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Breaking Laravel's firstOrCreate using race conditions

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read

Recently I was working on a client project where a data import was performed via queues. Each record was imported in its own queued job using multiple queue workers. After the data import was done we had more rows than expected in the database. In this blogpost I'd like to explain why that happened.…

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The road to dependecy injection

Link – matthiasnoback.nl

Mattias Noback shares how you can migrate a code base that fetches its dependencies using static method calls to code that uses dependency injection.

I've worked with several code bases that were littered with calls to Zend_Registry::get(), sfContext::getInstance(), etc. to fetch a dependency when needed. I'm a little afraid to mention façades here, but they also belong in this list. The point of this article is not to bash a certain framework (they are all lovely), but to show how to get rid of these "centralized dependency managers" when you need to.

Read more [matthiasnoback.nl]

Stay up to date with all things Laravel, PHP, and JavaScript.

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On all these platforms, regularly share programming tips, and what I myself have learned in ongoing projects.

Every month I send out a newsletter containing lots of interesting stuff for the modern PHP developer.

Expect quick tips & tricks, interesting tutorials, opinions and packages. Because I work with Laravel every day there is an emphasis on that framework.

Rest assured that I will only use your email address to send you the newsletter and will not use it for any other purposes.

A PHP debugger written in PHP

Link – blog.krakjoe.ninja

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]

Redecentralising the web

Link – hiddedevries.nl

On his blog [Hidde De Vries] recaps a talk by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, on redecentralising the web.

However, if we’re not careful, Berners-Lee warned, there can also be a vicious circle, a dystopian scenario. This happens when algorithms cause people to meet more people like themselves, narrows down their circle and alienates them from people who are different. Or when websites are used to harvest people’s personal data that are then used for political gain.

Read more [hiddedevries.nl]

What's next for JavaScript?

Link –

Bram Van Damme, who runs the excellent bram.us blog recently gave a talk at the Frontend United 2018 conference on what will be coming to JavaScript in the next few years.

With ES2015 a lot has changed in JavaScript-land. Lesser known releases are the ES2016 and ES2017 releases. This talk not only touches these two new releases, but also looks forward at what’s to come next for JavaScript (ES2018 and more).

You'll find the videos of the other talks at Frontend United in this playlist on YouTube.

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The art of the error message

Link – thestyleofelements.org

Marina Posniak, UX writer at Spotify, shares some great tips on how to write error messages well.

To start, ask yourself if you even need the error message. Before writing anything, consider if there’s a way to redesign the experience so there’s no error at all. Is there a way to just make it work? (Really, the best error message is no error message.) But if you do need it, think carefully about the message. When things go wrong and the app “fails,” say something useful. The message should help the user solve the problem and move on.

Read more [thestyleofelements.org]

How to hack and win the May Mayhem blog contest

Link – alexvanderbist.com

Recently Taylor Otwell held a blogging competition. Entries could be submitted on a GitHub repo, the post with the highest amount of ? would win. My colleague Alex wrote a blogpost on how you could easily win the competition by hacking a bit. It's pretty awesome that Alex, without using any of the hacks described in the post, wound up winning the competition.

I feel like programmers are often as good at breaking things as they are at fixing things. Part of the thought process of programming anything new is figuring out its flaws, weaknesses and possible exploitations. As a web developer, I often find myself applying the same thought process to everything I see and read about online. Including Laravel's May Mayhem blog contest.

Read more [alexvanderbist.com]

Serverless Laravel

Link – mnapoli.fr

A few weeks ago Matthieu Napoli released Bref, a tool to get any PHP project up and running in a serverless environment. Matthieu has managed to get working serverless too.

Serverless basically means “Running apps without worrying about servers”. The main difference with a traditional hosting is that you do not maintain the servers and reserve their capacity. They are scaled up or down automatically and you pay only for what you use. ... Today let’s try to deploy a Laravel application on AWS lambda using Bref.

Read more [mnapoli.fr]

What you'll need to build projections

Link – dev.to

A great post by Barry O Sullivan on what, in my mind, is one of the biggest advantages of event sourcing: the ability to create projections.

Projections are a necessary part of any event sourced or CQRS system. These systems don't rely on a single generic data source such as a normalised MySQL database. Instead you build up your data sets by playing through the events, i.e the “film”, "projecting" them into the shape you want. This allows lot of flexibility as you're no longer bound by a single data model on which you have to run increasingly monstrous SQL queries (12+ joins anyone?). With projections you can build a data model specifically for the problem/question at hand.

Read more [dev.to]

The open source department at Spatie is doing overtime

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

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…

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Keeping your Laravel applications DRY with single action classes

Link – medium.com

Rémi Collin shares a cool approach on where to place code that doesn't really belong in a controller. He creates small, reusable, testable, decoratable classes, called Actions.

Using this approach can seems a lot of classes at first. And, of course the user registration is a simple example aimed to keep the reading short and clear. Real value starts to become clear once the complexity starts growing, because you know your code is in one place, and the boundaries are clearly defined.

Read more [medium.com]

Introducing React Suspense

Link –

At the Zeit conference React core member Andrew Clark showed off an upcoming React feature named Suspense. It can automatically pause the render process of a component if it hasn't got all its data. In can be used to avoid things like spinner showing up too quickly.

Async rendering in React gives us a powerful new set of primitives for addressing longstanding problems in UI development. I'll discuss React's vision for how async rendering can improve data fetching, code delivery, prefetching, view transitions, and more.

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