What did you learn from this Laracon?
Dan: “I think there are always improvements that we can make and frameworks that we could be using more. There’s been a few times where we’ve done a query without thinking about whether we need to use all columns back and we’ve questioned whether we need to use a model. I think hearing the talks from this Laracon, we’ve come to realise that we could be creating DB tables and use DB facades. I must admit I always used to hate looking at DB facades and DB tables on code, but now the more I get into it, I think to myself “do I need to create a model just to get into a field?” So, I can definitely see like there’s tons of things we can improve that way.”
Alex: “Thinking back to Aaron Francis’ talk on Database Performance for Application Developers, he mentioned considering the field type you need, keeping it as minimal as possible so that it has less of a long term impact when you’re pulling data from the database, which often as developers we don’t always pay attention to. I’ve learnt to remember that when storing string values in the database, that I should restrict the number of characters we need and avoid defaulting to 255 characters. For example, if we have a value that will only ever be a maximum of 5 characters, we should limit it to that.”
Lee: “I think Aaron’s talk certainly helped because, since I watched it, I’ve worked on projects and I’ve actually taken an extra 5 minutes to think about what I want in each column. I’ve also applied a few of the indexes to my work and have become more aware of the order that I apply them and it has improved the code.”
If you were to give a Laracon talk, what would it be?
Dan: “I think a talk worth giving would be about test driven development- there’s a lot of them about, but there’s always something more that you can learn from this kind of talk. Testing is vital for us at Jump24 we always find tidbits and things we’ve either never seen or thought about in others’ talks.”
Alex: “If I was to give a talk it’d probably lean more toward what I do at Jump, for example deployments in Laravel outside of Forge that can be scalable and using infrastructure as code such as Terraform. I’ve not seen anyone ever talk about that at Laracon, other than the Kubernetes and Laravel talk by Bosun Egberinde, which is the closest thing to infrastructure we’ve had.”
Lee: “I’d like to see someone talk about how to carry out accurate estimates on projects. I’m sure if someone gave that talk, they’d have thousands of listeners. I’ve never seen one about that and I think a lot of companies use Laravel like us which would make it a very popular talk even though estimation will always be something to work on at some level.”
What did you think of this Laracon event?
Dan: “I think it was another great event overall, plenty of interesting sessions and lightning talks. It’s nice to see more of those five, ten minute sessions where speakers talk about frameworks like GitHub. For me, I think it’s great that Laracon is free, anyone can listen in or watch from anywhere in the world.”
Alex: “I think the good thing about the lightning talks is that you can just watch them on a lunch break or for 5 minutes after work. Whereas, a lot of the talks are an hour long, it’s difficult to have the time to watch them all. The lightning talks also gave speakers who haven’t had the opportunity to speak at Laracon a chance to have a voice and speak about something they’re passionate about.”
Lee: “Laracon is a big stage to get yourself onto, so the lightning talks provide an opportunity for aspiring speakers to build their confidence and get feedback from everyone who tuned in.”
Missed out on Laracon but not sure which talks to catch up on? We’ve made a “what to watch” list so you don’t have to worry. Check it out here.