Top Laravel & PHP Blogs You Should Be Following

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If you’re a web developer, you’ll likely know that the Laravel ecosystem is always changing. Thankfully, there’s a huge amount of content that is written that help us keep up to date with what’s going on, thanks to the amazing community. There’s also a constant stream of guides and tutorials that we can use to improve as developers.

So, I thought that I’d put together a short post with the blogs that I’d recommend every Laravel and PHP web developer to follow. If you’re interested in seeing the top Twitter accounts that I think every Laravel developer should be following, you can also check out my “Top Laravel Twitter Accounts to Follow” post.

Are there any other blogs that you would recommend? If so, let me know in the comments so that I can add it to the list.

In no particular order, here’s a list of the top 35 blogs that I think every Laravel and PHP developer should check out:




































Laravel News Links

Laravel Package To Beautify Your Code – Laravel Pint

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/G83VTGK1lnk/hqdefault.jpgIn this video, we will be looking into a laravel package that will help us to beautify our code so that when we look into our code, everything is formatted correctly. The package name is Laravel Pint.Laravel News Links

Strike Industries Strike Clicker: Something Different – A Finger Trainer

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Strike Industries, based in California, just released the Strike Clicker, a device that fits easily in hand to strengthen or rehabilitate a trigger finger – or relieve stress, do the ADHD stimming thing, train your dog, or just annoy someone with a bit of noise.

The Strike Clicker arrives unassembled, so the self-entertainment begins with a short, IKEA-style assembly process. Then the real fun starts. This hand-held device has a trigger-like lever with an approximately two-pound “break.” So, even though there are no sights on the top (hey, Strike Industries, ever thought about that?), you can get plenty of reps in while waiting in traffic. Or maybe you’re not so good at the “chill” part of Netflix & Chill. This might be the fix.

strike clicker

Most people who have a firearm with a two-pound trigger break don’t need finger training. But this little device could be a panacea for someone who’s bringing a hand back from an injury or some other weakness. And there’s no law saying its use is limited to the index finger. Indeed, I’ve known a handful of people whose physical histories force them to use something other than the index finger as a trigger-presser, usually with good results, so long as determination is in the mix. Then there’s this guy, who can shoot with his toes, who might have even more ideas on how to use the Strike Clicker. But I digress.

Fitted with a keychain hole, the little clicker appears easy to take anywhere. The audible click makes it suitable for training your favorite pet, too. That’s a more likely sub-use of the Strike Clicker than prepping to grease up and flex on stage at a trigger finger fitness show.

In a year that’s had its share of discouraging news and inflation, maybe an $8.95 fidget device on our keychains is just the distraction every gun owner needs.

strike clicker

The post Strike Industries Strike Clicker: Something Different – A Finger Trainer appeared first on AllOutdoor.com.

AllOutdoor.com

How to Optimize Laravel Application Performance

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With the growing pace of tech-oriented companies, software development is picking up. Many new tech stacks are coming into the world to make the development process easier, and a lot of these new companies are using PHP as the backend framework for their apps. PHP, with its various version updates, has grown popular among developers. Most PHP developers have heard and worked with Laravel at least once. Laravel is most known for making business-focused applications and providing security for the application. The most important thing that attracts most developers is that it allows them to do micro changes to improve website optimization.

In this article, we will discuss how we can increase the speed of your Laravel application. So let us begin.

Top Ways to Improve Laravel Performance

Some of the suggestions below may not improve the speed of your specific application, but you can try all of them, and with trial and error, you will see what is best for you. Let us discuss each of them one by one.

Utilize Laravel Performance Monitoring Tools

Laravel performance monitoring tools help to improve the performance of your application using metrics and error reports. You can use these stats to predict the behavior of your users. There are many tools available in the market for monitoring Laravel applications.

Scout APM helps you get these metrics easily in a single dashboard which helps you observe them quickly. You can check metrics like where users are leaving the application, where users are spending the most time, bad API calls, etc. Business teams can look at the data and suggest a relevant development path for the application.

Front End Asset Optimization with Laravel Mix

Laravel Mix is used for mixing different stylesheets into a single bundle and making it a single file. Larvel Mix is present by default in all Laravel applications. Laravel mix is generally used for compiling different CSS files into one file so that the application does not need to call two different HTTPS APIs. Hence, the speed of the application can be increased a little bit. Sample code for mixing two CSS files using Laravel mix is given below.

1mix.styles([

2 'public/css/vendor/normalize.css',

3 'public/css/styles.css'

4 ], 'public/css/all.css');

Mixing two CSS files generally increases the size of the generated file, so it dampens the benefit gained by mixing two CSS files. To tackle this issue, we optimize the mix bundles and decrease the size for the production-level applications. It helps in the fast loading of the application and a quicker response time.

Revert to Caching As Much As Possible

Caching in computer science means using the information already produced in some previous iteration/execution cycle. In any kind of web application, caching plays an important role in increasing the speed of
the website.

