On the Laravel News site there's a post announcing a course from the Laracasts.com site (a video tutorial site targeted towards Laravel) covering the use of Laravel Forge, the community's server management and deployment platform.

Learn Laravel Forge is new video course on Laracasts teaching you all things Forge, by guest instructor Marcel Pociot! The course consists of over twenty free videos walking you through configuring servers with Laravel Forge.

Topics covered in the 20+ videos include:

• creating a first Forge project
• provisioning a load balancer
• customizing PHP settings
• configuring firewalls
• using Forge recepies
• setting up SSL
• using the Forge API

Each of the videos runs anywhere from 3 minutes to about 9 minutes so they're definitely "bite sized" and easy to consume when you have a few extra minutes.

Gary Hockin had been working on a book for anyone out there looking to share their experience or ideas at a tech conference but didn't end up finishing it: "Conference Speaking for Everyone". He did want to share some of the content from the book to at least help would-be speakers deal with one of the main parts of conference speaking: Submitting to a Call for Papers.

What even is this? This is a full chapter from my started-but-never-finished book called Conference Speaking for Everyone. I’m posting this finished single chapter that’s been sitting on my laptop for nearly a year to a) Get some feedback and hopefully some impetus to finish the book, and b) Put what I hope is some useful information into the hands of the people who need it.

In the example chapter he covers topics like:

• how speakers are accepted to speak at a conference
• what kind of topics you could potentially speak about
• tips for writing session abstracts/summaries

He finishes up the chapter with a mention of expenses around the speaking (if selected). The policies from conference to conference vary, so he recommends being sure you completely understand them before agreeing to speak.

In a new post to his site Junior Grossi shares some of his thoughts about Open Source and how it's less about "free software" and more about sharing and giving back.

Maintaining an open source project – even a small one – is not an easy task. The open source ecosystem is about sharing and contributing, about giving and receiving. You scratch my back and I will scratch yours.

He suggests that working in Open Source is less about the actual software that's being written as it is a lifestyle. For him, the goal is to make someone else's life better by working on something you're sharing (instead of working on something commercial). He includes a quote from Fabien Potencier (of Symfony) about Open Source developers being exploited for their free software and how, despite the gift of time and work spent on the code, some people don't appreciate the work and just complain.

Instead of complaining about features or bugfixes, do it yourself, and show your gratitude for people that spent their free time working on something to help your life. They could be with their family but no, they were doing open-source. And you should thank them for that.

He finishes with a few thoughts about giving back to the projects you use and enjoy. It doesn't always have to be about code too - you can submit bugs, contribute to documentation or even just write up a tutorial to share your own knowledge of using the package.

On the php[architect] site they've shared an article originally from the May 2016 issue of the magazine by Joe Ferguson: Artisanal: Project Creation (also released as a free PDF).

Every developer has a set way of starting a new project. Most frameworks have a linear path to getting started, and Laravel is no exception. With a few commands, you can quickly get started configuring routes, writing controllers, and saving data in a database.

In the article Joe walks you through the tools and commands that come with the Laravel framework to make getting up and running quickly easier. He covers tools available for both the backend and frontend functionality as well as testing (mentioning Dusk), routing, middleware groups and database functionality.

As is mentioned in this new post from the Laravel News site, all of the videos from this year's Laracon US conference are now available online for free.

StreamACon has just published all of the videos from Laracon US and they are available for everyone to watch for free.

Included with all the talks is also videos from the sponsor segments so you can relive the entire conference right from your couch. Except of course mingling with everyone.

These videos include sessions like:

• Adam Wathan - Test Driven Laravel
• Chris Fidao - Servers For Hackers
• Ben Ramsey - Long Live HTTP/2
• Fabien Potencier - PHP Performance Tuning With Blackfire

...and many more. Check out the full page for the entire list of videos and sessions from this year's event.

Matt Stauffer has a post to his site sharing a few things he didn't know Laravel could do as discovered during his work on his book Laravel Up & Running.

It turns out that there's a long road between "I have a book contract" and "I know everything there is to know in order to write this book."

