Posts tagged with learning

Webpack Academy

Sean Larkin, core team member of Webpack, will be leaving his current job at Mutual of Omaha for a new position at Microsoft. Because on his team he was the one most familiar with the webpack setup of the project, he looked for a way to transfer his knowledge. He landed on creating a video course on webpack that's free for everyone.

I decided to create Webpack Academy, a training and educational platform for those wanting to learn more about webpack. This was a perfect way to not only allow me to give back to my team — by giving them free access to all of the content — but to also benefit the community by sharing it with everyone.

https://webpack.academy/

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What the hell are generics and why would I want them in PHP?

Frederick Vanbrabant, developer at madewithlove and co-organiser of PHP Antwerp, explains on his blog what generics are.

So everyone is talking about this hip “new” kid on the block for PHP: Generics. The rfc is on the table and a lot of people are getting all excited about it, but you don’t fully see the excitement? Let’s explore what it’s all about!

http://frederickvanbrabant.com/2017/05/31/generics-in-php.html

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Diving Laravel

Mohammed Said, Laravel employee number #1, recently announced that he published a new site where he shares stuff he learned while researching the Laravel code base. The site is called "Diving Laravel", which is kinda nice knowing that Mohammed is an incredible diver himself.

In this website I’m going to share notes on the internals of Laravel core, packages, as well as the technologies behind the different components. My goal is to help people understand how things work under the hood and also to be a reminder for me for when I need to look into something that I’ve already studied before.

https://divinglaravel.com/

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Stay up to speed with PHP by reading these feeds

by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

In the PHP ecosystem we're blessed with so many people blogging about their favourite language. Everyday new interesting content on PHP gets posted somewhere on the web. Visiting each blog separately to see if new content has been posted is quite tedious. Luckily this problem has been solved long…

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Shipping Docker, a video tutorial series on Docker

Chris Fidao, the hero behind serversforhackers.com, and Deploy PHP!, created a new video course called Shipping Docker. It's in early access right now and it covers everything from the basics to advanced topics like building a multi-server production environment.

I'm only a couple of videos deep in the course, and like expected, I'm liking a lot of what I'm seeing.

This is a comprehensive course in the many uses of Docker. From playing to developing, testing to deploying, we'll cover it all in a way that is easy to understand.

https://shippingdocker.com/

(In case you were wondering, I'm not being paid for posting this)

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Glossary of Modern JavaScript Concepts

Don't know what the difference between stateful and stateless is, or what higher order functions are? On the auth0.com site Sebastián Peyrott explains these terms and other modern JavaScript concepts.

Modern JavaScript has experienced massive proliferation over recent years and shows no signs of slowing. Numerous concepts appearing in JS blogs and documentation are still unfamiliar to many front-end developers. In this post series, we'll learn intermediate and advanced concepts in the current front-end programming landscape and explore how they apply to modern JavaScript.

https://auth0.com/blog/glossary-of-modern-javascript-concepts/

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How PHP Executes – from Source Code to Render

On the excellent PHP section of Sitepoint Thomas Punt has written a good high ievel overview of how PHP code is executed.

There’s a lot going on under the hood when we execute a piece of PHP code. Broadly speaking, the PHP interpreter goes through four stages when executing code:
  • Lexing
  • Parsing
  • Compilation
  • Interpretation

This article will skim through these stages and show how we can view the output from each stage to really see what is going on. Note that while some of the extensions used should already be a part of your PHP installation (such as tokenizer and OPcache), others will need to be manually installed and enabled (such as php-ast and VLD).

https://www.sitepoint.com/how-php-executes-from-source-code-to-render/

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A thousand best replies on the Laracasts forum

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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An introduction to functional programming

On Egghead.io there's a free course available on functional programming. Your teacher is Professor Frisby, who is in fact a hedgehog. Yup, you've read that right. The tempo of the course is quite fast, so you might have to, like me, pause or rewatch the videos to get the most out of it.

This course teaches the ubiquitous abstractions for modeling pure functional programs. Functional languages have adopted these algebraic constructs across the board as a way to compose applications in a principled way.

We can do the same in JavaScript. While the subject matter will move beyond the functional programming basics, no previous knowledge of functional programming is required. You'll start composing functionality before you know it.

https://egghead.io/courses/professor-frisby-introduces-composable-functional-javascript

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Advancing in the Bash Shell

If you want to learn some neat bash tricks, read this excellent read by Sam Rowe.

If you’ve ever used GNU/Linux, chances are good that you’ve used bash. Some people hold the belief that using a GUI is faster than using a CLI. These people have obviously never seen someone who uses a shell proficiently. In this tutorial, I hope to show you just a few of the amazing features bash provides that will increase your productivity in the shell.

http://samrowe.com/wordpress/advancing-in-the-bash-shell/

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Things I learned from reading Laravel: Up and running

by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

Matt Stauffer is currently putting the final touches on his new book called Laravel: Up And Running. It aims to be a good guide for newcomers to the framework. But even if you've got some experience with Laravel, it should be worth your time to read it. Even Matt himself picked up a lot of cool…

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The traits of a proficient programmer

Gregory Brown wrote an excellent article on how you can grow as a programmer.

