Well it’s been a week since LaraconEU. We had such a great time out there, it was great to meet so many people in the flesh and to see so many great speakers and talks take the stage.
This post i’m going to write up about the talks that I managed to get to see so not every talk is covered here but the talks were all recorded so you will all get the chance to see all of the talks in full.
Jeffrey Way – All my mistakes
This was the first talk I was really looking forward to, anyone who’s been developing in the Laravel world would have at some point in time heard of Jeffrey Way and would have listened to his sultry tones either through Laracasts or in his previous roles before Laracasts.
The first key point made in the talk was that Laracasts is now 10 years old! this is such a massive achievement, it’s amazing to think that its been going that long now. There are so many great tutorials on that site and he’s helped so many developers from junior to seniors alike, long may Laracasts continue.
There were so many great takeaways from this, so many mistakes that I know i’ve made throughout my development career. Highlighting the repositories and interfaces phase that we all went through at one point in time.
Don’t let a desire for potential flexibility in the future lead you to monstrosities in the now!
Jeffrey Way
This was a brilliant core lesson, how many times have you started a piece of work and spent so much time thinking about this and not actually got work done?
Another core lesson that he talked about was when working on an open source project that you own, he talked about how Laravel Mix his largest open source project ballooned out of scope because he let in PRs that allowed it to be massively configurable but this in turn made it harder to maintain in the long run.
Nuno Maduro – Pest 2
This talk features a lot of the new features coming in Pest 2, I have to admit I’ve not jumped onto the pest bandwagon yet i’m still heavily using PHPUnit. There are a number of the Jump24 team that enjoy using Pest, but after watching this talk I have to admit i’m really looking forward to V2 and utilising it on a new project. Things like ---watch which works much like npm watch, so when you make a change to the test it will automatically run it or the new --retry option which only retries failed tests as really thats what we’re interested in when running out test suite.
One of the biggest features coming in V2 is the Arch Plugin, giving you the ability to write tests for your architectural rules, such as making sure that models are not using in controllers or that repositories are not used. Its possible in V2 of pest to write tests that will stop this from happening, we currently do this through the use of ECS and custom rules so having another option and place to write architectural rules is always a good thing. Writing any tests or any kind of styling rules that allow us to write better code is a good thing!
Steve McDougall – Modern API Workflow in Laravel
The next talk I was able to make it to was from Steve McDougall who run us through how he goes about building a good API in Laravel. He showed us a number of the packages that he uses to help him develop a standard compliant API. Having listened to Steve talk now a number of times a lot of the packages and best practices he mentioned in his talk have made their way into daily usage at Jump24.
Taylor Otwell – Laravel 10 Improvements
The last talk was Taylor introducing us to some of the new features and improvements coming to the latest version of Laravel (10). There were a number of key improvements here that we’ve been looking forward to 1 of the biggest being the use of types in the skeleton Laravel code, as well as this there have been some great DX improvements to the Artisan command line that I think developers will really appreciate.
Taylor also introduced us to a new first part package that the Laravel team have been developing called “Laravel Pennant” this package brings feature flags support to Laravel as a package maintained by the core team, another win win for the Laravel development community.
Day 2
Francisco Madeira – Termwind 101x
The first talk I managed to catch of day 2 was Franciscos talk about Termwind or tailwind in the console. Giving you the ability to easily use HTML and CSS in your terminal massively improving the DX of your terminal based applications. I have to admit before this talk i’d not looked at termwind at all but looking at the examples that were shown I love it!
Being able to create a more user friendly console application or even a more useable console command will help a user using these systems.
Bobby Bouwmann – Batchable Jobs
Bobby was the next talk I was lucky enough to catch, it was also great to meet him in real life as we’ve been lucky enough to work with Hospitable for a few months now so its great to meet some of the team. Bobby’s talk was all about batchable jobs and how great they are, he went through a number of use cases where batchable jobs would make sense.
As well as going through use cases he also highlighted the key features of both batching and chaining jobs.
I have used batchable jobs in the past but not chained jobs, I found it interesting how you’re able to retrieve batchable jobs much like you can with eloquent models as shown in the slide below.
We were also lucky enough to get one of our questions asked out by Caneco, as you can tell it was a very controversial question and quite an important one to get the speakers answer on. “What do you think about pineapple pizza?”
Katerina Trajchevska – Dealing with legacy code
This was a really interesting talk, how many times have we had to work on a legacy project and really not look forward to it. Katerina brought some great pieces advice to the table one of those being “Legacy code is useful code that you’re afraid to change.” This one really made me think.
It’s true a number of times these legacy projects that we have to look at are potentially earning millions of pounds for the business so its important to remember this, yes its old and sometimes messy but this code is running a generating revenue for a business.
Changing existing code is always a difficult thing to do especially if there are no tests. We have projects that come to us like this all the time and we always make sure that any changes we make going forward are backed by tests, so the following points from one of her slides makes perfect sense
- Identify what needs to change.
- Write characterisation tests.
- Make your changes and refactor.
Characterisation tests isn’t a term I have come across before but the following slide made it clear to me how important this kind of test is when working with legacy code.
Stephen Rees-Carter – Th1nk Lik3 a H4cker
This is the first time i’ve seen Stephen talk, Ive previously emailed him regarding running his security audit services that he offers and i’ve been reading his Laravel Security in Depth for a year now and have massively enjoyed it so I was looking forward to this one and trust me it wont disappoint when you get to see this one.
The talk was based on an interactive Laravel application that we were asked to try and hack, each stage different things needed to be tried different passwords, testing routes via the uri as well as adding things like query params etc. On the right hand side of the screen there was real time updates of how people were getting on, when people had gained access to the next stage etc. It was really fun just watching people attempt to get through the different stages and then have Stephen go through the common gotchas that people don’t think about when developing applications, watch out for this one when the videos are shared.
Aaron Francis
I wasn’t 100% sure what to expect here for this talk, I’ve been a fan of Aaron for a long time now. I think he puts some superb content out there to help people get a better understanding of databases and how to improve the performance and optimise your application queries.
This talk by far was one of my favourite talks of the event, it wasn’t focused on code but on getting yourself out there. Doing things like building in public helps, people get to know you and see the work that you’re doing, this is something that Aaron did himself and he has now had the pleasure of speaking at some very large events.
Some of the things he said resonated so much with me, I myself have wanted to get myself out there more, I’d love to start doing some live streams working through a project that I think people will benefit from seeing. So when he said.
“Publishing your work, get out there the internet is a scary place it’s a scary thing to do. Why not me? Other people out there are getting new jobs, Being afraid of putting yourself out there.”
Aaron Francis
It really hit home, another things that he said was
I could reach the end of my career ego fully intact, no one ever laughing at me. But I would be bitter
Aaron Francis
These two items really made me thing, I don’t want to look back at my career and feel the same, so it’s time for me to make a change!
Overall Verdict
I have to admit I wasn’t sure what to expect from the event, this was the first time we’ve been a major sponsor at a Laracon event and I must admit I really enjoyed it. It was great to meet so many different developers a number of them I had been following on twitter for a while.
It was great to watch so many excellent talks and absorb as much info as I could in between tweeting and talking to people.
I also enjoyed the location, the venue was superb the food was amazing and our hosts were outstanding huge shout out to Caneco for doing such an amazing job of being the event host, but also making us feel involved. It was also great to meet some of the Laravel core team and chat to both Joe Dixon who works on Vapour and James Brooks who works on Forge.
Im really looking forward to Laravel Live UK now and hopefully Laracon US! two more events we’re lucky enough to be able to sponsor this year as well.