GENERAL

ALL SHADES OF LARACON 2015


Laravel has really grown over the past 3 years to be a very popular framework and the community around it is blazingly amazing. Laravel is also now making PHP very respected in the community and I see it becoming profound, established, well rooted and significantly the de facto framework for rapid web application development like Rails in the near future.

Laracon US happened on the 11th and 12th of this month(August) and it was amazing. The speakers presentations were intriguing and for those of you that missed it, I want to give you a recap of the laracon Experience.

Cross Section of Laracon Attendees

Matt Stauffer’s Talk

He titled it “Leveraging Laravel: Launching Side Projects Quickly With Laravel”

The slides are right here:

Ed Finkler’s Talk He titled it “Open Sourcing Mental Illness” The slides are  right here:  

 

Eryn O’Neil’s Talk

She titled it “When It All Hits The Fan”

1.  “Ask Why 5 times to peel back the layers of ambiguity and reveal the root problem”

2. Most project (& people) problems are the result of mismatched expectations, a lack of communication, or (most likely) both.

3. “Sometimes the bug in the code is the person writing it”

4. “Have an incident response arsenal – A plan for things that haven’t happened yet.
Security breach
Server down
Datacenter wiped out in freak accident”

5. “Teams are most effective when members are empowered to work separately”

6. “No launch plan survives contact with the production server”

7. “Make any mistake once, but don’t make it twice.”

8. “When things hit the fan…

1. Calm down,

2. Make a plan
> Then prevent it from happening again. ”

9. “Development is starting with 100% bugs, getting it down to, say, 10% bugs, then shipping.” 

10. “If you’re not making mistakes you’re not getting better. If you’re making the same mistakes you’re also not getting better” 

11. “Make new exciting mistakes. Old mistakes are boring.” 

12. All projects involve people. So plan for it

Jeffrey Way’s Talk

He titled it “Things Laravel Made Me Believe”

1. Be honest about scope.  You can’t compare someone working on something at Amazon with building a blog.

2. Focus on the fundamentals

3. So, if there is some secret sauce for success, I have to believe the key ingredient is simplicity.

4. Some things Jeff’s grown to value.

* Other industries

* Userbase

* Developer Evangelists

* The Haters

5. It’s the tiny things that make code wonderful to use.

6. Make the user your top priority, not adherence to a design pattern.

7. Be Careful. Really smart people can offer really bad advice.

8. It’s okay to be honest about the scope of what you’re building.

Is it just a CRUD app? That’s fine but don’t complicate it.

9. My biggest mistake was focusing on how to get it to work, before how it feels to use.

10. Things I strive for. Care, Simplicity, Healthy level of Distrust

11. Design patterns are made to serve the developer, not the developer to serve the design patterns

12. Just build it, don’t worry about those mean reddit comments

Adam Wathan’s Talk

He titled it “Chasing Perfect”

1. Don’t be Lazy, don’t be sloppy

2. Stop worrying about the architecture; start emphasizing the details

3. Whether you have two elements in a statement or two services in some distributed architecture, the principles are the same – Kent Beck

4. Focus on lower-level mechanics of programming.

Paul M Jones Talk

He titled it “Same Thing Happens Every Time”

1. Two types of programmers.

Future-oriented: “first do it right, refactor as needed”
– Academic, details patterns, abstracts, layers, interfaces, testing
Present-oriented: “first get it done, then make it faster”
– Utilitarian, rapid, simple, prove that I need it, do the least needed.
2. Another type of developer is the “Problem Child”
 
Problem Child Characteristics
* competent, intelligent, knowledgeable, talented.
* Low empathy, remember this/forget misses
* Games the rules, does not take instruction well
* Student syndrome; negotiates conditions post-facto

* Has never really “failed” in own mind.

3. How to handle the problem child. 

* Works well in a team… But only when leading it!

