Freek.dev

Laravel / PHP / AI

What I've learned after giving 100 talks

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

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Backup multiple sites and frameworks with Laravel Backup

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/

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Improving the performance of PhpStorm

PhpStorm is a fantastic editor. Unfortunately it can be quite slow. Brent, one of our developers at Spatie, blogged a few tips to make it run a bit faster. I've followed all his suggestions and PhpStorm now feels a bit more responsive.

I didn't start this post by writing my own thoughts, because I figured people were looking for some quick tips to speed of their IDE. As a PHP developer, I think that PhpStorm is such a powerful tool, which helps me to write good and maintainable code. I don't want it to stand in my way though, so good performance is an absolute requirement.

https://www.stitcher.io/blog/phpstorm-performance

Hopefully future versions of PhpStorm will be more performant out of the box.

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Debugging the dreaded "Class log does not exist" error in Laravel

My colleague Sebastian took the time to write down the solution to a problem many artisans will come across at some point in time. I hope that in a future version of Laravel that error message will be improved so that it makes clear what the actual problem really is.

Every now and then I come across a Class log does not exist exception in Laravel. This particular exception is thrown when something goes wrong really early in the application, before the exception handler is instantiated.

Whenever I come across this issue I'm stumped. Mostly it's related to an invalid configuration issue or an early service provider that throws an exception. I always forget how to debug this, so it's time to document my solution for tracking down the underlying error.

https://sebastiandedeyne.com/posts/2017/debugging-the-dreaded-class-log-does-not-exist-error-in-laravel

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A Laravel package to log HTTP requests original

by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

Most of the sites we build for our clients contain some sort of contact form. For those client such forms are potentially critical to their business. Imagine for instance a real estate firm that generates leads with such forms. In most cases we will store the submitted values in the db and mail them…

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How to remove a big file wrongly committed to a Git repo

Today I accidentally committed a multi GB file to the git repo of the project I was working on and pushed it. Damn! Because of that big file cloning the repo again would take a long long time. Removing the file locally and pushing again would not solve the problem as that big file is in Git's history.

So I took a few moments to Google around and learned that that there actually is a git command that can rewrite history: filter-branch. This is how I removed that big file from history:

git filter-branch --tree-filter 'rm path/to/your/bigfile' HEAD

git push origin master --force

Both commands took a while to complete, but after that I had a light repo again.

If you need to do this, be sure to keep a copy of your repo around in case something goes wrong.

Here's an old, but still seemingly still correct blogpost by Dalibor Nasevic with some more info on the subject.

Few weeks ago I froze gems on my blog and ended up with a very big repository. So, I wanted to clean up the mess and remove permanently gems folder from the repository. git rm wasn't doing the job well, it only removes the folder from the working tree and the repository still contains the objects of this folder. After a quick search, I found that git-filter-branch was the command I was looking for.

https://dalibornasevic.com/posts/2-permanently-remove-files-and-folders-from-a-git-repository

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Dockerize your Laravel app with Vessel

Chris Fidao has created an easy to handle, well documented, Docker dev environment for Laravel projects. It's an excellent starting point if you want to have a taste of what Docker can do.

For the introductory newsletter:

I like Vessel the best for the following reasons: 1. It's installed per-project instead of globally. This lets me customize it per project if need be. 2. Docker lets me change out versions of software such as Nginx, MySQL, Redis, and others very easily. (I've often needed to use an older MySQL version at work) 3. Docker lets me add extra software (perhaps Beanstalkd for queues, or PgSQL for database) really easily 4. Docker containers are more like processes than VMs. They generally only use what resources they need (with some caveats, but even with those, they're lighter than Vagrant virtual machines) 5. I can fill up my workstation with one technology (Docker!) instead of many (PHP, Redis, MySQL, etc) with all their configuration files and data strewn about all over my file system 6. You can expand on your dev workflow to build up to a production workflow using all the same technology (Docker!) - You can check out Shipping Docker for my full course on bringing Docker from dev into production.

https://vessel.shippingdocker.com

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Write tests. Not too many. Mostly integration.

In a fantastic post on his blog, Kent C. Dodds makes the case for focusing on writing integration tests, and stop going for 100% code coverage. Amen to that!

You may also find yourself testing implementation details just so you can make sure you get that one line of code that’s hard to reproduce in a test environment. You really want to avoid testing implementation details because it doesn’t give you very much confidence that your application is working and it slows you down when refactoring. You should very rarely have to change tests when you refactor code.

https://blog.kentcdodds.com/write-tests-not-too-many-mostly-integration-5e8c7fff591c

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The official Vue.js style guide

The maintainers of Vue.js have recently published their official style guide.

This is the official style guide for Vue-specific code. If you use Vue in a project, it’s a great reference to avoid errors, bikeshedding, and anti-patterns. However, we don’t believe that any style guide is ideal for all teams or projects, so mindful deviations are encouraged based on past experience, the surrounding tech stack, and personal values.

For the most part, we also avoid suggestions about JavaScript or HTML in general. We don’t mind whether you use semicolons or trailing commas. We don’t mind whether your HTML uses single-quotes or double-quotes for attribute values. Some exceptions will exist however, where we’ve found that a particular pattern is helpful in the context of Vue.

https://vuejs.org/v2/style-guide/

Want to see some more style guides? At Spatie we have a guidelines site containing styleguides for Laravel and JavaScript.

This site contains a set of guidelines we use to bring our projects to a good end. We decided to document our workflow because consistency is one of the most valuable traits of maintainable software.

The contents of this site exist for ourselves—more importantly, our future selves—and for giving future collegues a reference to our way of doing things and their quirks. The guidelines cover workflow, code style, and other little things we consider worth documenting.

https://guidelines.spatie.be

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Deep dive into Electron’s main and renderer processes

In a post on his Medium blog Cameron Nokes explains the two most important processes in any Electron app: the main process and the renderer process.

Central to Electron is the concept of two or more operating system level processes running concurrently — the “main” and “renderer” processes. Dealing with multiple processes is new territory if you’re coming from browser Javascript land. It was definitely a paradigm shift for me initially, and working with multiple processes may mean you make different design choices in your app that you wouldn’t otherwise.

https://medium.com/@ccnokes/deep-dive-into-electrons-main-and-renderer-processes-7a9599d5c9e2

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