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What I Learned This Month (March, 2016)

In working progress!

I learn a lot about a lot of different topics each day and I never write it down or help keep track of things I find important. So I’m going to try writing a “What I Learned This Month” each month. So welcome to the first one!

Programming

  1. Larval 5 – I’m starting to get into Laravel more then the simple set up. I was very much a Codeigniter fan boy but Laravel is really starting to gain traction. There’s more Laravel jobs out there Codeigniter on Linkedin in my area. So better start brushing up on it and get on the Laravel Hype Train. Now Hype can some times be bad but going through the Laravel from Scratch series is awesome. I’m starting to fall in love again with Web.
  2. Gulp JS – In the Laravel from Scratch it briefly touched on Gulp JS as Laravel extends it with Elixir. Gulp is an awesome tool to automating all those CSS and JS conversions you’d want on production, for example minifying, bundling or other repetitive tasks required. It even allows you to refresh your web-browser every time you save your source code. It’s a top 10 for sure for web-developers. Here’s a decent article on Gulp to give you a fuller understanding.
  3. NPM is the Composer of JS. I’ve used Composer before for PHP package management, it makes managing PHP dependencies a breeze so it’s a no brainer to not have one for JS.
  4. Elixir – So Gulp is super easy to use with the terminal (once you get it install correctly). Simply run gulp, it runs your gulpfile.js and it outputs what it completed. Laravel extends it by adding convince methods to a lot of gulp abilities. I wanted minified compiled sass and I don’t want to mess with browser caching while developing; so here’s what it looks like:
    elixir(function(mix) {
     mix.sass('app.scss')
     .version('css/app.css');
    });
  5. Gulp Watch – just when you thought life couldn’t get any easier there’s Gulp Watch available. Instead of constantly running the gulp command every single time you want to update your CSS/JS, gulp has a built in
    gulp watch

    command. This allows gulp to watch these files you run automated scripts on and when you make changes it automatically updates. That way you can simply switch to the browser after each save and blam! updated CSS! You’ll even get a nice notification saying so on OS X.