Freek.dev

Fred Hébert on his blog:

... sooner or later, people start misinterpreting the original intent and thinking of technical debt the same way you could think about financial debt: a lever to use in order to get something now and then pay the accrued cost progressively over time. This is however not how things feel from the technical person's point of view. ... Rather than focusing on why that is wrong, I want to propose an alternative analogy to describe the reality behind technical debt.

http://ferd.ca/on-technical-debt-shoveling-forward.html

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Rob Allen, an active member of the Zend Framework community, makes the case for giving some love to API errors.

It's not hard to have great error responses; you just need to care. Poor error response cause developers to give up with an API and go elsewhere, so it's a competitive advantage to get this right.

Developers integrating with your API will thank you.

https://akrabat.com/api-errors-are-first-class-citizens

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Nicolas Widart, author of Asgard CMS, created a new package called laravel-modules that can help splitting up a large Laravel app in modules.

On his blog he published an introductory post.

Just imagine having a medium sized application where everything is in the `app/ù folder, worse, every model is in the root of the app folder! At some point you will spend a lot of time looking for things because everything is bunched together.

This is what being modular is trying to resolve. You split of the business logic into different parts, which belongs together. If you're into Domain Driven Design, you can consider a module an aggregate.

Every module has its own routes/controllers/models/views/business logic/etc. Meaning every module contains a group of classes that all are related to each other in some way.

https://nicolaswidart.com/blog/writing-modular-applications-with-laravel-modules

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In my book Joseph Silber is one of the unsung heroes of the Laravel ecosystem. Whenever I open up internals on Larachat or Github he's giving friendly and thoughtful advice. I was happy to learn that Joseph started a blog.

In the first post he goes over all the improvements made to authentication in Laravel 5.3.

Authentication has gotten some nice improvements in 5.3, so let's examine it piece by piece.

• Introducing the authenticate method
• The exception handler's unauthenticated method
• The Authenticate middleware
• Authenticating against multiple guards
• Route model binding and global scopes
• Bonus: the request's expectsJson method

https://josephsilber.com/posts/2016/07/10/authentication-improvements-in-laravel-5-3

If you're looking for a package that can handle roles and abilities in Laravel, be sure to check out his Bouncer package.

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Laravel 5.3, which will be released at this years Laracon US, has some new very handy functionality to work with MySQL 5.7 JSON columns. In a post on his site Matt Stauffer demonstrates the new API.

While Laravel has had the ability to cast your data to and from JSON since version 5.0, it was previously just a convenience—your data was still just stored in a TEXT field. But MySQL 5.7 introduced an actual JSON column type.

Laravel 5.3 introduces a simple syntax for lookups and updates based on the value of specific keys in your JSON columns.

https://mattstauffer.co/blog/new-json-column-where-and-update-syntax-in-laravel-5-3

If you're going to use this functionality, you should also read Mohamed Said's post on how to improve performance by using MySQL generated columns.

JSON columns cannot be indexed. You can work around this restriction by creating an index on a generated column that extracts a scalar value from the JSON column.

http://themsaid.com/laravel-mysql-json-colum-fast-lookup-20160709/

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In a post on his site Mattias Geniar shares how to write for loops in Bash.

Let me first start by saying something embarrassing. For the first 4 or 5 years of my Linux career -- which is nearing 10 years of professional experience -- I never used loops in Bash scripts. Or at the command line.

The thing is, I was a very fast mouse-clicker. And a very fast copy/paster. And a good search & replacer in vim and other text editors. Quite often, that got me to a working solution faster than working out the quirky syntax, testing, bugfixing, ... of loops in Bash.

And, to be completely honest, if you're managing just a couple of servers, I think you can get away with not using loops in Bash. But, once you master it, you'll wonder why you haven't learned Bash for-loops sooner.

https://ma.ttias.be/bash-loop-first-step-automation-linux/

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Every single day I use Sequel Pro to manage MySQL databases for all projects I'm working on. Sequel Pro gets used in both development and production environments. Because the databases mostly have the same name and tables in all environments it's very easy to mix them up. You have to be really…

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Tighten has developed a very useful package for testing mail in Laravel.

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Ross Tuck gave a one of kind closing keynote at this year's (excellent) Dutch PHP Conference. Clear your schedule for the coming hour and watch the video of the talk with full attention. It's really great.

At the conference there were a lot of talks on events sourcing. The two talks with that subject that stood out for me were Shawn McCool's (where he applied event sourcing to the board game Quantum), and Greg Young's opening keynote. Watch the latter one here:

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Jordi Boggiano investigated if there are pundits actively abusing typos in package names.

Earlier this month an article was published summarizing Nikolai Philipp Tschacher's thesis about typosquatting. In short typosquatting is a way to attack users of a package manager by registering a package with a name similar to a popular package, hoping that someone will accidentally typo the name and end up installing your version of it that contains malware.

