In the JavaScript world Jest, built by Facebook, is an excellent tool to run tests. Not only can it automatically rerun your tests when source code changes, but there's also an interactive mode where you can set a filter on which tests to run while the tool is running. Would it be great if we could…
Christoper Pitt published another excellent piece over at Sitepoint. This time he describes how he built a watcher to automatically recompile his preprocessed code and rerun the tests.
In order to reduce the burden of invoking the transformation scripts, boilerplate projects have started to include scripts to automatically watch for file changes; and thereafter invoke these scripts.These projects I’ve worked on have used a similar approach to re-run unit tests. When I change the JavaScript files, these files are transformed and the unit tests are re-run. This way, I can immediately see if I’ve broken anything.
https://www.sitepoint.com/write-javascript-style-test-watchers-php/
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Laravel Horizon is a kickass dashboard for viewing queued jobs. Co-creator Mohammed Said published two posts about the inner working of the tool. The first one on the Diving Laravel site highlights the overall configuration and how the master supervisor works.
Laravel Horizon is a queue manager that gives you full control over your queues, it provides means to configure how your jobs are processed, generate analytics, and perform different queue-related tasks from within a nice dashboard.In this dive we're going to learn how Horizon boots up and handles processing jobs using different workers as well as how it collects useful metrics for you to have the full picture of how your application dispatches and runs jobs.
https://divinglaravel.com/horizon/before-the-dive
The second one, published on his own blog, shows how queued jobs can get tagged.
Laravel Horizon is shipped with many amazing features that help you understand what goes on with your queue workers, my personal favorite feature is the ability to tag jobs for further investigation.
https://themsaid.com/tagging-jobs-in-laravel-horizon-20170731
Laracon US 2017 was an amazing conference. Sid published this excellent recap that contains many links to slides and related content.
I attended my first Laracon in person and I have to say I really enjoyed the experience — maybe more than I expected to. It was well organised and the talks were diverse, informative and actionable. Day 1 was all technical and mostly revolved around Laravel. Day 2 had a different mix of talks and the non-technical ones were thought-provoking and entertaining.
https://medium.com/koomai/laracon-2017-a-recap-and-links-galore-c233be2de670
On his recently redesigned Servers For Hackers site Chris Fidao published a free 6 part series on how to use Nginx as a load balancer.
We cover how to use Nginx as a load balancer, and see how load balancing affects our application.
Sean Larkin, core team member of Webpack, will be leaving his current job at Mutual of Omaha for a new position at Microsoft. Because on his team he was the one most familiar with the webpack setup of the project, he looked for a way to transfer his knowledge. He landed on creating a video course on webpack that's free for everyone.
I decided to create Webpack Academy, a training and educational platform for those wanting to learn more about webpack. This was a perfect way to not only allow me to give back to my team — by giving them free access to all of the content — but to also benefit the community by sharing it with everyone.
In a post on Sitepoint Allan MacGregor gives a good practical example on how to work with PHP-ML, a machine learning library for PHP.
As of late, it seems everyone and their proverbial grandma is talking about Machine Learning. Your social media feeds are inundated with posts about ML, Python, TensorFlow, Spark, Scala, Go and so on; and if you are anything like me, you might be wondering, what about PHP?Yes, what about Machine Learning and PHP? Fortunately, someone was crazy enough not only to ask that question, but to also develop a generic machine learning library that we can use in our next project. In this post we are going take a look at PHP-ML – a machine learning library for PHP – and we’ll write a sentiment analysis class that we can later reuse for our own chat or tweet bot.
https://www.sitepoint.com/how-to-analyze-tweet-sentiments-with-php-machine-learning/
On Scotch.io a new post by Julien Bourdeau was published that shows how you can easily import and search geographic data with Laravel Scout and Algolia.
