Here are some notes I made on the talks from the streamed Laracon Online “conference” earlier this month.
Laracon Online Talks
Adam Walthan
Advanced Vue Component Design
This is a demonstration of using Scoped Slots in Vue. Adam had Evan Yu on his podcast recently to talk about Scoped Slots – that was a good talk but it was a little hard to grasp with just audio. This talk expands on the podcast and goes through a concrete example — nicely done. The details are little deep if you are new to Vue, but even skimming the details it demonstrates the power of working with Vue components.
Steve Schoger
The Little Details of UI Design
A Case Study on redesigning the LinkedIn interface. The idea was to show developers what designers do, and/or to give some hints as to how to make design better if you don’t have a designer. This was interesting, and a great demonstration of the use of utility classes which let you get lots done without having to dig in the CSS files. I see that Steve and Adam Walthan have a new squib on Medium that goes through many of these points.
Taylor Otwell
Taylor goes through some of the new features of Laravel 5.6. This is a pretty modest release — some nice features but no big changes, as the framework is now pretty mature. He reviews a bit of Spark, which is a useful application shell for startups that are building a Software As A Service and don’t want to write registration, billing, etc. software before concentrating on their core idea.
Chris Fidao
Scaling Laravel
Various techniques covered including eager loading of queries, queue workers to offload work from the Http cycle, putting database and other services on their own servers, load balancing multiple servers, configuring php-fpm, etc. There is a *lot* of detail here. Chris has a course that goes into greater depth.
Wes Bos
The Future of Javascript
Wes reviews Promises, and covers ASYNC-AWAIT, intersection watchers, user-media additions and more. These features make asynchronous code easier to write and understand, and make some types of interactions (like determining if something is visible on the screen) more performant. Wes is pretty influential… I heard folks on the Lulabot podcast that are looking at adding JS Frameworks to Drupal 8 say they were learning ES6 and JS frameworks from Wes’ courses.
Johnathan Reinink
Advanced Querying with Eloquent
This talk is wonderful – worth the cost of the Laracon ticket itself. Great examples of the use of scoped queries to keep code expressive and understandable, and complex queries with an emphasis on performance. This will definitely show up in my work. I’ll watch this one again.
Sandi Metz
You are Insufficiently Persuasive
Sandi is a programmer and a psychologist. Her talk describes how decrease programmer unhappiness and get along better with your co-workers by changing *yourself*. She goes through a couple of books: Influence: The Power of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini (which she describes as weaponizing persuasion, not a good thing), and (yes) Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends & Influence People, to describe how to effectively collaborate and build the best team.
Matt Stauffer
Science for Grandma
Subtitled: How to code with Laravel for Fun and Profit. Well, maybe profit, but certainly fun, which may result in profit. Matt talks about a bunch of side projects he coded that amuse his kids or family, might be randomly useful, and can be done because he could. He showed the XKCD cartoon, which has been up on our office wall, which charts how much time you can spend coding a project that may save you time in the future. He argues that this isn’t an argument to not code projects, but is a challenge to make it easier/faster to code simple solutions so that we can code more solutions. Having lots of side projects makes us better at our main work.
This post originally appeared on the internal CIT Custom Development blog.