Dump Links #1

In DeSmart we find interesting things every day. In fact each team (called DeTeam) member finds it and shares it with others through our internal mailing group or private Facebook group and sometimes using HipChat. I found it very useful and I will try to share all those interesting things on our Blog. Topics will vary but mostly I will write about PHP, Frameworks (Laravel FTW ;), CSS and all technology news.

When my box with links gets full, I will put them here and try to describe each link – why I like it, why this particular technology is good or bad etc. I hope you will like it too and find it useful. Enjoy!

Phabricator is an open source tool which integrates other tools for managing projects, code inspection, bug tracking and integrating all with your own GIT or SVN repository. I would love to test this little fella during our next project.

Making applications according to BDD methodology gives you a lot of advantages, it’s obvious. But what to do if you didn’t use it earlier and wanna try it? You can start from this BDD tutorial and then go ahead with tools like PHPSpec and Behat.

Believe me: it’s good for you! 😉

While making the 3rd edition of the Fooder project we worked very hard on Domain Driven Development. It was our first attempt using it and it turned out it was a good call. In fact our task was a little hard because some of the code was already written but we didn’t give up 😉 At first we had a lot of problems with proper class and method naming but we learned how to use it. Now creating apps with DDD is more natural than ever, smart and efficient. You should try it.

It is important to keep your code clean and logic, everybody knows that. Especially if you want to maintain good relations with your colleagues while improving and changing their code (and opposite). If you want to see how good your code could be and learn something about clean code try to improve it.

Everyone who is used to Adobe Photoshop knows how to create nice effects using background blending mode. Now, similiar effects could be made by simply using CSS and background-blend-mode property. Pretty neat! Shall I talk with our friends at UXPin to implement it in their image editor? 🙂

Sometimes you have a problem with easy one-time notification implementation in your webapp. Now there is a package for it which gives you an ability to manage notifications. It’s an interesting way of creating, maintaining and sending notifications.

Did you ever come up with displaying the same view in different places in your web application and wondered how to do it best? Virtuoso could be the solution. This simple package allows you to create new object with your view and then it could be attached to other views. This way we don’t duplicate the code and if you have to change something, you just do it in one place. Simple.

Often I see problems with validating model, which needs to be saved in DB, but I found a solution for it using validating package. Use it every time you need to save something in DB and be sure your DB is safe 🙂

Web applications should look good, we know that but the appearance is not the only thing that counts. It should be crawlers and SEO friendly. You as a developer should also take care of that. Minifiying your *.js or *.css files is kind of obvious these days but you can also check other important stuff visiting one of the tools available. Woorank will tell you what needs to be changed and Google PageSpeed will show you how fast does your site response and what you can do to make it even faster.

That’s all for today, give me a comment if something is not clear for you or maybe you want to share other things with me 🙂

Want more? Share „Dump Links” with others. See you soon!

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