Laravel Telescope

Laravel Telescope is an elegant debug assistant for the Laravel framework. Telescope provides insight into the requests coming into your application, exceptions, log entries, database queries, queued jobs, mail, notifications, cache operations, scheduled tasks, variable dumps and more. Telescope makes a wonderful companion to your local Laravel development environment.

Installation & Configuration

You may use Composer to install Telescope into your Laravel project:

composer require laravel/telescope --dev

Note: Telescope requires Laravel 5.7.7+

After installing Telescope, publish its assets using the telescope:install Artisan command. After installing Telescope, you should also run the migrate command

php artisan telescope:install
php artisan migrate

After publishing Telescope's assets, its primary configuration file will be located at config/telescope.php. This configuration file allows you to configure your watcher options and each configuration option includes a description of its purpose, so be sure to thoroughly explore this file.

Updating Telescope

When updating Telescope, you should re-publish Telescope's assets:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=telescope-assets --force

Dashboard Authorization

Telescope exposes a dashboard at /telescope. By default, you will only be able to access this dashboard in the local environment. Within your app/Providers/TelescopeServiceProvider.php file, there is a gate method. This authorization gate controls access to Telescope in non-local environments. You are free to modify this gate as needed to restrict access to your Telescope installation:

 /**
 * Register the Telescope gate.
 *
 * This gate determines who can access Telescope in non-local environments.
 *
 * @return void
 */
protected function gate()
{
    Gate::define('viewTelescope', function ($user) {
        return in_array($user->email, [
            'taylor@laravel.com',
        ]);
    });
}

Magento Introduces the Mobile Optimization Initiative for Merchants

Retailers of all sizes continue to have a common problem: converting sales on mobile devices. While smartphones continue to gain share as a primary channel for consumers to shop online, the ratio of mobile views to conversions lags in comparison to desktop. Case in point -- a quarter of all back to school shopping time was spent on a smartphone (according to Adobe Analytics), yet desktop saw a 3.37% conversion rate with an average basket size of $142. Whereas conversion on smartphones was at 1.24% with an average basket size of $111.

Retailers can’t afford to miss out on more effectively monetizing consumers’ time on mobile devices particularly heading into the competitive holiday season. To help retailers tackle the mCommerce gap, the Magento Community, led by technology partners PayPal and HiConversion, today launched the Mobile Optimization Initiative. To date, the participating system integration partners have conducted over 250 experiments resulting in three million data points from merchants worldwide.

TACKLING MOBILE CHECKOUT OPTIMIZATION
It’s critical that companies deliver memorable mobile experiences across every facet of consumer engagement. Yet it’s the mobile checkout experience that’s become critical for every brand. A consumer won’t hesitate to abandon their purchase if the payment process is confusing or overly time-consuming.

The Mobile Optimization Initiative offers retailers a complimentary mobile checkout funnel assessment, optimized campaign design and implementation, and professional services during the active program. All participating merchants will benefit from:

• Leveraging HiConversion’s analytics to detect ‘friction points’ in each merchant’s checkout funnel and to formulate data driven test hypothesis;
• A series of A/B experiments that are then run as a single optimization campaign
• Experience optimization using adaptive algorithms; and,
• A final report encompassing results and actionable insights.

The initiative works with 15 system integrators providing professional services, including Web 2 Market, Redstage, Razoyo, Something Digital, Imagination Media, Wagento, ICUBE, JH, Gene, IWD Agency and Lima Consulting Group. Over 60 merchants are already on board and the program continues to expand globally.

The support provided to merchants in the Mobile Optimization Initiative will help them capture some of the billions of dollars that are being lost in revenue for online merchants. To date, participating merchants have seen their average revenue per visit increase by 7.5 percent. An added benefit: the initiative has found that a better mobile buying experience translates to a better desktop buying experience.

