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On the JetBrains blog Gary Hockin explains how to easily run a single PHPUnit test.

To run all the tests in a single file, right-click the test in the Project Pane (the left-hand navigation pane), and select Run .

To run all the tests in a single class, right-click the class name in the editor, and select Run .

To run the tests in a single method, right-click the method name, and select Run .

https://blog.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/2017/01/working-with-phpunit-and-phpstorm/

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One of my favourite features that was introduced in Laravel 5.4 are the higher order collection functions. It allows you to rewrite

collect($models)->filter(function(Model $model) {
   $model->passesFilter();
});

to:

collect($models)->filter->passesFilter();

This works with the filter method an a bunch of other collection methods.

In a new post on his blog Nicola Malizia explains how these methods work under the hood.

A new version of Laravel is available from 24 January 2017 and, as usual, it comes with a lot of new features. Among them, there is one that takes advantage of the dynamic nature of PHP. Some out of there will contempt this, but I find it awesome!

https://unnikked.ga/understanding-laravels-highorder-collections-ee4f65a3029e

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On his blog Mark Baker shares some thoughts on how to use closure binding to avoid having import variables with the use keyword.

You'll learn how to rewrite

$filteredArrayData = array_filter(
    $arrayData,
    function($value) use ($minimumPrice, $maximumPrice) {
        return $value->price >= $minimumPrice &amp;&amp; $value->price < $maximumPrice;
    }
);

to

$filteredArrayData = array_filter(
    $bookData,
    $priceFilter->inRange(5.00, 15.00)
);

https://markbakeruk.net/2017/03/12/closure-binding-as-an-alternative-to-use-variables/

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For a client project I've been doing some vue.js lately and I just love it. So you might see a few more vue.js related stuff appear on this blog in the future. Here's a nice site I stumbled across that contains a lot of useful components.

http://vuejsexamples.com/

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In the JavaScript world Lodash is a pretty popular and awesome package with lots of handy array, collection and object methods. In this article Dan Prince explains that some of those methods do have a nice ES6 equivalent.

Lodash is the most depended on npm package right now, but if you’re using ES6, you might not actually need it. In this article, we’re going to look at using native collection methods with arrow functions and other new ES6 features to help us cut corners around many popular use cases.

https://www.sitepoint.com/lodash-features-replace-es6/

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Andrew Welch of the New York based agency nystudio107 wrote a good overview of the options agencies & freelancers have regarding hosting.

Web hosting is something that many agencies and freelancers don’t give a whole lot of thought to. They just use whomever they’ve had a long-standing relationship with, and call it a day.

However, choosing the right host—and the right type of host—can be crucial to the success of a project. And the hosting world has changed a whole lot in the past few years, so let’s dive in.

https://nystudio107.com/blog/web-hosting-for-agencies-freelancers

At my company Spatie we're pretty happy with our choice to hosts our client projects on VPSes. We provision them using Laravel Forge and some custom ansible scripts.

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A few days before Breath of the Wild was released Nintendo's Hidemaro Fujibayashi, Satoru Takizawa, and Takuhiro Dohta (who all three working on various Zelda games in the past) gave at talk at the Game Developers Conference. They provide a unique look behind the scenes of this fantastic game.

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On css-tricks David Khourshid wrote a good introduction to RxJS.

According to ReactiveX.io: "ReactiveX is a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs by using observable sequences."

That's a lot to digest in a single sentence. In this article, we're going to take a different approach to learning about RxJS (the JavaScript implementation of ReactiveX) and Observables, by creating reactive animations.

https://css-tricks.com/animated-intro-rxjs/

If you want to toy around with the same ideas in PHP check out RxPHP

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Ondřej Mirtes, author of PHPStan lists some great tips to make a side project succesful.

Most developers have side projects. That's how we try out new things or make something that we miss on the market or in our dev stack. But most side projects end up unfinished and never actually see the light of day. And even if a developer builds up the courage to show his work to the public, he quickly finds out that just publishing a repository doesn't actually bring the masses to his doorstep. ... In this article, I'd like to share with you what I did to make sure that the project doesn't end up in the dustbin of history. I will concentrate on open source software, but the following advice may as well apply to any creative endeavour.

https://medium.com/@ondrejmirtes/how-i-got-from-0-to-1-000-stars-on-github-in-three-months-with-my-open-source-side-project-8ffe4725146#.211n6vihd

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James Long gives some solid advice: always keep in mind that there are a lot of things that are more important than coding.

