In so many countries, when you think of December, you think of Christmas. And, for as long as I can remember, Christmas has always been about giving, not receiving.

When you think about giving, is your first thought of gifts and presents? For many, that would be true. But what about, instead of giving gifts, you give to those helping others in need instead?

Sure, it's nice to receive presents. But, as studies regularly show, if your focus is only on things, on the material, you'll likely end up depressed and anxious, not blissfully happy as the ads suggest.

So in this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to build an application to help anyone quickly donate to any number of charities and nonprofits.

For the sake of simplicity, I've compiled a small list of six charities that I feel are doing great work, and which …

Learning a new language can be hard!

You get passionate about learning a new language for work reasons or because you plan to go on a vacation and want to immerse yourself into the culture and interact with the locals. You sign up for a course, hire an online tutor, or start watching youtube videos. You are psyched and keep this up for a minute, but it quickly starts feeling boring and like a chore.

Sound familiar? Yes, I know; we have all been there. Don't worry. The Maasai language app is up to the rescue!

The app enables you to learn the Maasai language in an easy and fun way. No hassles! Just open WhatsApp and start learning.

Why the Maasai language? The Maasai culture has a wealth of life lessons, moral principles, and practices that everyone should yearn to learn. Plus, if you ever want to see the …

What is Pub/Sub?

Pub/Sub is a message-driven software design pattern that facilitates communication between complex system components through an efficient communication mechanism that utilises message passing. In a typical pub/sub system, there is the producer (publisher) who creates a message to be sent out to Subscribers.

The Producers do not explicitly fashion the messages for specific consumers, but instead, messages in the system are grouped into categories and the consumers indicate interest in a specific group of messages without caring about the creators of the messages as seen in the image below.

In a typical distributed real-time system setting where each component of the system performs a specific task without knowing about other parts of the system, pub/sub comes in handy because it decreases communication complexity for the parties involved. A component generates a message at the end of its task and passes it to the appropriate channel. The next …

Recently, my colleague Niels wrote an excellent post showing how to build URL shortener using .NET, and Redis. On reading it, I was so inspired that I decided to build my own URL shortener with PHP and PostgreSQL instead of .NET and Redis, as I know those technologies far better.

So what’s so fascinating about building a URL shortener? Especially when there are quite a number of other ones, such as Bit.ly, Short.io, or Twilio Messaging Services Link Shortening service. To be honest, the concept just grabbed my attention and inspired me.

It doesn’t have all of the features you’d likely expect in a professional service, such as URL customisation, analytics and click tracking, branded links, or the ability to add CTAs (Calls To Action). However, it does contain the essentials.

Tutorial Prerequisites

To follow along with this tutorial you will need the following:

• Docker Engine …

Globalization has changed more things than one can imagine – and software development is not immune. Combined with the recent trend for separating client side and server side operations, poly-repositories have become a de facto standard for application structure.

However, for all its benefits it may not be sustainable for small teams or businesses eager to break out of the conceptualization phase and deliver an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). In such scenarios, the visibility and singular source of truth offered by a mono-repository can translate to faster and smoother deployment of new features.

This article will show you how to combine the new kid on the block, Svelte with the tried-and-trusted Symfony to develop an application, all the while using Webpack Encore to bundle the Svelte app. At the end of this article, you will have built an application to interact with your Twilio message history.

Prerequisites

To follow this …

In the first part in this series, you learned how to build a weather station with PHP, Python, a Raspberry Pi, and a DHT11 sensor.

In case you haven't read the tutorial, to summarise, the weather station is composed of two parts:

1. A Python script that reads humidity and temperature data from the DHT11 sensor and stores it in a SQLite database.
2. A PHP application that renders the stored data as HTML.

While that's already pretty decent functionality, how often do you need to look at all of the data? I'm guessing that you're most likely interested in the weather data for just the current, or previous week. Given that, wouldn't it be more convenient to have a daily or weekly summary sent directly to you?

Here, in the second part in the series, you're going to add the ability to send a daily summary notification via both …

Laravel's Artisan Console provides a wealth of helpful commands to assist with all manner of tasks when building and managing Laravel applications. It can clear the application and configuration cache, create all manner of classes, generate the application's key, manage database migrations, and so much more.

In this tutorial, you're going to learn how to create a custom Artisan command to list the voice calls you've made on your Twilio account and print the call information in tabular form.

Prerequisites

To follow along with this tutorial, you will need the following:

• PHP 7.4 or higher.
• A free or paid Twilio account. If you are new to Twilio click here to create a free account.
• Composer installed globally.

Create a new Laravel project

The first thing to do, if you don't already have an existing Laravel application, is to generate a new one using Composer. To do so, run the …

I've long been a fan of newsreader applications. Mostly for the convenience of being able to keep up with the stories, writers, and publications that interest me. That said, I'm also aware of the negative impact of such apps on my daily productivity.

The frequent interruption of my concentration by clickbait headlines is proving to be quite frustrating — especially as I fall for it every time. Yet, I'm somewhat hesitant to unsubscribe for the sake of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out).

For this millennial, the struggle is real. So, if you're like me and you share the dilemma of staying socially current while avoiding the trap of sensational headlines, you will find this tutorial incredibly helpful.

What will you build?

You will learn how to create a personalised news feed application that will text the day's headlines at the end of each day. The project will be powered …

There are so many things that you can do in PHP, including creating websites, building command-line tools, generating images, encrypting and decrypting data, and scraping websites.

But did you know that PHP can also make phone calls? Okay, not on its own it can't, but with the help of Twilio Programmable Voice, it can! In this tutorial, you're going to learn how.

Prerequisites

To follow along with this tutorial you will need the following:

• PHP 8.1.
• Composer globally installed.
• A Twilio account. If you are new to Twilio click here to create a free account.
• A Twilio phone number.
• A phone that can make and receive phone calls.

Set up your environment

The first thing you need to do is to create a project directory and change into it. To do that, run the following commands.

Next, create a new file named .env …

In recent years, user authentication in web applications has become a serious concern. For example, one-time passwords (OTP) are utilized to verify a user's identity; the most frequent method for sending OTPs is via SMS to the user's registered cellphone number.

In this tutorial you will learn how to send one-time passwords to users over voice calls in PHP using Twilio's Verify Api. In doing so, you will create an OTP system that can be used as an additional security layer for specific operations in your application.

Prerequisites

To follow this tutorial, you need the following:

• PHP 7.4 or higher with the PDO extension and PDO MySQL extension installed and enabled.
• Composer globally installed.
• MySQL and the MySQL command-line client (or an alternative database tool, such as DataGrip).
• A Twilio account. If you are new to Twilio, click here to create a free account.

Application Process

Here's …