For example, let’s say an API is called very frequently in the application. In this case, you can simply reuse the response of the API
and use it again and again instead of calling the API again. Caching decreases the API response time of your application, and the cost of database queries.

Laravel provides a very helpful command for caching, which helps in boosting performance. It is given below:

1php artisan config:cache

You can use this command for caching the config file. Similarly, you can cache the route in Laravel using the following command:

1php artisan route:cache

Using Queues

Queues are crucial data structures that could be used to improve the performance of applications. Most of the time, queues are used to send messages either to the end-user or to another service in architecture.
For example, if you want to send messages after they login into your application, you can push the messages into a queue, and they will be sent one by one. Also, using a third-party solution might cause a delay
in sending notifications, but queues will send notifications immediately, giving you a better user response.

Make Sure You’re Using the Latest Version

The latest version of PHP is necessary for optimizing the speed of your Laravel application. The latest version has some crucial changes to the current version of Laravel. So you should always try to install the latest version of both PHP and Laravel.

Minification

Minification means minimizing different components of your applications as much as possible. You can optimize various things like code, server-side configuration, and usage of assets on the website. In this part, we will discuss the things that could be minified in the Laravel application.

HTML Minification

HTML minification is the process of making the code simpler and breaking it into pieces for the sake of faster loading of the website, minimizing the API calls in the frontend. It helps for faster compilation of the code and execution of the script. This method can drastically decrease the load time and smoothness of the website. Also, it is helpful in debugging bugs because less code is more clear to read.

Minify CSS

CSS plays a main role in the response time of the website. More CSS means more style; hence it would take more time for the website to load. Different kinds of CSS frameworks can be used for styling your website. Minifying CSS also includes removing irrelevant styling, bad code style, removing spaces, etc. But while minifying CSS, you should be very careful because the behavior of all browsers is not the same as the same CSS. Different browsers behave differently toward the CSS; hence you should properly test your application while minifying CSS.

Minify Javascript

Minifying Javascript is mostly done for running the scripts faster than the non-minified versions. In the minification, you remove unused codes like API calls, variable definitions, irrelevant imports, etc. If you do javascript minification carefully, it could improve the performance drastically. It also helps in sending data faster from the website to the servers.

Optimize Your Laravel Application Performance with Scout APM

Scout APM is a modern-based application monitoring system for monitoring applications of almost all types. It supports many frameworks like PHP, Ruby, Python, Elixir, etc. Here we will talk about how we can improve a Laravel application performance using Scout APM. Scout APM supports all versions of Laravel above 5.5. Scout also handles the problem of N+1 queries, which is one of the major problems in Laravel Eloquent.

Installing Scout APM in your Laravel application is very simple; you just have to run the following command in your console,

1composer require scoutapp/scout-apm-laravel

When you run this command scout-php is installed.

After that, the next step is configuring the environment variables in the .env file. To integrate Scout into your application, you have to add the following keys:

1# Scout settings

2 

3SCOUT_MONITOR=true

4SCOUT_KEY="[AVAILABLE IN THE SCOUT UI]"

5SCOUT_NAME="A FRIENDLY NAME FOR YOUR APP"

In the case of installation through Heroku Addon, you don’t need to set SCOUT_MONITOR and SCOUT_KEY explicitly; it is automatically set.

The third step is adding the config/scout_apm.php using the following
command.

1php artisan vendor:publish

2--provider=\"Scoutapm\\Laravel\\Providers\\ScoutApmServiceProvider\"

After this step, you will need to clear and rebuild the cache, or it can give unexpected results. The final step is that after making these changes, you have to deploy your application. It will take around five
minutes for results from your website to appear in Scout’s dashboard.

Also, if you want to add the scoutapm PHP extension, then you can also do it easily using the following command,

1sudo pecl install scoutapm

You will have to install this extension if you want some instruments like the timing of libcurl and file_get_contents.

In this way, Scout APM can help you see all the
metrics of your Laravel application. You can use these stats to improve your Laravel applications and generate more value for your customers. You can start using Scout APM free for 14 days, even without a credit
card. If you want your Laravel application to perform better you should start analyzing its metrics now. You can sign up to start your first application on Scout APM’s website.

Laravel News

How to Turn a Landline Telephone Into a Cell Phone Bluetooth Receiver

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Photo: ShutterStockStudio (Shutterstock)

I’m not usually the nostalgic type, but I miss landline phones. Cell phones may do eight billion things, but they are tiny and inconsequential—artificial, semi-disposable black rectangles—whereas old telephones have weight, substance, and style. They come in lots of colors. The receiver feels good in your hand. It feels great when you slam down the handset to hang up on some jerk—angrily poking at the hang-up button on your iPhone doesn’t even come close. Old phones even sound better: The ringtones come from actual bells—so much more real than a piddly little tune or digital squonk—and the sound of a voice on a cellphone is terrible when compared to the same voice on an analog phone.

