Although I think we, like all artisans, would prefer to attend a real physical Laracon again, we created a nice alternative setting for ourselves: we agreed to follow Laracon on location in Leuven and a few called in from Ghent. It was a pleasant evening with interesting presentations. A short anthology of those who stuck with us.
Those like me who thought this was going to be a talk about performance and high load were in for a treat. But it turned out to be anything but a disappointment. Ashley talks very inspiringly and most importantly, soothingly.
He is the Director of Engineering at Car & Classic and within his role there has created a vision around the framework in which work is done ( especially in terms of development, engineering). A vision that is supported by Pickachu.
One of his basic principles is simplicity. Inspired by 'Choose boring technology', he strives to keep the technical stack simple, perhaps even for many developers, boring. Of course, this is not to say that no experimentation or innovation is allowed.
To make the vision of the organization complete, he proposes his POPOFF model. POPOFF stands for People, Organization, Process, Ol` autonomy, Flourish & Flourish more.
In a nutshell, surround yourself with the best people, use the right tools that support your team in a process that is as minimal as possible. When all that is there in a team, let them do it, that way you can flourish, grow lushly and you can help others to do that too :)
Definitely worth checking out for yourself.
Codana is also all about and around great people.
Then it was Marcel Pociot's turn. He is the CTO of Beyond Code, a software company in Germany that deals with creating video tools and video courses. Marcel was going to tell us more about the mysterious Web3, but at the start of his talk he first gave a clear disclaimer.
"This talk is not about cryptocurrency or NFTs, it is about the technology behind these topics."
What is Web 3.0?
Many people have heard of it, but don't know exactly what it is. Some people use it as a synonym for NFTs, to others it means something else. According to the Wikipedia page, there is no general definition of Web 3.0, so they tried to create 1 themselves.
Web 3.0 is an idea for a new iteration of the World Wide Web based on blockchain technology, which includes concepts such as decentralization and token-based economy.
What is Blockchain?
A blockchain, as the name suggests, is a chain of blocks. Each block consists of 3 pieces of information: the data, a hash and a previous hash.
The data can be anything, for example with bitcoin it consists of the sender's information, receiver's information and the amount of bitcoin being sent.
When this data is stored in the block a hash is automatically created. When the data changes the hash also changes.
The previous hash is stored in the previous block, this is needed to make the blocks a blockchain.
So for example, as with Bitcoin, this technology can be used to create a secure transaction log. Combine this with decentralization, where power is distributed and therefore there is no longer a central authority and you have the technology of the future!
Blockchain and PHP/Laravel
During the rest of his talk, Marcel talks about how you can use this technology in combination with PHP and Laravel. For example, there is a tool called Ganache that allows you to work locally with an Ethereum blockchain. He also uses a package by Nuno Maduro called Web3 PHP, which allows you to develop in a more productive and enjoyable way with Web3.
What's in it for us/you?
Web3 offers many possibilities, for example in the future we could use it to build a secure transaction system for a project, or we could use it to create a convenient login system. Yes you heard right, Web3 is more than just cryptocurrencies and NFTs 😆. Using this technology, we could realize passwordless logins in the future. This would allow you to just press a button and log in using your public and private keys with the help of a browser plugin like MetaMask. No more thousand and one passwords and no more password managers!
Aaron Francis's talk, for which the alternative title is: "Add a microservice to your monolith", is a demo of Laravel Sidecar, a tool to easily add (from your monorepo) lambda to your Laravel application.
Lambda is a tool from Amazon's AWS to perform serverless compute processes, this can run several languages, performing on-demand functions for you. Examples where you can use this are:
Serverless functions are also available from other hosting providers, such as Google, Azure, Vercel. These are not yet available within this toolset, but will be in the near future, Aaron is already working on the Vercel implementation.
So what does Sidecar do already? It is a package to create a lambda function from your existing repository, deploy to AWS and call it from within PHP.
Strong demo, it's itching to get this into action myself!
