As Freek Van der Herten mentions in his latest post, the videos for the sessions at this year's Laracon AU conference (their first year) have been posted to YouTube.

This year Laracon AU was held for the very first time. According to what I read on Twitter Michael Dyrynda did an awesome job organising it.

The organisation was so kind to record all talks. They are now available on YouTube. You'll find all talks in this playlist.

Sessions from their inaugural event included:

• A real-life journey into the opinionated world of 'utility-first' CSS
• Turning stories into software
• Understanding git - even the scary parts
• Level up with a Microservices architecture

...and many more. Check out the full playlist for all of the great sessions including a keynote from Taylor Otwell introducing the Laravel Telescope introspection tool.

As Freek Van der Herten has mentioned in a new post to his site, the videos from this year's Laracon US conference (2018) have been released.

Laracon US was held in July 2018 at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

[...] Though there isn't a playlist to hold them yet, you can view recordings of all other talks on the StreamACon channel on YouTube. Be sure to check out the amazing talks by Jason McCreary, TJ Miller, Samantha Geitz and Caleb Porzio.

You can also check out the full list of talks and summaries on the Laracon US website to help narrow down the ones you might want to watch.

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.

On the Laravel News site, they have a post sharing a video from a presentation by Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of PHP) looking forward at PHP in 2018.

PHP in 2018 is a talk by PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf, which focuses on new features in PHP 7.2 and 7.3. We have some exciting low-level performance wins coming to PHP 7.3, which should be out late 2018. It’s highly encouraging that PHP’s focus is mainly on performance in the PHP 7.x releases.

For many in the PHP community, 2016 and 2017 was all about getting onto PHP 7. The drastic performance improvements and overall efficiency have resulted in PHP 7 adoption rates well beyond past PHP versions. If you are not on PHP 7 yet, you will learn why you should be, but the talk will focus more on new features in PHP 7.2 and 7.3 along with optimization and static analysis.

In the post, they give a brief summary of the talk and one of their favorite parts ("crappy code runs really really well"). The video of the talk is embedded in the page but you can also watch it on YouTube directly. The slides are here.

The PHP Roundtable podcast, hosted by PHP community member Sammy Powers, has posted their latest episode: Episode #71 - Extra, extra: PHP 7.2 released!.

The next major version of PHP is here! PHP 7.2 comes with a nice set of upgrades, performance enhancements, and a brand new crypto library right out of the box. We discuss some of the features and breaking changes that we should be aware of before upgrading to PHP 7.2.

In this episode, Sammy is joined by Scott Arciszewski and Craig Duncan to discuss the updates in this latest version and how you can make the upgrade without too many things breaking. You can catch this episode either by using the in-page audio and video player, by downloading the audio directly or by watching the recording over on YouTube directly. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter for updates on when future shows are recorded and released.

On the Laravel News site they've posted information about a series of videos on the Laracasts site covering what's new in Laravel 5.6.

Laravel 5.6 has been for a few weeks now and it includes a few nice new features like Broadcast Channel Classes, Collision Reporting, Improved Logging, and more.

In order to get you up to speed on all these new features, Laracasts has started a new free series, “What’s new in Laravel 5.6” that will go through each major feature of this release.

The series includes videos covering how they upgraded the Laracasts' codebase to 5.6, collision reporting, logging improvements and dynamic rate limiting. More videos will be added to the series as it goes along. You can check out the current listing of videos on the Laracasts site.

The Twilio blog has a new post from PHP developer advocate Margaret Staples showing you how to integrate Twilio and Laravel to create a group video chat system. This makes use of the Twilio Video API to build the connections between users via a Laravel application.

While words alone are powerful, the inflections of people’s voices, the gestures and expressions we unconsciously flow through during conversation all contain a wealth of information often lost to us in our technology driven communications.

Using Twilio’s Video API you can now add the richness of face to face interactions to any web project.

Here we’ll look at how to create a Laravel web application that gives users the ability to join existing video groups or create their own. You can preview what we’re building here.

The tutorial starts with a few assumptions (things you'll need to have already set up) and a link to a GitHub repository that provides some of the boilerplate code. After a few setup commands the application should be ready to add the Twilio API/account configuration values and the addition of three routes for room joins, creates and listing. Next she creates the controller to handle the incoming requests and the views for the page output including the video and audio service provided by a Twilio script. Finally they show how to demo the result and include a few troubleshooting steps you can follow if something seems to be going wrong.

On the Laravel News site they've announced the release of the videos from Laracon EU 2017 on YouTube - perfect for those that couldn't make the event this year.

Today, Laracon EU uploaded all of the speaker videos to YouTube and here is the link to the full playlist.

The playlist features 20 videos and is sure to keep you busy for a few days. Also, be sure and join the wait list for the 2018 event.

Sessions presented at this year's event included:

• Christopher Pitt - Monads in PHP
• Rizqi Djamaluddin - Bad UX is Not an Option
• Hannes Van De Vreken - Code review beyond code style
• Taylor Otwell - State of Laravel

You can check out the full playlist for these and more great sessions.

On the TutsPlus.com site there's a new tutorial posted showing you how to create custom drivers in a CodeIgniter application. In this case the "drivers" are what lefts the application work with external technology or services.

The best way to understand the concept of drivers is to look at how caching is implemented in the core CodeIgniter framework. The main Cache class acts as a parent class and extends the CI_Driver_Library class. On the other hand, you'll end up finding child classes for APC, Memcached, Redis and the like, implemented as pluggable adapters. The child classes extend the CI_Driver class instead of the main driver class.

[...] Creating a custom driver in the CodeIgniter application is the aim of today's article. In the course of that, we'll go through a real-world example that creates a MediaRenderer driver used to render the media from different services like YouTube, Vimeo and similar. The different services will be implemented in the form of adapter classes.

He starts by listing the files that he'll be creating along the way and where they need to be located in the application structure. He then starts in on the configuration changes required and the contents of the files. He then walks through the code for each of them briefly explaining how they work. He starts with the drivers then moves to the adapters and, finally, how to put them together to make a functional renderer for either Vimeo our Youtube videos.

The PHP Roundtable podcast, hosted by Sammy K Powers, has posted their latest episode with guests Phillip Shipley, Chris Fidao and Chris Tankersley (author of Docker for Developers): Episode #66 - Docker: Drinking the Kool-Aid.

After years of resisting, SammyK finally drank the Docker Kool-Aid for his everyday client work. We talk about his transition from Vagrant to Docker and some bumps he hit along the way.

You can catch this latest episode either using the in-page audio or video players, by watching directly on YouTube or by downloading the audio for listening offline. If you enjoy the show and want to see more like it in the future, be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter for updates when new shows are released.