Segfault #3 – Speaking at LaraconIN 2023

Hello Friends 👋🏻

Welcome to the third edition of the Segfault newsletter.

I have big news to share with you — to my surprise, my talk proposal has been accepted in the upcoming Laracon IN 2023 and thus I will be speaking there in February! This is the first Laracon I’ll be attending so I could not have asked for anything more. I am planning to show how a Report Builder can ease the reporting need for your Laravel application.

I have not finalized the talk content yet, so I’d really love to hear from you if you have any suggestions or ideas on what would be beneficial to share on this topic. Pretty much every serious application requires reports so I am hoping this would be useful to a broad spectrum of people. Let me know your views through comments or by replying to this email.

I had previously spoken at a few local conferences and have also arranged some of them myself. Their size and audience would be no match to Laracon though where more than a thousand people would participate. Also it has been quite a few years since I last did public speaking — all in all, I am both excited and a bit scared.

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👓 Recommended Readings

I read a few great articles over the week, so here are my top 3 picks for you.

1. Laravel DB Optimization: From 1.5k to 26 Queries – in this short video, author Povilas Korop demonstrated how to practically optimize a series of DB queries in a Laravel package called Laravel Translations.

2. Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued – we programmers sometimes want to avoid negotiations and thus can be stuck with a poor salary for years. In this ~7000-word essay, author Patrick McKenzie goes into explaining the rationale of negotiation and how to approach it. I have personally had success applying some of the techniques so I vow for it highly.

3. Things You Should Never Do, Part I – in this internet classic, industry legend Joel Spolsky points out why a full rewrite in the software industry is almost always a bad idea. Do you know why you’d always want to rewrite a codebase if given the choice? Read on to know more.

If you have come across a great write-up and want me to share it with others, feel free to reply to this and/or write in a comment.

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📦 Great PHP Packages

A couple of notable packages I’ve come across that I’ve bookmarked myself and would recommend to others.

1. Log Viewer — this package is a perfect companion for your Laravel application as it will allow you to quickly and clearly see individual log entries, search, filter, and make sense of your Laravel logs fast. No more reading the raw Laravel log files trying to find what you're looking for.

2. Aire — this package is a modern Laravel form builder with a focus on the same expressive and beautiful code you expect from the Laravel ecosystem. It allows you to build forms using expressive helper methods or through Blade components.

3. Safe PHP — this is quite an unusual package. It consists of a set of core PHP functions rewritten to throw exceptions instead of returning false when an error is encountered. It has built-in support of PHPStan and Rector to help with finding the functions and automatically refactoring them.

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🐦 Tweetworthy

One tweet to share with you:

Dave Anderson @scarletinked

Moving from software engineer to senior software engineer is a big step. Most engineers get hung up on assuming that their technical depth is the key to growing their position. But is that really what's holding them back? 🧵

My key takeaways from it:

• It’s easy to find lacking in technical skills and fill them up. It’s a lot harder to find the behavioral ones, work to get them improved, and see the results they bring.

• A senior engineer will have a lot more empathy toward customer problems than a junior one. Juniors are looking to solve the core technical issue while seniors want to understand why the problem is occurring in the first place and then provide solutions.

• A winning combination for getting consistent promotion depends on if someone can be relied upon, who takes responsibility of their work, communicates with their peers, has practical sense, and understands tradeoffs.

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That’s all for this week. Feel free to hit that reply button if you have a question or if you would like to open a discussion.

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Thank you for subscribing.

– Mohammad Emran  

PS. If you enjoyed my writing above or found the resources I shared helpful, it would be of great help if you let your friends know about this newsletter by sharing it 🤜 🤛