Happening online

This month we have another GitHub Actions talk from Ryan Chandler who is going to build on the talk that he gave for us back in November and look at some of the things that he's been doing recently such as:

- Writing custom actions with PHP & Docker.
- Automatically screenshotting particular pages in your application when a pull request is made.
- Enforcing particular formats for your pull requests, e.g. ensuring the title has a Jira ticket ID or that it contains a certain word based on feature, hotfix, release.

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This month we have Dan Leech from Inviqa joining us to give a talk on testing code performance with PHPBench.

PHPBench is a tool analogous to PHPUnit but for performance. In this talk, you will learn how to create benchmarks for your code and, with the upcoming 1.0 release, how to protect your code from performance regressions.

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We still have space for a short or lightning talk this month. If you'd like to volunteer and speak, please get in touch.

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Thank you to our sponsors:

- Lexis Nexis
- Twilio

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This month we have talks from Ismael, and Michael Pritchard.

Laravel Rapid: A Minimum Viable Website in under 5 minutes with a single command.

The biggest barrier to building a personal website and starting blogging is the initial friction. It takes a while to learn your way around, configure, set up and style a CMS, Jamstack platform or your own website and database. It's often enough for other priorities to win. I created Laravel Rapid to remove this friction.

Happy New Year, everyone!

This month we have two talks from our organisers, Steve McDougall and Oliver Davies.

Steve will be speaking about building APIs with Laravel.

Oliver will be giving a lightning talk on using rst2pdf to create slide decks (and potentially anything else too).

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Thank you to our sponsors:

- Lexis Nexis
- Twilio

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We *always* need more speakers! Volunteer to speak or request a topic: [masked] or #speaking in Slack

This month we have Ryan Chandler joining us to give a talk on GitHub Actions for PHP Applications, covering the basics of getting a pipeline set up with a MySQL database, static analysis, code formatting & linting, testing, etc. We've had various discussions in Slack about GitHub Actions so I hope that this will be interesting and useful for people.

Ryan is also preparing and recording a course on GitHub Actions, which you can find at https://actions-for-php.com.

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Following last year's successful contribution session for Hacktoberfest, we're going to be running an online version this year.

All are welcome! If you're new to contributing to open source, several of us in the group maintain or have contributed to various projects and can give you some help finding a project or an issue to work on.

This month we have another online meetup, with two new faces for PHP South Wales. We have a lightning talk from Marcos Rogers on Xdebug, and Zvonimir Spajic from the company Made with Love giving us a fantastic talk on getters and setters - and why he doesn't like them.

Get, Set ... STOP!

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This month we have an online workshop thanks to Mathias Verraes, who will be showing us how we can build some pretty cool stuff in PHP.

Build Your Own Parser

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Let’s write some parsers! We could do it by writing a lot of imperative code that manipulates strings using a ton of ifs and switches, but it turns out there’s a better way.

This month we have 2 talks lined up for you!

Our first speaker is a regular attendee at our user group, Jamie Callis (@O_JDesign) giving us a talk on Building a VS Code extension.

Our second speaker is everyones favourite Laravel Package developer, Freek Van der Herten (@freekmurze) giving us a talk on Building a realtime dashboard using Laravel and Livewire.

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Journey of building Laravel’s first entity relationship (ER) diagram visual studio code extension.

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This month we have Mark Taylor (@willCodeForAle on twitter) Lead Architect at DealTrak, giving us a talk about all the different database types available to you as a PHP developer.

We also have Phil Sturgeon (@philsturgeon on twitter) Developer Relations at Stoplight and API guru, giving us a talk about how you can go design first for your APIs using Stoplight Studio and OpenAPI.

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Different Types of Database:

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