A recap of 2019 original
A year ago, I wrote a recap of 2018. Now that 2019 is coming to a close, I thought it might be fun to write a similar post on what I did this year.
Writing open source software, and staying sane while at it
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]
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Live refactor: contributing to open source
In this video Jason McCreary creates a PR that adds a null driver to our laravel-newsletter package.
Optimizing JavaScript packages for tree shaking
In a new post at the madewithlove blog, Geoffrey Dhuyvetters explains how you can organize your code so a bundler can make it as small as possible.
As an author of (open source) packages, I think you have the responsibility to protect the bundle size of your package consumer. When you publish a package that exports a whole range of modules (for example lodash, ramda, date-fns…) you want to make sure the package is exported in such a way that the consumer of your package (mostly bundlers) can optimize size.
Read more [madewithlove.be]
A Laravel package to flash messages original
For the past few years, we've been using the laracasts/flash package to flash messages in all projects. In case you don't know: a flash message is a message that is being passed from a request to only the next request. The Laracasts package does its job pretty well. It has support for multiple flash messages, overlay messages. It comes with bootstrap styling out of the box and a few messaging levels preconfigured.
We've noticed that in our projects we only use a tiny bit of functionality from the laracasts/flash. That's why we whipped up our own lightweight package called spatie/laravel-flash. In this blog post, I'd like to introduce it to you.
The internet was built on the free labor of open source developers. Is that sustainable?
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]
Introducing phpx: implementing Phoenix' LiveView in PHP
Christopher Pitt has created a new package called phpx that bring the power of LiveView to PHP.
A few days ago, Caleb Porzio demonstrated some work he’s been doing; to replicate Phoenix LiveView in Laravel. I’ve been building PHP preprocessor stuff for a long time, and this really inspired me to try the same thing.
Read more [assertchris.io]
A recap of 2018 original
Now that 2018 is coming to a close, a lot of awesome people have written a recap post. Here's mine! The most significant change on a personal level is that my girlfriend an I bought a house in Ghent. Together with our two kids, we moved this summer, and we now live in an awesome house that's very…
Our packages have been downloaded 20 million times original
At Spatie we do a lot of open source work. You can find a list of our packages on the open source section of our website. I'm proud to share that, according to Packagist, the Spatie packages have now been downloaded over 20 million times. The rate at which they are being downloaded is growing too.…
Introducing our Laravel Nova packages original
Introducing our Laravel Nova packages Laravel Nova is a beautiful admin panel that was first showcased at Laracon 2018 by Laravel creator Taylor Otwell. Using Nova building rich admin panels is a breeze. Nova was released today. Taylor was kind enough to give us early access to Nova shortly after…
A new website for Spatie: backend highlights original
For the first time in 4 years we completely redesigned our company website. We launched it today. The site is a simple Laravel app with some technical niceties. True to form we also open sourced the app, you can find the code in this repo on GitHub. In this blogpost I'd like you to give you a tour…
Take a look into your Laravel views
Marcel Pociot, serial open source creator, released another cool Laravel package.
When your Laravel project grows, so do the Laravel views. Sometimes it might be hard to figure out, which part of the output HTML was rendered using which template. With this package, you can take a peek into your Laravel views and find out which template is responsible for which part of the output HTML.
Read more [github.com]
A PHP debugger written in PHP
Joe Watkins, core PHP developer and author of (amongst many other things) ptrheads, is busy creating a PHP debugger written in PHP that you can just composer require.
This isn't just pipe dreams, the PHP code exists, it's alpha quality and largely untested ...There is much to do and you shouldn't design your workflow around this (or any alpha quality software) yet. What you should do is start reading code, testing, and opening pull requests...
You'll find the code of Joe's debugger in this repo on GitHub.
Read more [blog.krakjoe.ninja]
The open source department at Spatie is doing overtime original
Bad title because we don't do overtime at Spatie, but our team has been very busy putting out new open source stuff. In the past weeks our team has released three new packages. In this post I'd like to quickly introduce them too you. sheets First up is spatie/sheets, created by Sebastian. This…
A good issue
Sebastian De Deyne, package creator and JavaScript wizard at Spatie, gives some good tips on how to report an issue well.
Maintaining a number of open source projects comes with a number of issues. Reporting a good issue will result in a more engaged approach from project maintainers. Don't forget: there's a human behind every project.
https://sebastiandedeyne.com/posts/2018/a-good-issue
Laravel Excel — Lessons Learned
Last week Laravel Excel v3 was released. In a post on his company blog Patrick Brouwers writes the story of why and how v3 was released.
Laravel Excel (https://github.com/Maatwebsite/Laravel-Excel) turned 4 years last November and has reached almost 6 million Packagist downloads. A good time to reflect on 4,5 years of open source development.
https://medium.com/@maatwebsite/laravel-excel-lessons-learned-7fee2812551
Today we hit 10 million PHP package downloads original
For the past few years Spatie, the company where I work, has released many Laravel and PHP packages. Those packages are primarily built to be used in our own projects. We do not operate in a void. We have a community around us. They use our work. They help to make our packages better by submitting…
Regaining trust in your test suite with Docker
Frank de Jonge, creator and maintainer of Flysystem, recently started using Docker to test the FTP driver. On his blog he explains the why and how.
For Flysystem, an open source PHP package to deal with filesystems, I needed a way to test FTP (barf) interactions. FTP servers are notoriously bad at abiding by the spec. ... For Flysystem's FTP(d) adapter an integration test, using an actual FTP server, brought back the level of confidence it needed.
https://blog.frankdejonge.nl/regaining-trust-in-your-tests-with-docker/
The story behind our open source efforts original
This post was first published on 24daysindecember.net Chances are that you've never heard of my company Spatie. We specialise in creating Laravel applications for our clients. Our team is rather small: we consist of only 6 developers and one manager. On first glance we are just a web agency like…
