April-2017.php

April is almost over, and it's time for another monthly roundup of interesting articles and links.

During the month I've read some interesting articles providing a pretty good spread ranging from introductions to JavaScript tools over best practice for working developers to a deep dive into the PHP engine.

The world of JavaScript tooling and frameworks seems to be an ever moving target, even so, the purpose of these tools is to make the everyday life of developers easier. Npm seems to be something like a current de facto standard for JavaScript package management. Sitepoint posted a beginner's guide to npm, which gives a bit more background info for people who wants to know a bit more than how to write npm install.

At our company we recently switched to the Webpack module bundler, it's been working quite well, but it was interesting to read Tutorialzine's learn Webpack in 15 minutes and gain a few more insights into how it all works.

JavaScript as a language is also a moving target. The latest version is ECMAScript 2015 (aka. ES2015, aka. ES6), if you want to know more about what's new in this new version, you can Learn ES2015 with Babeljs.

On a more general development note, TechBeacon published an article called 35 bad programming habits that make your code smell. Despite the link batish title, the article contains some good points about bad programming habits worth keeping in mind when doing your development.

Developers often complain about having to maintain other peoples' code, and sometimes you get the impressions that only greenfield projects are fun to work with. Tobias Schlitt from Quafoo has some very interesting points about the advantages of improving existing code bases in his Loving Legacy Code. I think the article presents some really interesting advantages that are often forgotten when we get too focused on the code itself.

I've written a few deployment scripts by myself, but it's always interesting to learn about other peoples' experiences, Tim MacDonals has some interesting points in his Writing a Zero Downtime Deployment Script article.

It's always interesting to know how our tools actually work internally. Even though it's a bit too low level for me I always find Nikita Popov's PHP internals articles interesting, the same goes for the new deep dive into the PHP 7 Virtual Machine.

As a last thing I'd like to share a PHP library that I'd like to play around with; Spatie's Crawler a PHP library for crawling websites. I could imagine this would work well together with Fabian Potencier's Goutte web scraper library. I currently use Goutte for a small "secret" side project I call Taplist, a web scraper that scrapes the websites of beer bars in Copenhagen, to collect the lists of what's currently on tap in the bars in one place.