann-lessons-1000-best-replies-laracasts/

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Zalando, a large online fashion plaform, published it's guidelines around open source creation and usage.

Why Open Source? Because it can: improve quality, mitigate risk, increase trust, save us money, expand our technology choices, be fun, enable us to give back to the community, strengthen our tech brand, and attract talent. ... Do “Open Source First”: If your Zalando project can also be useful to non-Zalandos, release it as open source from the start.

https://github.com/zalando/zalando-howto-open-source

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Laravel employee #1, Mohammed Said, recently gave an interview at codeforaliving.io on his career and how he started with open source. Terrific story. A lot of what he says resonates with how I feel about working on open source.

Said believes many developers, in the Middle East and elsewhere, are interested in the open source community, but not sure how to get started: “They think they have to wait until they have something perfect.” That’s simply not the case, Said maintains. He encourages developers to dig deep into their favorite projects, especially into software they work with on a daily basis, and look for places they can offer “enhancements” to existing code.

Open source, he believes, is the best experience a developer can show in an interview. “Tech interviewers want one thing,” he says: “Show me your code.” You can share code you’ve written for your day job, but it’s probably impersonal or boring or even proprietary and closed source, so you can’t share it at all. Some code at work is done as part of a team and you can’t pick out what you did and what Jane down the hall did. Open source, on the other hand, is all you. It’s your passion, it’s publicly accessible, and it has your name on it.

http://www.codeforaliving.io/how-i-open-sourced-my-way-to-my-dream-job-mohamed-said

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The Laracon EU conference is happening right now. Talking to other developers is a joy like always, the speakers are great and the venue is amazing. Here's a good recap written by Simon Nicklin of the first day of the Laracon EU conference.

We entered the building and joined the back of the queue. I say we, even though I travelled on my own I already felt part of something. The queue snaked around a mood light corner to the awaiting registration desk where we are split into last name lanes. A pleasant volunteer welcomed me as I showed her my ticket. After a quick flick through the name cards I'm registered. For me this was the start of Laracon EU 2016.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/laracon-eu-conference-2016-day-1-simon-nicklin

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Joind.in is a website where attendees can leave feedback for speakers delivering talks and conferences and user groups. This feedback is very useful for the speakers who which improve their skills. In my mind it is an essential part of the PHP ecosystem.

For the last 6 years Lorna Jane Mitchell and Rob Allen have maintained the project. They are now looking for others to take over their duties.

This post is about the open source project, Joind.in. Joind.in is a tool to allow attendees at conferences or other events to offer immediate public feedback to speakers and organisers at those events. Joind.in is an open source project run by volunteers. For the last 6 years I've been a maintainer of this project, following a year or two of being a contributor. Over the last few months, myself and my comaintainer Rob Allen have been mostly inactive due to other commitments, and we have agreed it's time to step aside and let others take up the baton.

http://lornajane.net/posts/2016/joind-in-needs-help

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Without any doubt Tim Wood, the creator of the awesome moment.js library, has done a lot for the community. It's really a shame that the constant pressure of maintaining the library has taken it's toll.

The correlation between Open Source and burnout is no secret, and I am not immune to it. ... Seeing bugs and issues continue to roll in and being mentally unable to address them has led to feelings of failure and depression. When looking at the moment project, I could only see the negatives. The bugs and misnomers and mistakes I had made. It let to a cycle of being too depressed to contribute, which led to being depressed because I wasn’t contributing.

https://medium.com/@timrwood/moment-endof-term-522d8965689

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When features get added to PHP there's a lot of discussion first about the new functionality. This is done on the so-called internals mailing list. You can try to follow the discussions via a rather ugly interface at http://news.php.net. The site looks like a very old school web email client where all conversations are just running through each other.

A couple of days ago Matthieu Napoli launched his new site externals.io. This site makes following internals a lot easier. Messages that are part of a conversation are grouped and thus much easier to follow. If you're interested in this you should definitely also check out Made with Love's Why We Can't Have Nice Things project that lists all RFC's and votes.

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Davey Shafik dissects the values of several tech communities in a new post on his blog.

Just like the programming languages that are the centers of our communities, each community has its own set of rules and idioms — they have a real life syntax.

In my (almost) three years of being in a developer relations type role I have attended events in several communities and have observed how they differ from my primary community (PHP). As I’ve tried to understand those differences and the reasons behind them, I have had many discussions with members of many more communities also.

After attending my first PyCon (US) I was struck by just how welcoming and diverse the community is and had many conversations trying to understand why this is. This is not what this post is about. This post is about conferences specifically, and how communities place different priorities on different things when it comes to how they run, organize, speak at, and attend events.

https://daveyshafik.com/archives/69985-the-syntax-of-tech-communities.html

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Michael Bromley on his blog:

There is an implicit agreement which needs to be understood by both consumers and creators of FOSS projects¹. It goes something like this:

• I agree to provide you with some free code which solves your problem.
• I recognize that in doing so, I have taken on a small portion of responsibility to you as a user of my code.
• I agree to try to help you if you have difficulty in using my code.
• I agree to try to fix bugs that you find in my code.
• Crucially, you agree that I, in acting without remuneration, am free to assign priority to the above points as I see fit.

The last point is the reason why I haven’t fixed your issue yet.

As a package consumer you should be grateful for the free code you're given. Keep in mind that when you use someone else's code, you are responsible for that code as well. If a package maintainer solves an issue for you that's great. If he or she doesn't, than that's your problem, not the maintainer's. You can always submit a PR with a fix. And if the fix or feature doesn't get accepted you can always maintain your own fork.

For our own packages we try to respond to every single issue in a timely manner. The users of our packages are generally very friendly and helpful. There's only one instance when things went sour. I do make a point of thanking everybody who takes the time to submit a PR. It's a small thing but I do believe it helps creating a positive vibe on our GitHub repo's.

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Yesterday, after a winter sleep, PHPGent awoke and held a meetup at the offices of In The Pocket. It was nice to see some familiar and some new faces.

I had the honor of being the first speaker. My talk was titled "Backing up with Laravel". I started off with some best practices regarding backups and demonstrated the laravel-backup package which was released a few weeks ago.

Here are my slides:

https://speakerdeck.com/freekmurze/backing-up-with-laravel

Next up was Wouter Sioen of SumoCoders. He talked about building maintainable software. He showed how using the solid principles help to clean up the code of his home brew json to html converter. Then he continued with explaining object calisthenics: a few simple rules to greatly improve the readability of your code. Wouter's slides can found on github.io.

These two very beautiful graphic summaries of the talks were made by Peter Decuyper:

https://twitter.com/sgrame/status/720674134041235456

https://twitter.com/sgrame/status/720690758265778176

If you attended the meetup be sure to leave Wouter and me some feedback on joind.in so we can improve our speaking skills.

Visiting your local PHP user group is one of the best ways to learn new stuff and to getting to know the community. If you've never visited a user group, use this site to lookup the closest one to your home. If there isn't one close by, start one yourself.

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