March-2017.php

The month of march is ending, so it's time for this month's roundup of recommended reads. This month consists of 3 main topics: PHP, JavaScript and project management.

Even though I work a lot with PHP there's always something new to learn. I've previously dived a bit into how Composer works. Earlier in the month my attention was called towards the Composer documentation, namely the part about autoloader optimization, which features hints on how to make the Composer autoloader work faster in your production environment.

I'm working a lot with JavaScript these days, especially with the Vue framework. A lot of stuff is currently happening in the JavaScript space, and I'm struggling to both get updated and keep at least partly on top about what's going on in that space.

JavaScript ES6, aka. ECMAScript 2015 is the newest version of the ECMAScript standard and comes with a bunch of new features. Sitepoint has a nice article about 10 ES6 native features that you previously needed external libraries to get. They also have a quick rundown of 3 JavaScript libraries to keep your eyes on in 2017, including the before mentioned Vue.

"Awesome"-lists, curated lists of links somebody finds noteworthy, seems to be the big thing on Github these days. So much so that there is even awesome awesomeness meta listsa popping up. Any respectable (and all other) technology seems to have at least one dedicated awesome list, and of course, there is also an awesome Vue list.

When working with a Framework and a related template engine, there is usually a standard way of sharing data between the application and the frontend. But as the physical distance between the front- and the back-end of an application grows, with more functionality moving to the browser, sharing data gets a bit more complex. Jesse Schutt has a nice article about some different strategies for sharing data between Laravel and Vue applications, but despite the name, the strategies are applicable to any application where the back-end and front-end are separated and needs to share data.

On a less technology focused note PHPStan author Ondřej Mirtes wrote a nice article on How PHPStan got to 1000 stars on Github. Despite the rather click baitish title, the article has some really nice points on how to keep your focus on building, launching and growing an open source project and the community around it. Most of the points are very relevant in any development process, not only for open source projects, and they're definitely worth being aware of.

On the same project building, I stumbled upon an article about the self-limiting habits of entrepreneurs, which is also worth a read for anybody trying to build a project, open source or otherwise.