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In a post on Sitepoint Allan MacGregor gives a good practical example on how to work with PHP-ML, a machine learning library for PHP.

As of late, it seems everyone and their proverbial grandma is talking about Machine Learning. Your social media feeds are inundated with posts about ML, Python, TensorFlow, Spark, Scala, Go and so on; and if you are anything like me, you might be wondering, what about PHP?

Yes, what about Machine Learning and PHP? Fortunately, someone was crazy enough not only to ask that question, but to also develop a generic machine learning library that we can use in our next project. In this post we are going take a look at PHP-ML – a machine learning library for PHP – and we’ll write a sentiment analysis class that we can later reuse for our own chat or tweet bot.

https://www.sitepoint.com/how-to-analyze-tweet-sentiments-with-php-machine-learning/

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On Scotch.io a new post by Julien Bourdeau was published that shows how you can easily import and search geographic data with Laravel Scout and Algolia.

Laravel Scout makes it very easy to setup an external search engine to create consumer-grade search quickly. The package comes with Algolia as a default search engine. I'd like to demonstrate how to make use of the geo-location search feature with Scout.

In this tutorial, you'll learn how to prepare your data for Algolia and Laravel Scout to retrieve items based on location.

https://scotch.io/tutorials/achieving-geo-search-with-laravel-scout-and-algolia

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?Combining query scopes with explicit model names will help keep code cleaner and easier to understand #laravel pic.twitter.com/ixzDdrZcRT

— Chris Gmyr (@cmgmyr) July 12, 2017

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I love this little “owns” trait/method that @michaeldyrynda & I came up with for Confomo.

Look at that expressiveness. :kisses fingers: pic.twitter.com/dE731Ko1Zw

— Matt Stauffer (@stauffermatt) July 7, 2017

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Let's have a little fun! Yitzchok Willroth, better know as Coderabbi, created a new package that can improve the output of PHPUnit.

Here's what the output of a testrun looks like with his package installed.

https://github.com/coderabbi/phpumoji

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David Négrier, CTO of the CodingMachine, wrote a nice article on why he likes and how his team uses typehints.

As a developer consuming this function, I know how to use it. And if I’m using it wrong, I’ll know right away because PHP will crash with a nice error message when the function is called rather than with a cryptic error some time later.

https://www.thecodingmachine.com/type-hint-all-the-things/

Personally I like typehints too, because the potential readability improvement the article touches upon.

Note: (I only include this paragraph because it's mentioned in the intro of the article, don't want to stir up a discussion) the fuzz about that "Visual Debt" video was overblown. Even though I didn't agree with all of it, it was nice to hear Jeffrey's way of thinking.

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Like this simple new addition coming in Laravel 5.4.28, it's handy for when you need to eager-load related models of a collection on the go. pic.twitter.com/0W3hqG97BR

— Mohamed Said (@themsaid) June 21, 2017

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On the Bugsnag blog, Graham Campbell, wrote a guest post on the basics of creating a Laravel package. If you've ever wanted to create a package, this is a good starting point.

Laravel is a massively influential PHP framework, and its simple but powerful design means that it’s easy to utilize packages in your application. In this blog post we will look at the basics of creating and installing Laravel packages.

https://blog.bugsnag.com/designing-laravel-packages/

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Mattieu Napoli shows how you can use non breaking spaces to make long test function names more readable.

Yes. This article is about using non-breakable spaces to name tests. And the fact that it’s awesome. And why you should use them too.

public function test a user can add a product to a wishlist() { // ... }

The code above is valid PHP code and works. Non-breaking spaces (aka   in HTML) look like spaces in editors but are actually interpreted like any other character by PHP.

http://mnapoli.fr/using-non-breakable-spaces-in-test-method-names/

It's cool that it works, but I'm not really a fan of this. I very much prefer how test runners like jest go about this by passing the name of the test to a function so you can use spaces.

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Cool little Laravel 5.5 Eloquent Collection macro to assert two model collections are the same ?? pic.twitter.com/zzbkr1fL9T

— Adam Wathan (@adamwathan) June 14, 2017

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In a new blogpost at Sitepoint Christopher Pitt talks about snapshot testing. He first explains how snapshot testing can help test React components. Then he demonstrates how you can use our home grown package to use snapshot testing in PHP. Finally he shows pretty cool use cases for snapshot tests.

Ah-ha moments are beautiful and rare in programming. Every so often, we’re fortunate enough to discover some trick or facet of a system that forever changes how we think of it.

For me, that’s what snapshot testing is.

You probably write a lot of PHP code, but today I want to talk about something I learned in JavaScript. We’ll learn about what snapshot testing is and then see how it can help us write better PHP applications.

https://www.sitepoint.com/snapshot-testing-viable-php/

If you want know more about snapshot testing, check out this blogpost by my colleague Sebastian, or watch this video where I refactor some tests to use snapshots.

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On Twitter I see a bunch of people regularly tweeting very nice code snippets. Instead of only retweeting those, I'm going to add them to my blog. I'll tag them with tweet.

Here's the first one:

request()->query() is a life saver when dealing with tables that store "sorts" and "filters" in a query string. pic.twitter.com/84P6xvTvSz

— Caleb Porzio (@calebporzio) June 21, 2017

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One of our more popular packages is laravel-permission. It enables you to easily save roles and permissions in the database. It hooks into Laravel's native authorization capabilities. Allthough it's quite powerful, the package doesn't come with any UI out of the box.

If you do need a UI for this in your projects you're in luck. On Scotch.io Caleb Oki wrote down an extensive tutorial on how you can build screens to manage users, permissions and roles that use our package.

When building an application, we often need to set up an access control list (ACL). An ACL specifies the level of permission granted to a user of an application. For example a user John may have the permission to read and write to a resource while another user Smith may have the permission only to read the resource.

In this tutorial, I will teach you how to add access control to a Laravel app using laravel-permission package. For this tutorial we will build a simple blog application where users can be assigned different levels of permission.

https://scotch.io/tutorials/user-authorization-in-laravel-54-with-spatie-laravel-permission

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Recently this button to optimize PHP's OPcache was added to Laravel Forge.

If you were wondering what PHP OPcache is all about and what pressing this button does with your application, read this article Olav van Schie wrote on the subject a while ago.

Every time you execute a PHP script, the script needs to be compiled to byte code. OPcache leverages a cache for this bytecode, so the next time the same script is requested, it doesn’t have to recompile it. This can save some precious execution time, and thus make your app faster (and maybe save some server costs).

https://medium.com/appstract/make-your-laravel-app-fly-with-php-opcache-9948db2a5f93

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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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On the Tighten co blog Caleb Porzio wrote a small post on how you can boot your model traits. It's a very handy feature that's being used a quite a few Spatie packages.

TL;DR Use bootNameOfTrait() instead of boot() in a model trait to avoid being overwritten by the base model’s boot() method.

https://blog.tighten.co/laravel-tip-bootable-model-traits

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