... I wanted to take a look at our repository data and see if I could spot any bad actors.

https://seld.be/notes/typo-squatting-and-packagist

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From time to time I need to process a csv file. PHP provides a fgetcsvfunction to help with that task. Unfortunately this is a very basic function. It will not, for instance, recognize a header column as such. In this quick post I'll show how using the excellent laravel-excel package (which can…

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In your apps there's probably a lot going on. Users log in and out, they create, update and delete content, mails get sent and so on. For an administrator of an app these events provide useful insights. In almost every project we make at Spatie we log these events and show them in the admin-section…

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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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All sites owned by EU citizens or targeted towards EU citizens must comply to a crazy EU law. This law requires a dialog to be displayed to inform the users of your websites how cookies are being used. You can read more info on the legislation on the site of the European Commission. The newest Laravel package made by my colleagues at Spatie and myself makes your app compliant with that law.

Once installed the package will render the following dialog that, when styled, will look very much like this one:

When the user clicks "Allow cookies" a laravel_cookie_consent cookie will be set and the dialog will be removed from the DOM. On the next request Laravel will notice that the laravel_cookie_consent has been set and will not display the dialog again.

We've made it easy to customize the texts shown by the dialog. You can also make changes to the dialog or JavaScript itself.

The legislation is pretty very vague on how to display the warning, which texts are necessary, and what options you need to provide. This package will go a long way towards compliance, but if you want to be 100% sure that your website is ok, you should consult a legal expert.

Take a look at the package on GitHub to learn how to install the package and which options it provides. If you like it, be sure to check out our full list of Laravel packages.

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Joeri Verdeyen, a developer at Yappa, explains how you can use some Symfony components in a legacy application.

Symfony Components are a set of decoupled and reusable PHP libraries. They are becoming the standard foundation on which the best PHP applications are built. You can use any of these components in any of your applications independently from the Symfony Framework.

The purpose of this post is to roughly describe how to implement some of the Symfony Components.

http://tech.yappa.be/symfony-components-in-a-legacy-php-application

Alternatively if you want to use Laravel's Illuminate components, check out Matt Stauffer's Torch repository on GitHub.

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Stoimen Popov advises not to call __destruct() manually.

The important thing to note is that you shouldn’t call the destructor of an object explicitly! Not because it will throw an fatal error, but simply because it won’t destroy the object.

http://www.stoimen.com/blog/2011/11/14/php-dont-call-the-destructor-explicitly/

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Maarten Balliauw explained the ins and outs of DNS at this year's NDC in Oslo

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Bill Jordan wrote an absolutely amazing piece on the things he learned in the twenty-eight years he worked in the software industry. There are so many good insights that I can nearly quote the entire article.

Here are some of the things that resonated with me:

Odds are far better than good that your high performers are achieving what appears to be high levels of productivity by building technical debt into the application by taking shortcuts whether intentionally or unintentionally. These kinds of high performers are actually low performers when when TCO is factored in.

Encourage developers to improve the application while working on their projects. Examples of improvements are creating reusable objects out of copypasta code and breaking up large objects that are difficult to maintain into smaller objects that individually are easier to reason about. Improve the database schema even if it hurts in the short term. Delete old and unused code. With the benefit of hindsight update the user interface to improve user experience — sometimes even just changing a word or two makes a big difference.

When continual improvement is part of the DNA of your team you’ll be amazed with the results, but give those results some time to become apparent — it won’t happen overnight. It also means management will need to recognize that things will take more time since developers will be working on their primary project while simultaneously making incremental improvements.

Be sure to read the entire post: https://medium.com/@billjordan1/the-quiet-crisis-unfolding-in-software-development-cffbdafbf450#.1j7a7qos3

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One of our more popular packages is laravel-analytics. The package makes it easy to fetch information such as pageviews, top referrers, etc... from the Google Analytics API. In our Blender-based projects we use the fetched data to display a nice chart in the admin section: Laravel-analytics is one…

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In a new tutorial posted at dotdev.co Diaa Fares shows a good way to develop API's using Laravel. Along the way he touches on the Dingo packages, JSON Web tokens and documentation generation.

Let’s look at everything we will cover: Landmark 1: Prepare our TDD environment and creating our first test. Landmark 2: Installing and configuring Dingo API package. Landmark 3: What are Transformers, why the need for them and how to use thephpleague/fractal as our transformation layer. Landmark 4: Introduction about JWT and how to use tymondesigns/jwt-auth for our token based authentication. Landmark 5: How to use laravel-apidoc-generator to generate nice documentation for our API. So, pack your bags and let’s dive into our journey!

https://dotdev.co/test-driven-api-development-using-laravel-dingo-and-jwt-with-documentation-ae4014260148#.iynir3ftm

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