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The HTTP specification says that status codes should be three digits integers, but what happens if they are not? April King, head of website security at Mozilla, did some fun experiments to find out.

While it is easy to create test cases for conditions that don't satisfy this requirement, it is somewhat more difficult to determine how third-party libraries will handle HTTP requests that fall outside this constraint. I looked around the internet for websites to help me test weird status codes, but most of them only let me test with the known status codes. As such, I decided to add arbitrary HTTP status codes to my naughty httpbin fork, called misbehaving.site.

What I discovered is that the various browser manufacturers have wildly different behavior with how they handle unknown HTTP status codes.

https://pokeinthe.io/2017/09/14/http-status-code-handling/

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Last week Apple introduced their new fancy iPhone X. It's screen has a top notch that might cause some problems in landscape mode. Stephen Radford explains how to properly handle it.

The new iPhone X features a beautiful edge-to-edge display. Well, almost. There is the small issue of a notch at the top of the browser which doesn't cause an issue when viewing websites in portrait but by default does cause some issues in landscape.

To accommodate the notch iOS 11 constrains websites within a "safe area" on the screen. On most websites this results in letterboxing on the left and the right.

http://stephenradford.me/removing-the-white-bars-in-safari-on-iphone-x/

We've already implemented the fix in our Laravel application template.

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Kotlin is a workhorse language built by the folks at JetBrains (you know, the company that gave the world PHPStorm). It's a superset of Java. In this video by Ross Tuck he tells you more about it and walks you through some of it's nice features.

If want to learn the language I'veen told by Ross that the Kotlin Koans repo is an excellent way to get started.

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Nice hidden @laravelphp Eloquent feature: you can specify the columns to eager load directly in the 'with' call! pic.twitter.com/vQT8CaRqGC

— Stidges (@stidges) September 13, 2017

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This works in Laravel 5.5 because $request->validate() only returns the validated data. Beautiful.

Yeah. I had originally sent that PR. I love it. Makes for these lovely controller methods. Just look at this❗ pic.twitter.com/FlxIlJVQXN

— Joseph Silber (@joseph_silber) September 14, 2017

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Colin DeCarlo, a developer at Vehikl, wrote some thoughts on why PHP has a bad reputation in some circles.

People shitting on PHP isn’t going to go away, it’s a symptom of a few things. PHP has a ridiculously flat learning curve so just about anyone can write code using it, this means a lot of amateurs and ‘get it done’ developers will choose php but won’t really ever level up their skills when it comes to software development.

https://medium.com/@colindecarlo/who-uses-php-anyway-672115ab81de

I agree with Colin on everything he writes in his post. I'm also thinking that the some of the reasons on why people don't like PHP apply to Laravel as well. In my mind Laravel is to PHP frameworks what PHP is to other programming languages. Both Laravel and PHP might not do everything by the "real programming rules", but it sure is easy to use. And when handled properly powerful and maintainable stuff can be built with it.

Because Laravel is an easy framework to get started with, it's a popular choice for newcomers. Even with almost no experience you can build an app. Some of those projects will go to production. If an experienced developer that uses another framework comes by and sees that Laravel app, it might be easy to conclude that the problem lies with Laravel, and not with the inexperience of the junior programmer who just begon his/her journey in coding.

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Most of work is done in PHPStorm. On my current project I do a lot of Vue stuff. Regularly use PHPStorm auto format feature to make the code look nice. One thing that was bothering is that by default it will use 8 characters of indentation for Vue component properties. So you get this horrible code:

<br /><template>
    <!-- ? -->
    <my-component
            myProp="myValue"
            anotherProp="anotherValue"
    ></my-component>
</template>

Today a golden tip by Christopher Pitt helped me find the solution. In the preferences of PHPStorm you need to set continuation indent of the html to 4 characters.

And after that the PHPStorm will reformat the code right according to our guidelines for Vue templates.

<template>
    <!-- ? -->
    <my-component
        myProp="myValue"
        anotherProp="anotherValue"
    ></my-component>
</template>

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Steve Schoger, a well known designer in the Laravel community, wrote down some good, actionable tips to improve your typography.

When I say typography, I’m not just referring to the font selection (although that is one important factor), I am referring to the entire composition of it. In this post, I’ve compiled a list of some important elements you can consider to create beautiful typography.

Let's get started!

http://www.steveschoger.com/2017/07/19/6-tips-that-will-improve-your-typography-on-your-ui/

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Caleb Porzio, co-presenter of the Twenty Percent Time podcast, published a new article on the Tightenco blog. This time he guides us through a nice use case for extending Eloquent models.

