Midwest PHP 2018 Notes

Last weekend I was lucky enough to attend Midwest PHP 2018 in Bloomington, MN (the hotel was attached to the Mall of America so it’s at the Mall of America). I wanted to make sure I was attentive to the speakers so I did the best possible job taking notes (the after lunch sessions were the hardest). My plan over the next couple days is to publish my notes (in a cleaned up version) both so I have an easy reference to them and so I can refer to them in later posts. My plan is to back date the published dates on the posts so they’re “published” when they started.

I enjoyed the conference and venue and would wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who’s a PHP developer. The sessions were mostly well planned out, they provided a decent breakfast and lunch, the venue was VERY clean, and everyone seemed to have an excellent time. If time and budget allow I would love to go back next year.

As part of the experience I gave myself some homework so plan on seeing posts about the topic below soon.

My homework from #mwphp18
1. Make my sites #a11y
2. Look into AWS a solution
3. Upgrade to MySQL 5.7 everywhere
4. Play with Kubernetes and Docker
5. Try building a site with Laravel

— Scott Keck-Warren (@warren5236) March 10, 2018

Day 1

• Community by Margaret Staples (@dead_lugosi)
• BASHing at the CLI by Chris Tankersley (@dragonmantank)
• Conquering Continuous Integration & Deployment by Tessa Krisel (@tessak22)
• Getting Rolling Fast with Symfony Flex by Beau Simensen (@beausimensen)
• Cryptography for Beginners by Adam Englander (@adam_englander)
• Intro to Laravel and getting started in the Laravel Ecosystem by Joe Ferguson (@joepferguson)

Day 2

• Essential AWS for PHP Applications by Michael Moussa (@michaelmoussa)
• Diving into MySQL 5.7 by Gabriela Ferra (@gabidavila)
• VM, Serverless, or Containers by Terry Ryan (@tpryan)
• Technical Annotations and Estimations by Jessica Feigal
• Developing a Culture of Mentorship by Tessa Kriesel (@tessak22)
• Open Source, accessibility, and you - the superhero! by Nic Steenhout (@vavroom)

Midwest PHP 2018 Notes: Intro to Laravel and getting started in the Laravel Ecosystem by Joe Ferguson (@joepferguson)

Joe used a tutorial he wrote and condensed it into this talk. He ran out of time but I’m amazed at how much he covered in 45 minutes. I also find it interesting that while Symfony and Laravel are competitors they both seem very similar.

Midwest PHP 2018 Notes: Cryptography for Beginners by Adam Englander (@adam_englander)

Adam gave an overview of Cryptography and how to use some of it in PHP.

The Correct Way to Add an Element with Properties in jQuery

The other day I needed to add an element to a select using jQuery and because I can never remember the correct way to do this without making a huge mess so I’m documenting it here.

var select = $('#selectInQuestion');
var option = $("<option>", {
    'value':value,
    'label':label,
    'text':text
});
select.append(option);

Link Post and Podcast Roundup: March 2018 Edition

March’s links.

Using var_export to Refactor Legacy Code

When you’re working with legacy code some times you need to add testing to an additional piece of form processing that has no tests. I find it helpful to break out the form processing code into it’s own class so it’s easier to test but if you’re not lucky it could be a large complicated form with lots of options so setting up a test case can be difficult. var_export is an excellent solution to get the posted data out so you can use it.

Let's Invest in Ourselves For 2018

A couple weeks ago (as I did last year), I started the evaluations for the programmers that I manage. As part of that process, we have them do Professional Development goals that they need to complete every quarter. I believe that everyone should be doing some type of learning about their craft. Not only does it improve your current work place but it opens up new opportunities for future employment. Our Professional Development comprises of three pieces:

Link Post and Podcast Roundup: February 2018 Edition

February’s links.

Accepting Android SDK Licenses From The OSX Command Line

At work I’m starting to package an Ionic App for Android and it’s been one problem after another (I spent most of yesterday afternoon dealing with a version incompatibility with my NPM libraries and installing Android Studio). Today I ran into a problem getting the application to compile. I’m documenting the solution here because I’m sure I’ll have a problem with it again.

Test Driven Development of PDFs With PHPUnit and PDFBox

On several of the sites I manage we use wkhtmltopdf to generate PDF files. One of the downsides to this process is that it’s hard to test the generation of the PDF. To overcome this we use PDFBox so we can inspect what’s inside the PDF so we can use TDD.