Last month of 2017, this is the 12th meet-up of the Laravel community here in Kuala Lumpur.
Laratalks
Laratalks is a series of monthly meetups for Laravel developers that are organized by Ajay and Aiyas under the name Laravens. Due to their efforts, the meetup attracts many developers who wouldn’t normally know each other and they get to make new connections. The greater part is that it gives a chance to the developers to share their ideas and experience related to Laravel, PHP and web development with the community.
In this 12th meet-up, Laravens invited 3 speakers and encouraged attendees to submit the topic they wish to talk, then attendees voted for the topic they wish to listen.
All of the talks were amazing. I categorize them into 3 categories:
- Web development
- Project Management
- DevOps
Web development
What do you know about Docker?
Chee Leong, a developer in Tuxuri, who gave a peek into Docker.
Docker is not something like Homestead nor a virtual machine. However, both Docker and Homestead share the same goal which is you build once and it runs everywhere. Comparing with Homestead, Docker runs lighter and faster.
By using Docker, Chee Leong demonstrated how to coexist both PHP 5 and PHP 7 on his machine. This was very useful when you had a legacy application which was running on PHP 5 and a modern application which was running on PHP 7.
You can find his slideshow here.
What do you know about a distributed database?
Michael Leow said you could have your own version of Amazon RDS without paying a buck with Bedrock DB.
Bedrock is a simple, modular, WAN-replicated data foundation for global-scale applications. — Bedrock
Bedrock is a scalable database built on top of SQLite, which supports MySQL clients. Means you can learn it easily even switching from MySQL database.
What do you know about LottieFiles?
This is the second time Nattu shared his remarkable work.
Lottie is a mobile library for Android and iOS that parses Adobe After Effects animations exported as json with Bodymovin and renders them natively on mobile and on the web! — Lottie
Although Lottie is handy it still missing a big part in between design and development. Designers cannot test their animations on mobile devices until the developers put the animations into code.
Nattu and his friend trying to solve this problem by introducing LottieFiles, which is a platform for a designer to preview their animations on the web and mobile devices. A simple drag and drop you JSON (animation) file into the browser, then you can share the preview with anyone.
LottieFiles has a huge community. The total downloads exceed hundred of thousands and 30k of files are sharing privately.
Did I tell you the website is built with Laravel and Bulma CSS? The performance is spectacular.
What do you know about big data?
Speaker shared his big data project. It is analysing big data with Hadoop distributed file system.
Speaker explained data mining is not a usual search. Data mining is searching for user behaviour and turning it to be knowledge. If use eCommerce as an example, you can learn what your customer like, and how they shop online.
If you manage project
What do you know about project management?
Shane from GetDoc used an interactive way to explain what was happening in managing a project.
He brought out a toothbrush, a toothpaste, a cup of water and a box of floss.
“Dentist always tells us to brush our teeth for 3 minutes”, he said. Then, he asked, “Do you spend 3 minutes exactly to brush your teeth?”
You started the timer. What’s your first step? You applied the toothpaste. However, you found out that you were running out of toothpaste. You went to get a new one, unboxed it, then applied it. While you were getting the new toothpaste, the timer was still running.
Do you find the similar situation while working on your project? Do you ever experience that a 30 minutes work turns to 3 hours or a usual deployment turns to sleepless night?
In order to prevent those frustrations, Shane suggested focusing on the objective and delivery and communicating the expectations.
You can find his slideshow here.
If you are doing DevOps
What do you know about ELK Stack?
David Chin, DevOps in Photobook Worldwide, shared how he used ELK Stack to monitor the system health daily.
ELK Stack (now the Elastic Stack) is the combined usage of Elasticsearch, Logstach and Kibana to manage application logs and analyse logs in real time.
Elasticsearch stores and searches the log data. Logstach populates the log data into a structured table. Kibana visualises the log data to help you understand the log data easily.
You can find his slideshow here.
Looking forward to 2018
In the year 2018, Laratalks is looking forward to hosting more fun activities such as:
- Themed talks — community suggests specific topic for each meet-up
- Larathon — a hackathon for Laravel developers
- Job opportunity — meet-up is the place of recruiting and job hunting for Laravel developers
- Website — an information hub for everyone to learn about the future event and get access to the speakers’ presentation slides.
What’s next?
Join us on Laratalks when you dropping by Kuala Lumpur. Check out Laratalks latest event information from https://www.facebook.com/laravensMY/.
