Jeff Ochoa wrote a nice walkthrough of one of Laravels lesser known functionalities: pipelines.
Basically, using laravel pipelines you can pass an object between several classes in a fluid way to perform any type of task and finally return the resulting value once all the “tasks” have been executed.
https://medium.com/@jeffochoa/understanding-laravel-pipelines-a7191f75c351
Here's a great story by Collin O'Dell, maintainer of league/commonmark amongst other things, on how he was able to extract the class definitions out of obfuscated PHP source files.
Per the framework's license, decrypting the IonCube-protected code was not allowed. This meant it was impossible to recover the original source code. However, I could require those files and execute them in PHP, which would cause those classes to become usable in code. So how does one figure out what code just got loaded & executed?
https://www.colinodell.com/blog/201708/generating-ide-stubs-ioncube-encoded-classes
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Fav piece of code for today ❤️ Partition collection method, array destructuring, catching multiple exception types... loving PHP + Laravel pic.twitter.com/jkIQkFSzhf
— Jacob Bennett (@JacobBennett) August 24, 2017
Read more [twitter.com]
At Spatie, we're building a multi-tenant app. Seb figured out a great way to handle theme based views.
Laravel allows you register a view vendor namespace which points to a specific directory containing Blade files. This feature is intended for package development, but it's a perfect solution to our problem.By registering a namespace with the current theme's location, we can drop all the dynamic parts of our view names when we're calling them.
https://sebastiandedeyne.com/posts/2017/theme-based-views-in-laravel-using-vendor-namespaces
? Dedicated view objects are a great use case for Laravel 5.5's new `Responsable` interface.
— Adam Wathan (@adamwathan) August 16, 2017
Can remove the need for other fancy patterns ? pic.twitter.com/qFpK6SRHLC
Read more [twitter.com]
At Spatie we recently launched a new site: guidelines.spatie.be. It contains articles on how we go about setting things up at Spatie and a collection of styleguides. The source code of the site is available on GitHub. In this blogpost I'd like to share why and how we created our guidelines site. Why…
Ross Tuck is probably one of my favourite bloggers. He doesn't publish something often (his previous post is from 2015), but when he does it's very much worth your time.
The important takeaway here isn’t “value objects, yay, inline juggling, boo!” It’s that we were able to remove several classes of errors by reducing the precision of the DateTime we were handling. If we hadn’t done that, the value object would still be handling all of these edges cases and probably failing at some of them too.Reducing the quality of data to get a correct answer might seem counter-intuitive but it’s actually a more realistic view of the system we’re trying to model. Our computers might run in picoseconds but our business (probably) doesn’t. Plus, the computer is probably lying anyways.
http://rosstuck.com/precision-through-imprecision-improving-time-objects
The organisers of PHP Serbia have recently released all videos of the 2017 edition of their conference.
Watch them all here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfGr5rAHwhIJtdueIX5-9aEE7K94TNTqC
Logan Henson, a developer at Tighten, wrote a new post on the company blog about MySQL's cool ST_Distance_Sphere function.
On a client project recently, we had to make it easy to filter database query results based on the distance between a user and an entity in our database. It's easy to get overwhelmed in that context, worrying about the crazy amount of PHP calculations you're going to have to run. ... If you need to calculate this, you can actually get surprisingly far by just using MySQL!
https://tighten.co/blog/a-mysql-distance-function-you-should-know-about
Grégoire Paris wrote down his opinion on why he dislikes Yoda conditions.
So how do Yoda conditions work? Well it is basically a knee-jerk reaction you have to develop: whenever you write a condition, put the operand that cannot be assigned on the left. This should give you an error message if you make an assignment when you actually meant to make a comparison.
https://dev.to/greg0ire/why-using-yoda-conditions-you-should-probably-not
Personally, I'm not a big fan of Yoda conditions either. My feeling is the the cost of decreased readability is just too high for the small value that Yoda conditions bring to the table.
At this year's Laracon US Adam Wathan gave a talk titled "Cruddy By Design" on how to structure your controllers better. After the conference he published a new GitHub repo that contains the demo app he refactored on stage. The 4 main tips to improve your code come as PRs on the repo with a full description on why the change is valuable. Very cool stuff.
Using this convention as a "rule" is a good way to force yourself to keep your controllers from becoming bloated, and can often lead to learning interesting new things about your domain.For the presentation, I put together a demo app called "CastHacker" that showcases podcasts about software development. It's not a "real" app by any means (lots of imaginary features, no tests, etc.); it's just enough code to demonstrate the concepts from the presentation. Feel free to clone it and play with it locally if you like though.
I've written up each refactoring I shared in the presentation as a detailed pull request.
While working on one of our projects my colleague Sebastian had to create a pdf with some text and charts. In a new post on his blog he explains how he leveraged headless Chrome to create the pdf.
In the JavaScript world Jest, built by Facebook, is an excellent tool to run tests. Not only can it automatically rerun your tests when source code changes, but there's also an interactive mode where you can set a filter on which tests to run while the tool is running. Would it be great if we could…
Christoper Pitt published another excellent piece over at Sitepoint. This time he describes how he built a watcher to automatically recompile his preprocessed code and rerun the tests.
In order to reduce the burden of invoking the transformation scripts, boilerplate projects have started to include scripts to automatically watch for file changes; and thereafter invoke these scripts.These projects I’ve worked on have used a similar approach to re-run unit tests. When I change the JavaScript files, these files are transformed and the unit tests are re-run. This way, I can immediately see if I’ve broken anything.
https://www.sitepoint.com/write-javascript-style-test-watchers-php/
Laravel Horizon is a kickass dashboard for viewing queued jobs. Co-creator Mohammed Said published two posts about the inner working of the tool. The first one on the Diving Laravel site highlights the overall configuration and how the master supervisor works.
Laravel Horizon is a queue manager that gives you full control over your queues, it provides means to configure how your jobs are processed, generate analytics, and perform different queue-related tasks from within a nice dashboard.In this dive we're going to learn how Horizon boots up and handles processing jobs using different workers as well as how it collects useful metrics for you to have the full picture of how your application dispatches and runs jobs.
https://divinglaravel.com/horizon/before-the-dive
The second one, published on his own blog, shows how queued jobs can get tagged.
Laravel Horizon is shipped with many amazing features that help you understand what goes on with your queue workers, my personal favorite feature is the ability to tag jobs for further investigation.
https://themsaid.com/tagging-jobs-in-laravel-horizon-20170731
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/
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
A while ago we released image-optimizer. In short this package can make all kinds of images smaller by stripping out metadata and applying a little bit of compression. Read this blogpost to learn more about it. Although it's pretty easy to work with the package, we felt that we could deliver a more…
?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
I love this little “owns” trait/method that @michaeldyrynda & I came up with for Confomo.
— Matt Stauffer (@stauffermatt) July 7, 2017
Look at that expressiveness. :kisses fingers: pic.twitter.com/dE731Ko1Zw