* Independent work: thrives on responsibility

* Leadership role: sword that cuts two ways

* Fire/release/let go

4.Dealing with informal structure

* Recognize that hierarchy exists

* Identify social hierarchy positions and holders

* Decide if you like you where you are

* Concentrate more on social strategies, less on technical ones.

5.The time from “now” until “the completion of the project” tend to become constant.

6. Handling Schedule Pressure

* Extend deadline (“free”) — Go big or go home.

* Reduce scope (not free)

* Parallelize independent tasks (not free)

Brian Webb’s Talk

He titled it “Building Great Company Culture”

  1.  A lot of leadership is not about teaching someone *how* to do something, but *why* to do it. People need purpose
  2.  Look at past work and performance with less emphasis on degrees and certifications.
  3.  Degrees and certifications just show a person is capable of being educated, not how they behave/perform in a team
  4. 7/10 employees are disengaged or actively disengaged
  5. Disengaged managers 3x more likely to have disengaged employees
  6. Employees with low engagement are 4x more likely to leave their jobs
  7. “I’d willingly forgo a substantial pay raise to see my direct supervisor fired.” – 35% of U.S. employees
  8. Motivation: autonomy, mastery and purpose
  9. Mechanical skills: bonuses work as incentive
  10. Cognitive skills: large bonuses led to poorer results
  11. Sam Glucksberg: Candle Problem
  12. Competition for reward creates stress that shut down creative problem solving
  13. Pay people enough money to take money out of the equation
  14. Autonomy – let teams self organize and let the team decide membership
  15. People love learning
  16. Therese Amabile and Steven Kramer: biggest motivator is getting something done
  17. Feed progress w/ feedback
  18. Take the time to reach out and give quick, informal feedback
  19. Company’s growth depends on individual growth and progress
  20. Yearning to do something in service of something larger
  21. Does what I’m doing make a difference in the world?
  22. Personality or values of the company are supported and evolved by its people
  23. Culture fit can’t be trained – coffee shop and airport tests
  24. Regularly invest effort in your team and environment
  25. Encourage new and different points of view

Samantha Geitz’s Talk

She titled it “Service Oriented Laravel and Lumen”.

She recommended the following books:

  1. Apprentice to Artisan
  2. Microservice: I/O API organized around business capability
  3. SOA: Single purpose online application
  4. Build APIs You Won’t Hate
  5. API Blueprint

Samantha Quinones’s Talk

She titled it “Hacking The Human Interface”

 

  1. People are complex
  2. Human interaction is a constant negotiation of hierarchy and ideas
  3. An individual’s authority within a community lies at the intersection of these attributes
  4. Leadership is a means to an authority, not an end of authority

 

Coderabbi ( Yitzchok Willroth’s ) Talk 

He titled it “Talmudic Maxims to Maximize Your Growth As a Developer”

  1. Start mentoring and be mentored at Phpmentoring.org
  2. Identify, Interact, Innovate
  3. The value of a mentor – even for a minute – is immeasurable.
  4. Local user group – Triangle PHP
  5. Dev Book Club
  6. Hackpledge.org
  7. Teach the student according to their way
  8. The community is our lifeline – without it we are adrift
  9. Nomad PHP – internet-based user group
  10. Up-for-grabs.net for low-hanging-fruit OS problems
  11. In a place where there is nobody, endeavor to be somebody
  12. Hyper-identification within a narrow community lessens involvement in a broader community
  13. Seize opportunities to cross-pollinate
  14. Programming begins with empathy

 

 

Taylor Otwell’s Zen Moment

He introduced the new Laravel Spark Platform that would be available for Laravel Users for free by Early September. Watch his presentation here:

The Driving Force behind Laravel and Laracasts

Taylor Otwell and Jeffrey Way’s Wives

Pls let me know if there are some very vital talks you think should be here but aren’t in the comments section.

Keep Fit, Stay Healthy and Keep Coding :smile:

PROSPER OTEMUYIWA

About PROSPER OTEMUYIWA

Food Ninja, Code Slinger, Technical Trainer, Accidental Writer, Open Source Advocate and Developer Evangelist.