Do you know what the difference between competence and proficiency is? ... Competence means having enough experience and knowledge to get stuff done; proficiency involves knowing why you are doing something in a certain way, and how it fits into the big picture. In other words, a proficient practitioner is always a competent practitioner, but the opposite may not be true.

https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/the-traits-of-a-proficient-programmer

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Finding time to become a better developer

Bill Sourour has some good tips on how to manage your time.

There’s no time for anything. At least that’s how it feels doesn’t it? No time to learn all the things you think you need to learn to stay ahead of the curve. No time to go back and refactor that ugly piece of code. It works (sort of) and there’s a deadline approaching. No time to write unit tests for everything. No time to write documentation or comments for the next guy who gets stuck maintaining what you wrote. No time to think. No time to breathe. No time!

Well… if you take the time to read this article, I promise you’ll find yourself with more time for what’s important.

https://medium.freecodecamp.com/finding-time-to-become-a-better-developer-eebc154881b2

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Things I didn't know Laravel could do

Matt Stauffer has been working on a book titled "Laravel: Up and Running" which will be released soon. In a post on his blog Matt shares a few hidden Laravel gems that he discovered while writing his book.

No blog post could contain all of the new things I learned from writing this book. I've been using—and teaching about—Laravel for years, and I was still shocked by how many tools and helpers and features I discovered.

Here are a few that stand out to me that I had never seen prior to writing the book.

https://mattstauffer.co/blog/things-i-didnt-know-laravel-could-do

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Things I used to do (that aren’t cool now)

In a post on his blog Michael Stivala looks back on his own code written a year ago. Because he learned a lot of stuff in a year time, he seems a lot of room for improvement.

As I’m picking up the codebase ahead of this Summer’s updates, I can’t help but review and refactor the existing code. It’s interesting to dissect previous design decisions. Also, I’ve learnt so much in the last year that it’s only natural for me to want to bring the standard of an older project up a bit.
https://michaelstivala.com/things-i-used-to-do-that-arent-cool-now/ If you look at your own code from a year (or longer ago) and think "this is allright, I can't improve on this", chances are you're not learning enough.

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Building a GIF search engine with React

Over at the Tighten blog Samantha Geitz posted an amazing introduction to React. She starts off by clearly explaining how to setup the environment (webpack and a few dependencies). After making sure that it all works, she continues by building a GIF search engine. Along the way the core concepts of React are explained. If you're in any way interesting in learning React, I warmly recommend reading the entire piece.

React itself is reasonably well-documented and easy to pick up, once you can shift your thinking to align with its conventions. The problem is, if you want to build robust apps, the V in MVC probably isn't going to cut it, and you have to dive into the often-confusing ecosystem surrounding React.

In this series, we're going to walk through the stages of building a React application — an app that lets you search the Giphy API and displays results, similar to what Giphy has on its own website.

In this first article, we are going to build the application using only React (with Webpack for asset compilation).

http://blog.tighten.co/react-101-building-a-gif-search-engine

I'm looking forward to read the next articles of this series.

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A step by step guide to building your first Laravel application

Eric L. Barnes, the curator of Laravel News, recently launched his new website called dotdev. It aims to be a resource for developers who want to read quality reviews and tutorials amongst other things.

Although the site in general doesn't focus on Laravel, Eric wrote a good introductory post for people who are new to the framework. Unlike most beginner level articles, it focuses on creating a real world application.

My goal with this is to create a guide for those just learning the framework. It is setup to take you from the very beginning of an idea into a real deployable application. ... I am attempting to go through the process of creating a new application just as I would in a real world environment. In fact, the code and idea is taken from a project that I built.

https://dotdev.co/tutorials/step-by-step-guide-to-building-your-first-laravel-application/

For the first batch of posts on the site I made a playlist for coding late at night. Do you have something to share that would interest the readers of dotdev? Read these guidelines on guest posting first, and thenemail Eric.

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Learning Elasticsearch with Laravel

Michael Stivala, the Maltese Artisan, wrote a nice introduction to Elasticsearch and how you can use it in Laravel.

In this post we’ll explore Elasticsearch; the basics of search and how to set it up with Laravel, Homestead and even Forge. Even though there are resources out there, I couldn’t find the one article that summarised everything I needed to get up and running in as short a time as possible.

https://michaelstivala.com/learning-elasticsearch-with-laravel

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Vim for beginners

Last year I made myself a bit acquainted with Vim. I'm by no means an expert and am not (yet :-)) advocating to replace your favourite IDE with Vim. I use it for small things:

  • it's much easier/faster to to edit files on a server using Vim as opposed to opening and editing the files in a tool like Transmit. There's a big chance that vim is already installed on your server.
  • editing your hostfile is breeze with vim.
  • if you need a small change, like deleting a line, in a file and you're IDE isn't open, Vim can help you.
  • there's a big change that you already use Vim when Git promts you to specify a commit message
Unlike most pieces of software, Vim has absolutely no respect for the beginner. Even quitting it proves quite difficult. There's really nobody that can use Vim without some training. But with same quick pointers everybody can do the tasks mentioned above.

Watch this video clearly explains the basic commands.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nim4_f5QUxA

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