As ever the Jump24 team tuned in throughout the event. Discover some of the talks we had on replay.
What to watch
Our top talk of the event was Database Performance for Application Developers by Aaron Francis. Delving into the world of database indexing, Aaron focussed on how to improve queries and material that people often forget about when they’re developing, like the good old ‘select all from table’. Aaron went into interesting detail on using formats like JSON – he pulled out data into a fake column which allows it to automatically update itself. For us, JSON is a great feature that’s been built into Laravel, and we find having a fake column and automatic updates is much better than doing it manually as it helps you access the field directly on the model as if it was an actual field in the database. So tuning into Aaron’s talk and hearing about his work with JSON and the improvements he’s made took the top spot on our list.
Next on our list to watch was: Taylor Otwell’s Laravel Update. Taylor mentioned a change to the dd() command in Laravel so it now shows in the CLI where the dd command was executed in code, a favourite update of our senior developer, Lee. At Jump24, we find the about commands and the database commands useful for production – in cases where a server isn’t working and we’ve been unsure of the reason why, it’s been helpful to have the extra information to understand where we’ve gone wrong.
Matt Stauffer’s talk, “Abstracting too early” is a talk for the code writers out there. If you’ve ever over-abstracted or thought a function only has one line, you’ll know that getting there means you’ve also created ten other functions, making it harder to maintain in the long run. Matt’s motto is: “write code the way you want to”. If you realise you’ve done it two or three times in different places, then that’s when you should look at abstracting it to a single source and use that. This talk gives an insight into his work and makes you realise that you don’t have to write the cleanest code to get something to work, and we think it’s important to buy into that mindset. Some of the largest software out there isn’t necessarily written in the best way, and yet it still works well.
A mythical turn to the event, but an insightful one – Stephen Rees-Carter’s talk, “Browsers are Magical Creatures”, a talk all about securing your application with the security headers that it returns. Stephen went through a list of headers that he recommends to switch on when using Laravel, and covered Content Security Policy – something that we’ve actually introduced to some of our projects already. Stephen also went through a security training website, an interesting insight when using Laravel that is often obfuscated from developers due to certain security that’s automatically handled by Laravel. Our senior developer Alex found this useful and enjoyed learning about knowing how to train yourself on common potential exploits that can happen in PHP and Laravel if you do things the wrong way.
All talks from this edition of Laracon are still available on YouTube if you didn’t manage to catch them live.