It doesn't matter how much of an expert you feel like. It doesn't matter how much time you've spent learning and teaching. Across the board, every tech author I've talked to has described just how much they learned—had to learn—when they wrote a book.

I learned a lot in writing Laravel: Up and Running. And I want to share it with you.

He includes a list of four of the interesting things he learned during his writing:

• The Cookie Facade is one special cookie
• Attaching files to emails is easier than you think
• You can chain more Scheduler methods than the docs show
• You can assert that a view gets passed certain data

Each item also comes with a brief code example showing it in action. If you'd like more information about the book and a free sample, be sure to sign up using the form in the post or you can just pre-order the book and get the whole thing as soon as it's released.

The TutsPlus.com site has posted a tutorial for the WordPress users out there about using Let's Encrypt and SSL certificates to easily secure your installation.

For years, purchasing, renewing, installing and managing SSL certificates overwhelmed me with expense and complexity. Now, Let's Encrypt makes it fairly simple and free.

Let’s Encrypt is an emerging, free, automated, and open certificate authority brought to you by a California public benefit corporation called the Internet Security Research Group—it also has nonprofit status. [...] In this tutorial, I'll walk you through installing Let's Encrypt on a few of my websites, including my WordPress consulting website, http://lookahead.io, soon to be https://.

You'll need a be a bit comfortable working at the command line to use the Let's Encrypt client, but they walk you through each step of the process explaining everything along the way. They start with a basic list of features the Let's Encrypt service provides and the requirements you'll need to get started. Screenshots of the setup wizard are included and the "one small difference" you'll need to make when using it with WordPress. They link to the SSL Labs site to help you verify the certificate is working as expected and finish with setting up the auto-renewal of the certificate via a simple cron job.

As Davey Shafik mentions in this post to his site, O'Reilly has just released a "mini-eBook" he's written up to help you migrate your current codebase up to PHP 7 compatibility.

Yesterday, O’Reilly published my report on Upgrading to PHP 7. This 80-page mini-eBook is available free (and DRM free) in ePub, Mobi, and PDF formats.

Grab it today or read more details here.

The book guides you through the updates and features that come along with PHP 7 including: "deprecated features, Unicode enhancements, changes in Object-Oriented programming, and other enhancements." You'll get more details on what to change to bring your code up to the level of PHP 7 and remove deprecated features and what to replace them with. The book is free so there's no reason not to pick up a copy and find out what the PHP 7 revolution is all about.

php[architect] has a new post about the release of their latest issue (June 2015) - "APIs" - and how it's been made free for download.

That's right-thanks to Nexmo, June's issue on APIs is free of charge for the month! [...] The promise of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) is really bearing fruit in today's Web. Of course, we are not talking about internal APIs but of HTTP-based ones that allow us to interact with external systems-whether its saving or searching images in Flickr, getting weather conditions, or transcoding video. For many tasks, if you sign up to use the right APIs, you can build a fully functional application by writing PHP scripts which coordinate the workflow and communications between APIs.

This issue includes articles like:

• "SPOIL Your Users with Great Helper Libraries" (Keith Casey)
• "High-Performance PHP APIs" (Simone Di Maulo)
• "Putting the Pieces Together: Building APIs with Aura (and Other) Libraries" (Ian Littman)
• "The API Toolbox" (Tim Lytle)

If you've ever been interested to see what php[architect] is all about or want to find out more about making and working with great APIs, be sure to grab your free copy today!

On the Bigcommerce Engineering blog there's a new post sharing a few tips for memory optimization in your PHP applications. This includes tips you can implement at a code level without too many changes to the server or the need for external services.

Lately, I’ve been working on optimizing the memory of some of our backend PHP applications and wanted to share some of the tricks that I have come across, especially dealing with large set of data using PHP.

Each of their tips includes code to illustrate the technique:

• Always cap your internal in-memory caching
• Use layered caching
• (Freeing) DB Resources
• Free large blocks of memory

Some of the examples include output from the scripts showing the reduction (or non-growth) of the peak memory usage of the script.