Freek.dev

While working a little bit on laravel-sitemap I decided to refactor the tests to make use of our own snapshot assertions package. The snapshot package enables you to generate snapshots with the output of your tests. On subsequent runs of those tests it can assert if the output still matches the contents of the snapshot.

In this video I demonstrate how the refactor of the tests of laravel-sitemap was done. (double-click on it to view it full-screen)

If you want to know more about snapshot testing, then read this blog post written by my colleague Sebastian. The refactor of the tests can be viewed in this commit on GitHub.

(Little note on the video itself: this is my first tutorial video I ever made. After recording it I noticed that I used a wrong ratio resulting in those black bars on the side. Ah well, you live you learn. Next time it will be better. For those interested, I used a Blue Yeti Pro mic to record my voice and ScreenFlow to record and edit the video.)

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Simon Yousoufov argues that PHP is going the way of the dodo.

It’s well known that PHP is a dead programming language and that its 22-year-old ecosystem is effectively useless now that we have Node and its fancy new asynchronous frameworks. Node’s superiority is evident because everyone knows that single-threaded, asynchronous, programs are better by default. Faster. Stronger, even.

https://medium.com/fuzz/php-a0d0b1d365d8

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Electron is a library that enables you to create desktop apps with JavaScript, Html and css. If you're interesting in playing around with this cool technology check out this tutorial by Kristian Poslek.

In this article, I’ll try to guide you through the process of building a simple desktop application and touch on important concepts for building desktop application with JavaScript.

https://medium.com/developers-writing/building-a-desktop-application-with-electron-204203eeb658

Together with Marcel Pociot and the help of Alex Vanderbist I'm currently building my first Electron app. It's a bit too early to share any details about it except that we'll open source it (and it'll be free).

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PHP Uk Conference is an excellent conference where I had the pleasure of speaking this year. All sessions were recorded. Last week the organizers released all the videos. Here's the entire playlist:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_aPVo2HeGF-_djRi_UVWWLdkVpYQFnFm

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If you need a free SSL certificate Let's Encrypt seems like the obvious way to go. But the installation and renewal process of Let's Encrypt surely has it's caveats. An alternative to Let's Encrypt is to use a free certificate issued by Cloudflare. On his blog Taylor Otwell published a post explaining how to request and install such a certificate.

I personally prefer to use Cloudflare, another service that offers free SSL certificates, as well as a variety of other free and paid services that are useful for web developers. I prefer Cloudflare because: - Cloudflare doesn’t require any renewal process to ever run on my server. LetsEncrypt renewals must run on my server at least every 3 months and that’s just one more thing that sometimes can (and does) go wrong. - Cloudflare supports wildcard sub-domains.

https://medium.com/@taylorotwell/free-wildcard-ssl-using-forge-cloudflare-ab0ebfbf129f

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Jarek Tkaczyk demonstrates how you can use a helper relation to eager load specific models.

Have you ever needed to show only single related model from the hasMany relationship on a set of parents?

Being it latest, highest or just random, it’s not very clever to load whole collection using eager loading, just like running query per every parent.

Of course you can do that better, and now let me show you how.

https://softonsofa.com/tweaking-eloquent-relations-how-to-get-latest-related-model/

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My colleague Sebastian recently released a new package called phpunit-snapshot-assertions. In a new post on his blog he tells all about it.

The gist of snapshot testing is asserting that a set of data hasn’t changed compared to a previous version, which is a snapshot of the data, to prevent regressions. The difference between a classic assertEquals and an assertMatchesSnapshot is that you don't write the expectation yourself when snapshot testing. When a snapshot assertion happens for the first time, it creates a snapshot file with the actual output, and marks the test as incomplete. Every subsequent run will compare the output with the existing snapshot file to check for regressions.

https://medium.com/@sebdedeyne/a-package-for-snapshot-testing-in-phpunit-2e4558c07fe3

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On his blog Matt Stauffer published a new post explaining the steps required to deploy your app without any downtime.

The reason you're getting zero-downtime deploy from these tools is because the entire deploy process—clone, composer install, etc.—doesn't happen in the directory that is currently serving your site. Instead, each new release gets its own separate "release" directory, all while your site is still being served from its current "release" directory.

https://mattstauffer.co/blog/how-to-set-up-your-laravel-application-for-zero-downtime-envoyer-capistrano-deploys

In my own projects I handle these capistrano like deploys using a custom Envoy script: https://github.com/spatie/blender/blob/master/Envoy.blade.php

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In the JavaScript world promises are a great way to deal with stuff that needs to happen asynchronously. But there's also another new way to go about it: async/await.

In case you missed it, Node now supports async/await out of the box since version 7.6. If you haven’t tried it yet, here are a bunch of reasons with examples why you should adopt it immediately and never look back.