If you want to revisit the old days of our pre-digital past or experience it for the first time, you don’t need to sign up for a landline. It’s easy to convert an old push-button or rotary phone to a Bluetooth receiver that works with your cell phone, and almost as well as a dedicated landline phone. Here’s how to make it happen.

How to turn an old landline telephone into a cell phone Bluetooth receiver

Get an old phone. If there isn’t one in your attic, there are thousands of old telephones on eBay that can be purchased for very reasonable prices, running the gamut from the ubiquitous beige push button models of the 1980s, to classic black rotary phones to pink “princess” phones, and novelty cheeseburger phones.

Get a specialized jack. There are a few ready-made devices that instantly transform your old phone into an old phone that gets cell calls. Cell2Jack retails for about $30, and the Xlink BT Bluetooth Gateway lets you connect three different cell phones to the same landline phone and costs around $90.

Hook it up. Most old telephones don’t have separate power sources because the power came from the same wire that transmits the sounds (such a sleek design), so you’ll have to plug the jack into a power outlet and plug a phone cord into the jack and the phone. Once you do that, you just have to hit the “pair” button and pair up the Bluetooth from your cell phone, and that’s it. Now you have an old school phone, complete with old-school ringer, rotary or push-button dialing, a dial-tone when you pick up the receiver, and even a busy signal.

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Make some calls. You can now experience the joy of the mechanical chunka-chunka-chunka sound of a rotary dial, or the satisfyingly discordant sounds of a push button phone making a connection. Your new phone has the same telephone number as your cell phone, and when someone calls, you’ll be amazed at how freaking loud phones used to ring. Spend many hours talking to your friends. Note how right the handset feels in your hand and how nicely the ear piece cradles your ear. Don’t forget to absentmindedly wrap the coiled cord around your finger as you talk.

The one way your Bluetooth phone will remain inferior to old-school phones

Calls made through POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) sound better than calls made though cell phones. Cell phones convert sound into electrical signals and send it a thousand miles away then instantly convert it back in sounds. To minimize latency, cell phones limit the signal of the sound they convert. But that’s not all: to make speech more understandable in a smaller “space,” cell phones eliminate some frequencies and boost others, giving people’s voices a compressed, robot feel. Old-school telephones provided richer sound, less squelched and more natural, because they don’t have the space limitation that digital phones do.

Your new franken-phone will be playing back that compressed signal on a different kind of speaker, so it won’t sound as rich as landline-to-landline calls did back in the day. The speaker is likely to be louder and less “tinny” than your cell phone’s speaker though.

Lifehacker

Build APIs in Laravel With the Restify Package

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Laravel Restify is a package to make a powerful JSON:API-compatible Rest API with Laravel. After installing the package and following the setup guide, you can get started quickly using the repository CLI:

1php artisan restify:repository Dream --all

The repository is the core of this package. The example command above would generate a blank repository that you could add fields to, like the following example:

1namespace App\Restify;

2 

3use App\Models\Dream;

4use Binaryk\LaravelRestify\Http\Requests\RestifyRequest;

5 

6class DreamRepository extends Repository

7{

8 public static string $model = Dream::class;

9 

10 public function fields(RestifyRequest $request): array

11 {

12 return [

13 id(),

14 field('title')->required(),

15 field('description'),

16 field('image')->image(),

17 ];

18 }

19}

If you don’t define the $model property, Restify can guess based on the repository class name (i.e., DreamRepository would be the Dream model).

Here’s an example of the built-in UserRepository class (you would want to protect this in a real app) that will return an API response in JSON API format:

1GET: /api/restify/users?perPage=10&page=2

2{

3 "meta": {

4 "current_page": 1,

5 "from": 1,

6 "last_page": 1,

7 "path": "http://localhost:8000/api/restify/users",

8 "per_page": 15,

9 "to": 1,

10 "total": 1

11 },

12 "links": {

13 "first": "http://localhost:8000/api/restify/users?page=1",

14 "next": null,

15 "path": "http://localhost:8000/api/restify/users",

16 "prev": null,

17 "filters": "/api/restify/users/filters"

18 },

19 "data": [

20 {

21 "id": "1",

22 "type": "users",

23 "attributes": {

24 "name": "Paul Redmond",

25 "email": "paul@example.com"

26 }

27 }

28 ]

29}

This package also walks you through the authentication process, advanced filtering, and more!

Learn More

To get started, I recommend watching the Restify Course, which has 24 lessons on using Restify to build an API with Laravel. You can also read the official documentation to install this package and start using it in your applications. Finally, you can see the source code and contribute on GitHub at BinarCode/laravel-restify.

Laravel News

The Special Poverty Rifle, Part 1: Buying Parts and Building

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A short while back I was challenged by fellow TFB Staff member James Reeves (you may have heard of him), to build an SPR as cheap as possible. Well, myself being an unapologetic “poor”, I, of course, took him up on the challenge and started the project Special Poverty Rifle. More AR-15 Content @ TFB: […]

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The post The Special Poverty Rifle, Part 1: Buying Parts and Building appeared first on The Firearm Blog.

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