Laracon DB
Laracon DB
Laracon AU 2023 in Sydney, AU

What's new in Pest

Nuno Maduro presents Pest PHP, a modern testing framework for PHP. He demonstrates its elegant syntax, improved test output, and expectation API compared to PHPUnit. He then introduces a new stress testing plugin called Stressless that helps developers test application performance under load. The talk includes live demos of both Pest's core features and the new stress testing capabilities.

Documenting Laravel APIs

James Brooks presents a talk on documenting Laravel APIs using Scribe, demonstrating how to automatically generate comprehensive API documentation directly from code annotations and comments. He shows how to group endpoints, add request/response examples, handle authentication documentation, and discusses hosting options including using bump.sh for enhanced documentation features.

Introducing Laravel Pulse

Jess Archer presents Laravel Pulse, a new free and open-source performance monitoring and insights tool designed specifically for Laravel applications. The talk demonstrates Pulse's features including monitoring system stats, queues, cache usage, slow queries, and exceptions. She shows how to customize the dashboard, configure sampling rates, and create custom cards while emphasizing Pulse's low overhead and production-readiness.

Building a maintainable Livewire application

Josh Hanley, a core maintainer of Laravel Livewire, presents best practices for building maintainable Livewire applications. He covers various architectural approaches including page components, computed properties, form objects, and action classes. The talk focuses on code organization, naming conventions, and strategies to keep Livewire components clean and testable.

Designing with friction, it's irritatingly good

A talk about the positive uses of friction in design and user experiences. The speaker challenges the common assumption that all friction is bad, arguing that intentional friction can lead to better outcomes. Using examples from Pet Rescue's platform, where breed search is intentionally omitted, the talk demonstrates how friction can promote ethical design choices and create positive social change.

Accessibility on the backend

This talk focuses on accessibility in backend development, challenging the common perception that accessibility is only about frontend concerns. The speaker discusses how accessibility affects developers themselves, including considerations for different coding styles, development processes, and tool selections. He emphasizes that accessibility isn't just about disabilities but includes making code and processes accessible to developers with different experience levels, language backgrounds, and working styles.

7 habits of a high performing team

Greg, the director of Technology at IC plant, discusses seven key habits that create high-performing software development teams. He explains how teams can maximize value delivery while minimizing toil through practices like working in small steps, maintaining zero bugs, continuous deployment, simple solutions, pair programming, and fostering a learning culture. The talk includes data from Google's DORA report showing how high-performing teams significantly outperform others in deployment frequency, lead time, and incident recovery.

Put Verbs in your database

Daniel Kurn presents 'Verbs', a Laravel package for event sourcing that aims to make it more ergonomic and developer-friendly. Through live coding, he demonstrates how to refactor a job application system from using traditional status columns to an event-sourced approach, showing how this better captures business requirements and handles state transitions while making it easier to track history and implement features like notifications.

Writing native apps with... PHP?

Developerhood

Cultivating success with Laravel

Richard Mar, Head of Engineering at Figured, shares how Laravel helped transform their farm financial management software from a problematic Ruby on Rails application to a successful, scalable SaaS product. He discusses how they rewrote their entire application in Laravel within 6 weeks, achieving 100% feature parity, and how Laravel has enabled them to grow to serve over 35,000 customers across multiple countries while processing billions of financial transactions.

Statamic for Laravel devs

Marty gives an in-depth presentation about Statamic, a flat-file CMS built on Laravel. He demonstrates how to integrate Statamic into existing Laravel applications, create blog posts, manage content through blueprints, and utilize features like Glide for image manipulation. The talk showcases Statamic's flexibility in content management while maintaining the familiar Laravel ecosystem.

Building an accessibility testing habit

A comprehensive talk about web accessibility testing and how to build better habits around it. The speaker discusses various tools and techniques for testing accessibility, including screen readers, keyboard navigation, and color contrast tools. The talk emphasizes making accessibility testing more approachable by breaking it down into manageable checklists and establishing regular testing habits.

Data encryption made easy

Sam, CTO of CustomD, presents a talk on encryption and data privacy in Laravel applications. He introduces their open-source library 'eloquent-model-encrypt' which implements hybrid encryption (combining symmetric and asymmetric encryption) to securely protect user data while maintaining granular access control. The library helps developers implement proper encryption practices without dealing with the complex cryptographic details directly.

Th1nk Lik3 a H4cker

An interactive security demonstration where the speaker guides the audience through various security vulnerabilities in Laravel applications. The talk showcases common security issues like password brute forcing, insecure direct object references, cross-site scripting through markdown, and environment file exposure. The audience participates by attempting to hack a live demo application using their phones while learning about security best practices and common pitfalls.

Tapping into the power of junior developers

Rissa Jackson presents a compelling case for hiring and supporting junior developers, drawing from her personal experience transitioning into tech. She discusses how junior developers bring diversity, fresh perspectives, and passion to companies while identifying important gaps in processes and documentation. The talk emphasizes the importance of mentorship, psychological safety, and creating supportive environments for junior developers to succeed.