For those who have never heard of this topic before, here’s a quick intro

• Async/await is a new way to write asynchronous code. Previous options for asynchronous code are callbacks and promises.
• Async/await is actually built on top of promises. It cannot be used with plain callbacks or node callbacks.
• Async/await is, like promises, non blocking.
• Async/await makes asynchronous code look and behave a little more like synchronous code. This is where all its power lies.

https://hackernoon.com/6-reasons-why-javascripts-async-await-blows-promises-away-tutorial-c7ec10518dd9

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You might thing that PHP is not able to automatically perform a type check on items in an array. But using variadic constructor this is possible. Bert Ramakers wrote a blogpost with some good examples on how to do this.

One of the language features announced back in PHP 5.6 was the addition of the “…” token to denote that a function or method accepts a variable length of arguments.

Something I rarely see mentioned is that it’s possible to combine this feature with type hints to essentially create typed arrays.

https://medium.com/2dotstwice-connecting-the-dots/creating-strictly-typed-arrays-and-collections-in-php-37036718c921

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Michael Dyrynda, one of the co-hosts of the Laravel News and the North Meets South podcasts, explains how to easily uptime your models with data coming from requests.

Instead of littering your controller method with multiple request()->has('field') checks, you can employ the request object's intersect method. The intersect method will return a new array containing only the keys that are present in both the specified list and the request itself.

Using intersect allows you to easily handle a PATCH request - one where you partially update a resource's data, rather than all of it as with a PUT - in a much more concise manner.

https://dyrynda.com.au/blog/partial-model-updates-in-laravel

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Recently I stumbled upon a page in the VueJs docs where Vue is compared against all other similar frameworks. I'm impressed with the fact that they reached out to authors of the other frameworks to get well balanced comparison.

This is definitely the most difficult page in the guide to write, but we do feel it’s important. Odds are, you’ve had problems you tried to solve and you’ve used another library to solve them. You’re here because you want to know if Vue can solve your specific problems better. That’s what we hope to answer for you.

We also try very hard to avoid bias. As the core team, we obviously like Vue a lot. There are some problems we think it solves better than anything else out there. If we didn’t believe that, we wouldn’t be working on it. We do want to be fair and accurate though. Where other libraries offer significant advantages, such as React’s vast ecosystem of alternative renderers or Knockout’s browser support back to IE6, we try to list these as well.

https://vuejs.org/v2/guide/comparison.html

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Every year Stack Overflow runs as survey where they asks their users about their favourite tools, languages, etc... A little while ago they published the results of the 2017 edition.

We learn something new every time we run our survey. This year is no exception:

- A common misconception about developers is that they've all been programming since childhood. In fact, we see a wide range of experience levels. Among professional developers, 11.3% got their first coding jobs within a year of first learning how to program. A further 36.9% learned to program between one and four years before beginning their careers as developers. - Only 13.1% of developers are actively looking for a job. But 75.2% of developers are interested in hearing about new job opportunities. - When we asked respondents what they valued most when considering a new job, 53.3% said remote options were a top priority. A majority of developers, 63.9%, reported working remotely at least one day a month, and 11.1% say they’re full-time remote or almost all the time. - A majority of developers said they were underpaid. Developers who work in government and non-profits feel the most underpaid, while those who work in finance feel the most overpaid.

https://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/

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There are multiple good ways to pass data from Laravel to Vue. In a new blogpost Jesse Schutt covers all the options.

It has been helpful to think of my application as "layers" or separate sections of code each with varying responsibilities. I like to think of Laravel as the intermediary between the persistent data in the database, and the Vue components comprising the front-end of the app.

Though the boundaries between Laravel and Vue may appear unclear at the outset, the only way one can know about the other's data is if it is explicitly passed. Blade templates implicitly know a lot about the application, but Vue operates on a different layer, so it only knows what we tell it. Fortunately, there are a number of ways to provide Vue with the data it needs.

https://zaengle.com/blog/layers-of-a-laravel-vue-application

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On the madewithlove blog Frederick Vanbrabant wrote a post on how he and colleague improved the PWA score of their company site.

So the first thing you should know about PWA (or progressive web apps) is that it’s an adaptation of your current site or web app. This means that if you want to have all the features of a progressive web app, you are going to need to change your current site/application. The good news here is that they are all changes you would want to have anyway.

https://blog.madewithlove.be/post/improved_pwa_score

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In an article on the Hackster.io site explains in detail how he made a nice visualization of unit test results. Pretty cool what you can do with a raspberry pi, some LEDS and a couple of scripts.

I wanted to create a desktop gadget to visualize the progress of unit tests run via PHPUnit.I've named this project PHPUnicorn (by combining "PHPUnit" with "Unicorn pHAT").

https://www.hackster.io/colinodell/phpunicorn-visualizing-phpunit-tests-896208

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