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Laracon 2016 Summary - Day Two

Laravel 5.3 is here. Learn more and get caught up on all the news coming out of Laracon US 2016.

Prosper Otemuyiwa

Former Auth0 Employee

Jul 29, 2016 • 5 min read

Day Two of the Laravel US Conference consisted of more talks and workshops. Seven speakers took to the stage, and we had the first soft talk of the conference. Check out our recap of Day One to learn about the Laravel 5.3 overview by Taylor Otwell and the technical workshops that happened on the first day.

Evan You was back again with another live demo on Single-Page Applications with Vue, Vue Router & Vuex. He demonstrated the importance of Vuex to Vuejs in relation to Redux with React. Check out the slides for his Vue.js workshop here.

Jack McDade presented the first soft talk of the conference. His presentation was on Wizards, Lawnmowers, and Hovercrafts. Very insightful presentation about product design, people culture, and work perspectives. Check out the slides here.

Note: Of all the presenters today, he had the finest slides!

Ben Ramsey, creator of the popular UUID PHP library covered a lot about the history of HTTP and HTTP/2. He talked about the challenges and processes that occurred from the initial version of HTTP up until HTTP/2 came about. Check out the slides here. HTTP is Dead. Long live HTTP/2!

Note: The sound of Ramsey's voice has a strong resemblance with that of Tom Hanks!

Zeev Suraski, co-architect of PHP, talked about the PHP 7 Story. He talked about the history of PHP from the initial version up to PHP 7. He also highlighted benchmark performances of each major PHP version.

Note: Zeev is crazy about spicy foods!

Amanda Folson, developer advocate @ Gitlab. Her talk was on building APIs with Lumen. Check out the slides here.

Matthew Machuga, senior developer at Think Through Math, gave a talk on Tests Should Tell a Story. He gave some really good tips and tricks for testing, like the ones below:

  • Write a failing test first
  • Write the smallest amount of code
  • Listen to feedback and refactor code and test in pieces.

He also talked about a feature-first approach in building software.

  • Build only what your client needs at that moment
  • Support slice plans
  • Waste few resources to test and idea
  • Provide readable, agreed-upon specs for stakeholders
  • Encourage collaboration

Check out the slides here.

Sandi Metz, popular Rubyist and author of Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby gave a talk on Get A Whiff of This. She talked about the various types of code smells and a practical object-oriented approach in writing good code. She also mentioned that every code smell can be mapped to a recipe that cures it via refactoring. Check out the slides here.

Note: This is the first PHP conference Sandi has ever attended!

Conclusion

Day Two of Laracon US has been awesome. Two speakers actually used Ruby code to drive home points in their presentations today. It amazingly brought a fresh perspective to the way we use code in the PHP land. I'll update this post as soon as I lay my hands on speaker slides that are currently not referenced here. There are seven speakers lined up for the final day of Laracon US 2016. There will be more technical talks and hopefully Taylor will unveil some other Laravel and open-source goodness!

I'll leave you with a list of additional resources and links to help you both learn Laravel and stay up to date with the latest news and announcements.