Let’s explore another alternative that can be used as a stand-in for repetitive where statements and local scopes. This technique involves creating new Eloquent models that extend other models. By extending another model, you inherit the full functionality of the parent model, while retaining the ability to add custom methods, scopes, event listeners, etc. This is commonly referred to as “Single Table Inheritance,” but I prefer to just call it “Model Inheritance”.

https://tighten.co/blog/extending-models-in-eloquent

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PHP 7.2 is just around the corner. In new blogpost Martin Hujer walks us through the changes.

PHP 7.2 is planned to be released on 30th November 2017 (see the timetable). And it comes with two new security features in the core, several smaller improvements and some language legacy clean-ups. In the article, I will describe what the improvements and changes are. I read the RFCs, discussions on internals and PRs on Github, so you don't have to.

https://blog.martinhujer.cz/php-7-2-is-due-in-november-whats-new/

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? My buddy @thatguychriswJS showed me that you can use the "plus equals" operator for a sort of "array merge assignment" - pretty sweet pic.twitter.com/UJEUlfSs7E

— Caleb Porzio (@calebporzio) September 7, 2017

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In a new article on his blog, Christoph Rumpel shows how you can easily set up a Facebook Messenger chatbot using the shiny new v2 of Botman Studio. Very cool stuff.

Although it seems quite easy to setup BotMan Studio and Facebook you still need to be aware of a few concepts regarding Facebook. I hope I could provide them there and this article helps you to setup your next Facebook Messenger chatbots. From here you are ready to build more and more features to your bot your own. So make sure to checkout the BotMan documentation to get a feeling of what is possible and learn new stuff.

http://christoph-rumpel.com/2017/09/build-a-facebook-chatbot-with-laravel-and-botman-studio/

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Jeff Madsen wrote down a good piece that explains how mutable Carbon dates can lead to some nasty bugs. I would't mind if Chronos were to be promoted to the default datetime library in Laravel.

If you hang out on any sort of programming forums you have no doubt encountered “The Great Mutable vs. Immutable Debate”. While I’m sure you know what the words mean, if you are new to programming or don’t have a strong Computer Science background it might not be obvious to you whether this is an important concept to be concerned with, or just more “architecture astronaut” purists arguing some obscure fine point.

To help you answer that for yourselves, I’m going to show you the difference between the two using two popular Php DateTime libraries — Carbon and Chronos, and then demonstrate the danger of using the mutable one of those.

https://medium.com/@codebyjeff/whats-all-this-immutable-date-stuff-anyway-72d4130af8ce

If you want to read more cool articles by Jeff, be sure to subscribe to his excellent newsletter.

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An official toolset for testing Vue components will be released soon. In a new series Jover Morales tells you all about it.

vue-test-utils, the official VueJS testing library and based on avoriaz, is just around the corner. @EddYerburgh is indeed doing a very good job creating it. It provides all necessary tooling for making easy to write unit test in a VueJS application.

Jest, on the other side, is the testing framework developed at Facebook, which makes testing a breeze, with awesome features such as:

• Almost no config by default
• Very cool interactive mode
• Run tests in parallel
• Spies, stubs and mocks out of the box
• Built in code coverage
• Snapshot testing
• Module mocking utilities

https://alexjoverm.github.io/series/Unit-Testing-Vue-js-Components-with-the-Official-Vue-Testing-Tools-and-Jest/

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One of the first things I do after a fresh setup. That annoyed me for the /longest/ time. pic.twitter.com/j9LvzbMQQd

— Jaggy ? (@jaggygauran) August 31, 2017

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Devron Baldwin wrote down a few words on the excellent Laracon EU conference, edition 2017.

The awesome talks and the amazing people made Laracon EU 2017 an experience to remember. I’ll split this up into a few sections to talk about the non-technical and the technical talks. I found myself enjoying the non-technical talks slightly more than the technical this year.

https://medium.com/@devron/7-laracon-eu-2017-talks-and-the-people-i-met-381e55ebf898

I can't believe it' already over and am already looking forward to Laracon EU 2018.

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Jeff Ochoa wrote a nice walkthrough of one of Laravels lesser known functionalities: pipelines.

Basically, using laravel pipelines you can pass an object between several classes in a fluid way to perform any type of task and finally return the resulting value once all the “tasks” have been executed.

https://medium.com/@jeffochoa/understanding-laravel-pipelines-a7191f75c351

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