When running unit tests, xdebug will slow things down quite a bit. Most of the time we run tests we don’t need xdebug because we are not doing code coverage, or actually debugging. Here is how I quickly toggle xdebug
The current state of things
It’s amazing how life gets going in a rhythm, and you get your head down and working so hard, that you sometimes forget to look around (or in this case, write in your blog). Working at a small travel advertising
Sorting Associative Arrays in PHP
$arr = [ ‘foo’ => ‘bar’, ‘faz’ => ‘baz’ ]; array_multisort(array_column($arr, ‘value’), SORT_ASC, $arr); You can sort an associative array with one line of code as I did above. As a result, the array becomes sorted by the keys: [
PHPStorm – Stop those accidental tab closures!
If you’re like me, you have probably had this happen. You go to click on one of the many tabs you have open in PHPStorm, only to accidentally click the X, and close it. ARGH! Today I found a way
Defensive Programming | Laravel find()
Defensive Programming One of the things I’ve learned in my career is to code defensively. Laravel makes it very easy to ask for an object, but it also makes it very easy to get it wrong. If you request an
Some resources
Here are some great resources I found recently. Unsplash Free Stock Photos Remove.bg Remove background from portraits Page Cache Whole page caching IsoRepublic.com Free hi-res photos and videos
Laravel – the difference between all() and get()
When dealing with a model, all() is a static method. It creates a new query object, and runs get() on that object get() is not static, but can be called statically because of a magic method in the Model class.
Laravel Eloquent only()
$fullModel = Model::find(1) // Get model with id 1 $idArray = $fullModel->only(‘id’) // array containing id // this does not work. You’ll get back an empty collection // It is trying to pull the id column off the collection object,
MySQL Stored Procedures
Here is a tip you can use when writing a stored procedure, and using prepared statements. Since you have to pass the statements in through EXECUTE stmt USING … it can get confusing if there are a large number of
Laravel Eloquent Attributes
When dealing with an Eloquent model, you can add your own attributes. These can be useful for computed values. For example: class Person extends Model { // By default, all the database fields will be available. // Let’s assume for
Laravel Eloquent sortBy function
Here is how you can sort a collection by an ordered array of ids. The use case here was that I had a number of objects in a Redis cache, which were retrieved in unsorted order. The objects were large,
SQL EXPLAIN: The “Extra” column
This column contains additional information about how MySql resolved the query. There is a line in the manual which states: If you want to make your queries as fast as possible, look out for Extra values of Using filesort and Using temporary. Let’s examine why
SQL EXPLAIN: The “filtered” column
The filtered column shows an estimated percentage of rows that will be filtered by the table WHERE clause. It’s typically only shown during the EXPLAIN EXTENDED command.
SQL EXPLAIN: The “ref” column
The “ref” column shows which columns or constants are compared to the index named in the “key” column to select rows from the table. This comes right from the manual, but I have noticed that when the value is const,
SQL EXPLAIN: Index-related columns
These relate to the usage of indexes: possible_keys Which indexes were considered? key Which indexes did the optimizer choose? key_len How many bytes of the index will be used?
SQL EXPLAIN: The “type” column
The “type” column indicates how MySQL will access rows From worse to better: ALL index range ref eq_ref const system NULL
A faster alternative to correlated sub-queries
I recently had to rewrite a query that was running very slowly. It was taking over 30 seconds. Upon analyzing it, I saw that it had 2 correlated sub-queries in it, and each was doing a count(*). This meant that
You might not need jQuery…
I just found a video that talks about how jQuery is no longer needed in 2018. I found it interesting, and thought I’d save it and some related pages here for future reference. http://microjs.com/#ajax https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Fetch_API/Using_Fetch https://caniuse.com http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/
Compact and Extract
Compact takes individual variables, and packs them into an associative array. Extract does the opposite. <?php // example code // Set 2 variables $var1 = “one”; $var2 = “two”; // Create associative array $arr = compact(‘var1′,’var2’); // Show results var_dump($arr);
Splat!
While looking through the Query Builder class in the Laravel source code today, I came across something I hadn’t seen before in PHP: $query->{$method}(…array_values($value)); I had no idea what the three dots meant, so I went looking for it. Turns