January-2017.php

As a new feature this year, I'd like to start doing monthly summaries of interesting articles I read throughout the month, that I feel is worth returning back to. The lists will include a bunch of different articles revolving around web development, but will probably mainly focus on PHP. It might also show that I work with Laravel in my day job.

I will include anything that pops up on my radar during the month, even though some of it might be old news if I feel that it's still relevant.

I believe one of the best ways to learn is to look at how other does the job you're trying to become better at. I've had a hard time finding complete Open Source Laravel projects, but OpenLaravel showcases just that.

Besides diving into full project code bases, reading other peoples' experiences with diving into specific areas of a code base can also be highly valuable; that's why I've written about diving into Laravel Eloquent's getter and setter magic. In the same sense, I found it interesting to read a breakdown of hacking a Concrete5 plugin.

Since we're already on the topic of security, the people from Paragon IE wrote a PHP security pocket guide.

I like to consider myself a pragmatic programmer, who focuses on getting the right things to work in a proper way, which means not necessarily trying to solve every imaginable scenario that might be a problem someday. In other words, I try to practice YAGNI.

Shawn McCool has gathered a tonne of interesting information regarding the Active Records design pattern (the base for Laravel's Eloquent ORM) in his giant all things Active Record article.

The last link for this month is a short story about why a bug fix is called a patch.