Freek.dev

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

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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.

https://www.stitcher.io/blog/shorthand-comparisons-in-php

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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

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???? 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

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? TIL Eloquent's query builder has a whereBetween function#laravel #php pic.twitter.com/SyCXshL3Oe

— Freek Van der Herten (@freekmurze) November 5, 2017

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? 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

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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.

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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.

https://seld.be/notes/php-versions-stats-2017-2-edition

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? 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

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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.

https://csswizardry.com/2017/10/airplanes-and-ashtrays/

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Gping - like regular ping, but with a graph! https://t.co/bPKWkEA8Zk #linux #ubuntu

— Colin O'Dell (@colinodell) 30 oktober 2017

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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

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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.

https://matthias-endler.de/2017/yes/

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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.

https://www.gkogan.co/blog/dont-design-emails/

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