The goal of free open source development is empowerment: everyone can not only use code for free but also contribute to and influence it. This model allows people to teach and learn from each other, improves businesses by sharing work on similar ideas, and has given some people the chance to break out and become well-known leaders.

Unfortunately, in reality open source development is rife with problems and is ultimately unsustainable. Somebody has to pay the cost of maintaining a project.

http://jlongster.com/Why-Frequently-Absent-Open-Source

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On his blog Frank De Jonge explains how he solved a performance problem in one of his projects.

Last week I took a deep dive into Symfony's Routing Component. A project I worked on suffered from a huge performance penalty caused by a routing mistake. This lead me on the path to discovering some interesting performance considerations. Some common practices align nicely with Symfony's optimisations, let's look into those.

https://blog.frankdejonge.nl/symfony-routing-performance-considerations/

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Chris Fidao, the hero behind serversforhackers.com, and Deploy PHP!, created a new video course called Shipping Docker. It's in early access right now and it covers everything from the basics to advanced topics like building a multi-server production environment.

I'm only a couple of videos deep in the course, and like expected, I'm liking a lot of what I'm seeing.

This is a comprehensive course in the many uses of Docker. From playing to developing, testing to deploying, we'll cover it all in a way that is easy to understand.

https://shippingdocker.com/

(In case you were wondering, I'm not being paid for posting this)

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Sebastian De Deyne, author of many Spatie packages, posted a new blog article on how to generate SEO Friendly Urls in Laravel.

When admins create or update an news item—or any other entity—in our homegrown CMS, a url slug is generated based on it's title. The downside here is that when the title changes, the old url would break. On the other hand, if we wouldn't regenerate the url on updates, titles that were edited later on would still have an old slug in the url, which isn't an ideal situation either.

https://sebastiandedeyne.com/posts/2017/non-breaking-seo-friendly-urls-in-laravel

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On his blog Jef Claes, organiser of DDDBE, shares some good tips on how to organize a meetup.

I've organized a few DDDBE meetups in the past, and always succeed in forgetting something. Either someone points it out well in advance, or I end up stressing last minute. This post partly serves as a checklist for myself, but it would be a welcome side effect to also see it encourage others to help out organizing future meetups. Organizing a meetup is not rocket science, having a list of what to take care of is a good start.

http://www.jefclaes.be/2017/02/how-to-organize-meetup.html

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Don't know what the difference between stateful and stateless is, or what higher order functions are? On the auth0.com site Sebastián Peyrott explains these terms and other modern JavaScript concepts.

Modern JavaScript has experienced massive proliferation over recent years and shows no signs of slowing. Numerous concepts appearing in JS blogs and documentation are still unfamiliar to many front-end developers. In this post series, we'll learn intermediate and advanced concepts in the current front-end programming landscape and explore how they apply to modern JavaScript.

https://auth0.com/blog/glossary-of-modern-javascript-concepts/

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A great feature of Laravel Spark is it's ability to impersonate other users. As an admin you can view all screens as if you are logged in as another user. This allows you to easily spot a problem that your user might be reporting. Laravel-impersonate is a package, made by MarceauKa and Thibault Chazottes that can add this behaviour to any Laravel app.

Here are some code examples taken from the readme.

Auth::user()->impersonate($otherUser); // You're now logged as the $otherUser.

Auth::user()->leaveImpersonation(); // You're now logged as your original user.

$manager = app('impersonate');

// Find an user by its ID
$manager->findUserById($id);

// TRUE if your are impersonating an user.
$manager->isImpersonating();

// Impersonate an user. Pass the original user and the user you want to impersonate
$manager->take($from, $to);

// Leave current impersonation
$manager->leave();

// Get the impersonator ID
$manager->getImpersonatorId();

It even includes some handy blade directives:

@canImpersonate
    <a href="{{ route('impersonate', $user->id) }}">Impersonate this user</a>
@endCanImpersonate

@impersonating
    <a href="{{ route('impersonate.leave') }}">Leave impersonation</a>
@endImpersonating

Want to know more, take a look at the package on GitHub.

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