It's April, and I've got a bunch of updates to share with you!

JetBrains

I've been working in the PhpStorm team for 3 weeks now. It has been an amazing experience and I can't wait for what's to come! I made a vlog about my first week if you're curious how that went.

I'm also happy to say that a couple of things I helped work on these past three weeks are already online: PhpStorm 2022.1 was released, and I made the blog post, as well as the announcement video. I had lots of fun working on these projects. Like I said: looking forward to what's to come!

Aggregate

I made something! Well, actually, I made something again. I've revisited an old project of mine called Aggregate. It used to be an open source Laravel application, and it still is; but the concept has changed a little bit.

Aggregate is my personal RSS feed, with a twist: it's a community driven RSS feed. That means that you can suggest your own blog, or someone else's; and it will get added to Aggregate. Furthermore, the public feed is accessible to everyone.

The main difference with the previous version is that every post is manually curated and approved by me. That means that, even when a blog is added, not all posts might end up in the public feed. The goal is to have a feed with extremely high quality content for everyone to read, and for people (myself included) to discover new and excited content, suggested by others.

I'm looking forward to seeing this project grow again, would love to hear your feedback!

Oh, by the way: I filmed the whole process of building Aggregate, and made it into a commentated timelapse. If you want to see a Laravel project being built from scratch to production, you check check it out here.

Blogs

I wrote another blog post! It's a lengthy one about designing code and applying patterns. I hope you like it, maybe you have an opinion you can share as well? Here it is: Dynamic strategies.

I also plan on writing my annual "What's new in PHP X" post soon, I'll keep you posted!

Vlogs

Finally, you're probably not surprised at this point, I made some vlogs on YouTube as well.

There actually are quite a lot of new vlogs since my last newsletter. I'm just going to list them here, you can check them out if you want to:

• A comparison between TypeScript and PHP's type system
• I quit.
• I've been programming for 15 (!) years
• My first week at JetBrains
• Should you go to college to become a good programmer?
• Building a Laravel project from scratch to production in 5 hours

Have fun watching! As always, hit the reply button if you have any feedback :)

That's all for this April update, looking forward to hearing from you!

Brent