Laravel Scout makes it very easy to setup an external search engine to create consumer-grade search quickly. The package comes with Algolia as a default search engine. I'd like to demonstrate how to make use of the geo-location search feature with Scout.In this tutorial, you'll learn how to prepare your data for Algolia and Laravel Scout to retrieve items based on location.
https://scotch.io/tutorials/achieving-geo-search-with-laravel-scout-and-algolia
A while ago we released image-optimizer. In short this package can make all kinds of images smaller by stripping out metadata and applying a little bit of compression. Read this blogpost to learn more about it. Although it's pretty easy to work with the package, we felt that we could deliver a more…
?Combining query scopes with explicit model names will help keep code cleaner and easier to understand #laravel pic.twitter.com/ixzDdrZcRT
— Chris Gmyr (@cmgmyr) July 12, 2017
I love this little “owns” trait/method that @michaeldyrynda & I came up with for Confomo.
— Matt Stauffer (@stauffermatt) July 7, 2017
Look at that expressiveness. :kisses fingers: pic.twitter.com/dE731Ko1Zw
Marty Cagan, who held jobs at eBay, AOL, Netscape and HP, describes the most important differences between good and bad product teams.
What I’ve learned is that there is a profound difference between how the very best product companies create technology products, and the rest. And I don’t mean minor differences. Everything from how the leaders behave, to the level of empowerment of teams, to how the organization thinks about funding, staffing and producing products, down to how product, design and engineering collaborate to discover effective solutions for their customers.
Let's have a little fun! Yitzchok Willroth, better know as Coderabbi, created a new package that can improve the output of PHPUnit.
Here's what the output of a testrun looks like with his package installed.
David Négrier, CTO of the CodingMachine, wrote a nice article on why he likes and how his team uses typehints.
As a developer consuming thisfunction, I know how to use it. And if I’m using it wrong, I’ll know right away because PHP will crash with a nice error message when the function is called rather than with a cryptic error some time later.
https://www.thecodingmachine.com/type-hint-all-the-things/
Personally I like typehints too, because the potential readability improvement the article touches upon.
Note: (I only include this paragraph because it's mentioned in the intro of the article, don't want to stir up a discussion) the fuzz about that "Visual Debt" video was overblown. Even though I didn't agree with all of it, it was nice to hear Jeffrey's way of thinking.
Testing @spatie_be 's media library with the new #laravel upload fakes ? Trust, but verify ? #testing pic.twitter.com/Ss98rGloRf
— Christoph Rumpel (@christophrumpel) July 3, 2017
Read more [twitter.com]
Our recently released image-optimizer package can shave off some kilobyes of PNGs, JPGs, SVGs and GIFs by running them through a chain of various image optimization tools. In this blog post I'll tell you all about it. First, here's a quick example on how you can use it: use…
Curl is not your only tool when creating or testing out APIs. On her blog Lorna Jane Mitchell made a nice list of alternatives.
At a conference a few days ago, I put up a slide with a few of my favourite tools on it. I got some brilliant additional recommendations in return from twitter so I thought I'd collect them all in one place in case anyone is interested - all these tools are excellent for anyone working APIs (so that's everyone!).
On his blog Left On The Web, Stefan Koopmanschap lists the podcasts he's listening to. His selection contains both tech and non-tech podcasts.
Brent Roose wrote down his thoughts around how things like fonts, spacing, docblock, ... can influence the cognitive load of a programmer.
As a professional programmer, I'm reading and writing code on a daily basis. I'm working on new projects, doing code reviews, working with legacy code, learning documentation etc. Based on my own experience and that of colleagues, being a programmer often involves a lot more reading than actually writing code. Whether it's your own code or that of others, when you open a file, you have to take it all in. You need to wrap your head around what's going on, before you're able to write your code. Doing this day by day, it's important to find ways to make this process easy. To try and reduce this cognitive load as much as possible. Streamlining the way you take in code, will allow you to not only work faster and better; but also improve your mental state and mood.
https://www.stitcher.io/blog/a-programmers-cognitive-load
Visual debt is real.
Browsershot is a package that can easily convert any webpage into a image. Under the hood the conversion is made possible new headless options in Chrome 59. In this post I'd like to show you how you can use Browsershot v2. Here's a quick example of how it can be used:…