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My colleague Brent published a new blogpost on how the ternary and null coalescing operators work in PHP.
You've probably used the ternary ?: and the null coalescing ?? operators in PHP. But do you really know how they work? Understanding these operators makes you use them more, resulting in a cleaner codebase.
In this blogpost by Tailwind CSS co-creators Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger share lots of actionable tips to improve the layout of your site.
Laravel.io is a forum and community portal for developers who use the Laravel PHP framework.
They recently launched a brand new version of the site, but being a volunteer-driven open source project, finding the resources to put together a really polished design can be tough.
We asked and got the go ahead to try our hands at a bit of a facelift, so let’s see what we can do to take the UI up a notch!
https://medium.com/refactoring-ui/redesigning-laravel-io-c47ac495dff0
Stay up to date with all things Laravel, PHP, and JavaScript.
You can follow me on these platforms:
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.
Tweet – – twitter.com
???? Pushing yourself to remove comments is one of the best drivers towards clean code. Here's a few tips on how to spot and replace comments that may be unnecessary… pic.twitter.com/STIK6AIKXt
— Jason McCreary (@gonedark) 16 november 2017
Tweet – – twitter.com
? TIL Eloquent's query builder has a whereBetween function#laravel #php pic.twitter.com/SyCXshL3Oe
— Freek Van der Herten (@freekmurze) November 5, 2017
Tweet – – twitter.com
? Symmetry in naming is a powerful tool I never gave the weight it deserves. Embrace the visual relation! A common example in Vue: pic.twitter.com/QEBbHDUvWY
— Caleb Porzio (@calebporzio) November 9, 2017
If you execute an Artisan command and something goes wrong, the error output is not terribly detailed.
You can improve the output slightly by tagging on -vvv to make to output more verbose.
Now we already know the line that where the problem originates: there's something going wrong on line 41 of the MyBrokenCommand command.
But we can improve the error output still. Nuno Maduro coded up a fantastic package called Collision that, once installed, provides much nicer output.
In this output we can immediately see what the silly programmer did wrong.
Let's hope that a future version of Laravel will be able to spit out these nicely formatted errors out of the box.
Every six months Jordi Boggiano, co-creator and maintainer of Composer/Packagist, publishes statistics on which versions of PHP are used. Some good news: PHP 7.1 is the most used version.
A quick note on methodology, because all these stats are imperfect as they just sample some subset of the PHP user base. I look in the packagist.org logs of the last month for Composer installs done by someone. Composer sends the PHP version it is running with in its User-Agent header, so I can use that to see which PHP versions people are using Composer with.
Tweet – – twitter.com
? New in PHP 7.3: A trailing comma is now allowed in function & method calls ?? https://t.co/SeNqfbrbRW pic.twitter.com/auBOVE9FpZ
— SammyK, (@SammyK) 4 november 2017
Harry Roberts makes the case for making technical debt visible instead of trying to hide it.
This means that, although far from ideal, the impact of these hacks is well contained and signposted, meaning that they won’t slip through the cracks and remain hidden in the codebase for the next five years.This pragmatism and lack of stubbornness can make your codebase much more malleable, resilient, and ultimately much more useful. Everything is a compromise.
Tweet – – twitter.com
Gping - like regular ping, but with a graph! https://t.co/bPKWkEA8Zk #linux #ubuntu
— Colin O'Dell (@colinodell) 30 oktober 2017
Jason McCreary, creator of Laravel Shift, wrote a down a two part series on how to write cleaner code.
To measure our change, we should ask: Did we improve readability?Admittedly a bit subjective, but you push yourself to stay objective. I've been pair programming for the last two years. Developers tend to agree on fundamental readability. Where we differ at the edges. These nuances can lead to some pretty great discussion.
...
The answer to did we improve code readability may vary from developer to developer and project to project. But always ask the question…
https://dev.to/gonedark/writing-clean-code https://dev.to/gonedark/writing-clean-code-part-2-9fn
yes is a Unix command that will spit out and infinite stream of y's. In a post on his blog Matthias Endler, an engineer at trivago, shares that there's more than meets the eye to make this happen in a performant way.
The trivial program yes turns out not to be so trivial after all. It uses output buffering and memory alignment to improve performance. Re-implementing Unix tools is fun and makes me appreciate the nifty tricks, which make our computers fast.
You can spend a lot of time to make emails look pretty, but it might be better to just don't style them at all. Greg Kogan did some A/B testing an concluded that sending plain emails results in more opens, clicks, replies, ...
Why are the plain emails crushing the performance of designed emails?
- They're less likely to be caught in spam filters. Having less HTML and fewer non-text elements such as images lowers the likelihood of triggering spam filters. You can use a free spam checker to validate this by testing plain and designed emails.
- They're less likely to go into the "Promotions" tab in Gmail (used by ~16% of all email users), for the same reasons above. From my testing, the plain emails typically end up in the Updates tab and some times even in the primary tab. Of course, the text in the email also affects this.
- They don't look like advertisements. The second the recipient interprets your email as an ad, promotion, or sales pitch—and it does take just a second—its chances of being read or acted upon plummet towards zero. A plain email leads people to start reading it before jumping to conclusions.
- They feel more personal. It's no handwritten note, but it's much more personal than an over-designed email with the recipient's first name crammed somewhere inside.
Recently my company Spatie launched https://dnsrecords.io, a beautiful site to quickly lookup dns records. True to form, we also opensourced it, here is the sourcecode on GitHub. If you want to do some dns lookups in your own app, you'll be happy to know that we extracted the dns lookup…
Zeno Racha wrote down some of his thoughts around public speaking. I've not given as much talks as he has but surely agree with everything in his post.
Having 10 years of experience on something is nice, but don’t wait for it to get started. The best speakers I've seen are not the ones who knows all the in’s and out’s about a certain topic.Here's the secret that nobody will tell you — the only requirement for giving a talk is passion. That’s it. No diploma, no famous project, no masters degree, no nothing. All you need is passion.
https://medium.com/@zenorocha/what-ive-learned-after-giving-100-talks-8f175654e945
Tim MacDonald, a freelance software developer living in Australia, wrote down how he used our backup package to backup his Laravel and Wordpress sites.
I’m not going to run you through the standard setup or all the great features of the package here, you should definitely get your feet wet and give it a go. You’ll be up and running with backups in no time at all. From here on I’ll assume you’ve had some experience with the package, as to not over explain every step along the way…I do tend to rant off topic otherwise ?I wanted to have a standardised backup system in place for all my sites. This system would have to include Laravel and WordPress installs - so I tinkered with Spatie’s Laravel Backup package and have managed to get a single install of Laravel to backup all my sites independently, including my WordPress sites ?
https://timacdonald.me/backup-multiple-sites-frameworks-laravel-backup/
Caleb Porzio gives some good advice on how to make code more readable in this talk given at Erie Day of Code 2017.
A few ways to clean up the conditional code that forms most of your codebase. From simple to nested to spotting unnecessary conditions. ? pic.twitter.com/qGVaDl3TKt
— Jason McCreary (@gonedark) October 26, 2017
In his excellent talk given at Laracon Online 2017, Adam Wathan argues that testing in isolation leads to brittle test and that integration tests are much more valuable.
Tweet – – twitter.com
?❗ You can add custom methods to your #laravel policies and use them with "kebab-case". pic.twitter.com/cRjctkuI80
— Sven (@svenluijten) October 28, 2017
