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Marcel Pociot, author of the excellent BotMan package, published a post on how he used Custom Elements for VueJS to power a widget that users can embed on their sites.

I am currently in the middle of working on a new BotMan feature - a frontend widget that you can embed into your website to make it easier to connect your website visitors with your own self-hosted chatbot solution. The backend / PHP side is already working and leverages the BotMan web driver, which is basically just an API that you can use to interact with your chatbot.

http://marcelpociot.de/blog/2017-12-08-using-custom-vuejs-elements

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24 days in december is a site where every day, from start of December until Christmas, a new post by someone in the wide PHP community is published. The blog authors are hand picked by Andreas Heigl who runs the site. Here's an excerpt of the post by Kalle Sommer Nielsen that was published to today.

PHP has a tremendous community behind it, that community consists of you and me, and millions of others that help promote PHP by continuing to develop awesome applications that power some of the biggest websites in the world, but within this community exists a relatively small community that actively develops PHP, such as making it run on your favorite platform or making your favorite extensions compile and work or even keeps the documentation up-to-date. Today I want to dwell into that community, and perhaps giving you flavor enough to contribute back to PHP with code

https://24daysindecember.net/2017/12/11/giving-back-to-php/

Be sure to check out the posts by Morten Bergset, James Titcumb, Juliette Reinders Folmer and all others too.

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In a new post to his site Mathieu Napoli makes the case for organising your code based on it's function rather than it's type.

We recently discussed 2 topics seemingly unrelated with my colleagues at Wizaplace: how to organize code? How to organize teams? ... Organizing code into domain modules is not a silver bullet but it forces to better understand the problem we are solving and better structure our code.

http://mnapoli.fr/organizing-code-into-domain-modules/

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Frederick Vanbrabant published another delirious rant on his blog. This time it's about atomic commits.

Atomic commits, sometimes also called micro commits, is the practice of explaining your thought process in the form of commit messages and code. It comes down to documenting the way to the solution.

https://frederickvanbrabant.com/2017/12/07/atomic-commits.html

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In an article on his Medium blog, Jerzy Zawadzki wrote about the most important changes made in Symfony 4.

Internally, Symfony 4.0 is “just” Symfony 3.4 with removed depracations. But from outside there is a big leap forward. Most changes (from the installation process, directory structe through using bundles, to coding itself) were made to improve Developer Experience with the framework. Such system like Symfony, which can be used to create web apps as easily as to build other frameworks on top of it, must be complicated. But, as Symfony proves in new version, this complexity may be ‘hidden’ from the developer eyes.

https://medium.com/@zawadzki.jerzy/symfony-4-new-hope-dbf99dde91d8

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Let's talk a little bit about Symfony's dump function. It's part of their VarDumper component. The function can dump a variable to the screen or browser in a nicer format than PHP's native var_dump. In the recently released Symfony 3.4 and Symfony 4 the function got a nice little improvement that…

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???? Symmetry is a hallmark of clean code. Symmetrical code is not only easy to read, but also predictable. Here are a few areas to check your code for symmetry. pic.twitter.com/jGVdR0aek7

— Jason McCreary (@gonedark) November 30, 2017

The @ChromeDevTools now let you copy an object directly to the clipboard, and it’ll automatically be converted to JSON ???? https://t.co/yBv3QjbmRc pic.twitter.com/Tb6LHRf5qz

— Joseph Silber (@joseph_silber) November 30, 2017

Using regular UUIDs stored as a text-based primary key is very slow. Our newly released package spatie/laravel-binary-uuid aims to solve that by binary storing a slightly tweaked version of the UUID. My colleague Brent wrote a blogpost describing how it works behind the scenes. He also included some interesting benchmarks.

