Laravel Daily #30: Eloquent, Static Sites and Software Estimates

Tip from Laravel Daily blog

Recently I’ve found out an interesting validation rule for form fields in Laravel, and I want to briefly tell you about it. Imagine that you have two forms – one with username/password fields and another with email/password fields.

My podcast - WebDevBusiness

In this episode I’m talking about the biggest pain in web-dev consultancy – time constraints. Projects tend to go over time estimates, and there are multiple reason for it. Here are my 5 thoughts. And at the end of the episode – a tip of what projects NOT to take.

Like zombies, they lurch forward out of the swirling fog of the documentation, threatening your peace of mind...`firstOrNew`. `firstOrCreate`. `updateOrCreate`. You can look away, but you can never forget they're there... Okay, probably better saved for Halloween than April Fool's.

Have you ever wanted a quick reference sheet for Laravel? The Laravel Cheat Sheet is a new project from the EST Group that shows you many of the Laravel features from a filterable web app. For those that have used Laravel for a few years, you may notice the similarities to Jesse O’Brians.

Server Monitoring is a package that will periodically monitor the health of your server and website. It provides healthy/alarm status notifications for Disk Usage, an HTTP Ping function to monitor the health of external services, and a validation/expiration monitor for SSL Certificates.

This is taken from a post and discussion on Laravel Quick Tips that people found to be pretty useful, and so I thought I'd expand on it a little and share. I'm sure you've all had to do a human-readable "time left" before - for example, an auction countdown where there were "5 hours left!".

Caching is one aspect of web development I am guilty of overlooking a lot and I am sure a lot us are guilty of that too. I have come to realize how important it is and I will explain the importance with Scotch as a case study.

Every time we created an application in Laravel 5, there will be a welcome page created with dynamically changing Inspiring quotes. If you want to edit the quotes here is the solution to do that.

There are some well-known Eloquent methods that everyone uses: find, findOrFail, create, etc. What many people don’t know is that there are so many more methods we don’t usually use. I’ll talk about some of them here and how they can help you.

It’s often useful to count the number of times a column value appears in a database table, however doing so using Laravel’s fantastic ORM might not be so obvious.

Adam Wathan just released a new version of Jigsaw, a static site generator built using Laravel.

Statamic the flat file CMS powered by markdown has been rebuilt from the ground up on Laravel 5.1 along with a brand new control panel. “Statamic 2 took a year of hard work, sweat, and whiskey tears, 4,000 commits, 200 beta testers, and 43 alpha/beta releases.

Eloquent is one of the easier ORMs to get started with, so let's look at how to use and test it within a Slim Framework application. You now need to bootstrap it. To do this we need some settings, so lets do that in our standard Slim configuration:

Developers sometimes run into tasks that require access to email mailboxes. In most cases, this is done using the Internet Message Access Protocol, or IMAP. As a PHP developer, I first turned to PHP’s built in IMAP library, but this library is buggy and impossible to debug or modify.

The Composer project just announced the official release of v1 on its fifth birthday. Five years ago today, Composer was born. In some ways it feels like yesterday, at least it doesn’t feel like five years went by.

PHP is already full of functions, with object oriented patterns emerging relatively late in its life. Still, PHP’s functions can be cumbersome, especially when combined with variable scope rules… In this example, we see languages defined as a list of programming languages.

Ubuntu is a popular Linux distribution based on Debian. It's often thought of as more of a desktop oriented distro, but it is quite a common for web hosting too. It is also the distribution of choice for many developers who are not that focused on Linux administration.

Quite often you see developers who have a lot of experience in one language try to play with another, then make a rather quick comparison between the two. This comparison is usually quite worthless, but the clickbait titles get them a lot of traffic.

The various studies claim many different things when it comes to the impact that the performance of the system has on user experience. Some of the most frequently quoted “facts” are: These quotes seem to carry weight but when you dig deeper, there is not much evidence to back these claims.

There has been more discussion recently on the concept of a “10x engineer”. 10x engineers are, (from Quora) “the top tier of engineers that are 10x more productive than the average” I have observed that some people are able to get 10 times more done than me.

Have you ever tried to solve a Rubik’s cube and been unable to complete it? I once tried several times during a long bus trip and felt pretty bummed after failing every time. Then I learned that there are kids out there that can do it in seconds! How is that even possible?