NO ONE COMPANY CAN SOLVE THE MCOMMERCE GAP ALONE: IT REQUIRES A COMMUNITY

The Magento Community is a vibrant, collaborative group dedicated to improving the online buying experience for everyone. From developers and system integrators, to designers and merchants, the Community has come together to directly address this challenge.  Leveraging the innovative technology of HiConversion, our system integrator partners have helped merchants all over the world implement and run these experiments to help deliver higher conversion rates and better buying experiences. By aggregating and anonymizing the learnings, then sharing them across the Community, everyone benefits.

As we look ahead to the quickly approaching holiday season, there’s no better time for retailers to optimize the mobile checkout experience. Visit here to learn more about or join the Mobile Optimization Community Initiative. 

How to deal with a workaholic boss

 

The never-ending emails and phone calls. The unrelenting deadlines. The pile-on of projects and deadlines.

Having a workaholic as a boss often means working long hours and sacrificing personal time to meet all the demands. Forget about having any work-life balance — for workaholics, work is life.But working under this kind of pressure can quickly lead to burnout.

"The key for employees is to coexist," said Harris Kern, author of "On Being a Workaholic: Using Balance and Discipline to Live a Better and More Efficient Life."

"You can't change your boss. They thrive on it. They live for the adrenaline rush ... but as an employee, you might have a family and other priorities and can't work 24-7."

Avoid notorious workplaces
Some bosses, companies, or even entire industries have reputations for long work weeks and relentless demands. Try to avoid the problem and do your research before accepting a job offer that will suck you into a work black hole.
"Find an organization that is in line with your views on work-life balance," recommended Dana Brownlee, founder of Professionalism Matters, a professional development training company. "You don't want to find yourself swimming upstream from day one. You probably aren't going to go in there and change the entire organizational structure."

Set your own boundaries...
Don't be afraid to share your work philosophy with your boss to help establish boundaries.
If you just started a job or are feeling overworked at your current position, request a meeting with your manager to talk about your schedule.
Avoid being aggressive — that can create more problems for you, advised Bryan Robinson, author of "#Chill: Turn Off Your Job and Turn on Your Life."
He suggested a sandwich approach to raising the issue: Start the conversation with something positive, then bring up the issue of being overworked with specific recent examples, and then end on another positive note.
"Workaholics don't see the water they are swimming in and don't realize it's taking a toll on people and themselves," he said. "They are totally focused on the task and getting it done."
Bosses can forget how much work they've already assigned, so if you're feeling overburdened, ask your manager to review your to-do list and set priorities.
"It is incumbent on you to point out that you were working on six things, and you can increase it to eight, it might impact the timing of when you can provide some of these deliverables or add a lot of extra hours," said Brownlee.

...and stick to them
There are going to be times when long hours and weekend work are necessary to get a job done. That's expected, and it's important to be flexible.
If you decide to work on the weekend, make sure your boss knows this is an exception, not an expectation.
"Tell your boss that you are fiercely protective of your weekend time, but that this project is important, and you want to make sure it gets out," Brownlee said. "But acknowledge this is an exemption."
If you don't want it to become a habit, stick to your work-life boundaries.
"You can't expect other people to respect your boundaries if you aren't respecting your boundaries," she said.

Acknowledge, then negotiate
If an assignment comes in late Friday afternoon that requires weekend work to hit the Monday morning deadline, acknowledge the request and then work to find a compromise.
Say something like: I understand the importance of the project, but I have other obligations. Can I get it done by end of day Monday?

Find the right balance
If weekend work is unavoidable, make it part of your schedule so it doesn't disrupt your personal and family time too much.
Kern checks his emails on the weekends before his wife wake up. "Work around your family."

Show your sacrifice
If you have to skip out on family or personal time for work, it's okay to let the boss know.
"Say something like, 'You might not be aware, but when you called, I was at my son's game and I want to figure out how I can be productive and meet your expectations but also protect my personal time with my kids and spouse," said Robinson.
A response like this is invitational, showing you want to work with your boss to find a middle ground.
"You are brainstorming together," he said. "You aren't being passive and allowing yourself to be run over, but not aggressive either."