The binary encoding of UUIDs solved most of the issue. There's one extra step to take though, which allows MySQL to even better index this field. By switching some of the bits in the UUID, more specifically time related data, we're able to save them in a more ordered way. And it seems that MySQL is especially fond of ordered data when creating indices.

https://www.stitcher.io/blog/optimised-uuids-in-mysql

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Three years ago I started this blog to share my bookmarks and interesting links with fellow developers. Like on the previous anniversaries I'd like to share some cool statistics from the past 12 months. For the period spanning from end november 2016 until end november 2017 my little blog served 591…

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Tailwind CSS is a kick-ass utility first CSS framework. Though the documentation contains some nice examples, you might want to some more examples. You'll be happy to know that Agustin Rodríguez created a site with some nice components built by the community.

https://tailwindcomponents.com

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???? Returning files from your cloud storage (or any other filesystem) as responses just got much easier in @laravelphp with the v5.5.22 release. Just return Storage::response($path) or Storage::download($path) and it will take care of it for you! ????https://t.co/xf8PxLYvFA pic.twitter.com/tHZJNxgzN1

— Jonathan Reinink (@reinink) 28 november 2017

Dave Rupert, lead developer at Paravel, shows how you can leverage native form validation and still style your errors using only a couple of lines of JavaScript.

If you’ve ever experimented with HTML5 Form Validation, you’ve probably been disappointed. The out-of-box experience isn’t quite what you want. Adding the required attribute to inputs works wonderfully. However the styling portion with input:invalid sorta sucks because empty inputs are trigger the :invalid state, even before the user has interacted with the page. I finally sat down and spent a couple days trying to make HTML5 Form Validation work the way I want it.

https://daverupert.com/2017/11/happier-html5-forms/

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Laravel rockstar TJ Miller posted a short and sweet post how how he tested a middleware that forces requests to respond with JSON.

So what I’ve done here is define custom testing routes and applied the middleware as I would use it in the application routes, in this case global middleware and as middleware for the api group. This allows me to assert that the middleware is configured and functioning correctly.

https://medium.com/@sixlive/an-approach-to-testing-middleware-c547fc942848

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In a new blogpost published at Sitepoint, Christopher Pitt explores the various ways you can handle reading big files in PHP.

Though this isn’t a problem we frequently suffer from, it’s easy to mess up when working with large files. In asynchronous applications, it’s just as easy to bring the whole server down when we’re not careful about memory usage.

This tutorial has hopefully introduced you to a few new ideas (or refreshed your memory about them), so that you can think more about how to read and write large files efficiently. When we start to become familiar with streams and generators, and stop using functions like file_get_contents: an entire category of errors disappear from our applications. That seems like a good thing to aim for!

https://www.sitepoint.com/performant-reading-big-files-php/

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Aaron Saray recently found some rogue code on a hacked website and investigated what it actually does.

It’s hard to come up with a title for this - but - basically I found some rogue code the other day that I thought was pretty interesting. I was fixing a “hacked” website when I came across the source of the symptoms of the hack.

This obfuscated code is doing something bad, but we don’t know what at first glance. Obviously, the solution is to remove it - but - aren’t you a little curious what it was doing? Let’s take a look.

https://aaronsaray.com/2017/anatomy-of-a-php-hack.html

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Probably you know that that keeping the disk & transfer size of a JavaScript file low is pretty important. But have you considered the time needed to parse and compile the code? In this great post on Medium Addy Osmani, an engineer at Google, explains the complete cost of having JavaScript on your page.

As we build sites more heavily reliant on JavaScript, we sometimes pay for what we send down in ways that we can’t always easily see. In this post, I’ll cover why a little discipline can help if you’d like your site to load & be interactive quickly on mobile devices. tl;dr: less code = less parse/compile + less transfer + less to decompress

https://medium.com/dev-channel/the-cost-of-javascript-84009f51e99e

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???? Annonymous classes in PHP 7 are perfect for small inline view models. Makes the view so much cleaner! pic.twitter.com/z9b4UKytk9

— Joseph Silber (@joseph_silber) 20 november 2017

PurgeCSS is a tool that can reduce the filesize of a CSS file. It does this by removing any css classes that are not used. It can detect which CSS classes are used by scanning the source files of your application. In this tweet Jonathan Reinink shared how it can be configured in Laravel Mix: ???? I…

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Regular visitors will have noticed that last week this blog got a new coat of paint. This new layout isn't just a new WordPress theme. Things have changed on the backend as well. Previously my blog was powered by WordPress. I've migrated it to a custom built Laravel app. That app is open sourced.…

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