A better dd() for your TDD
On the Tighten blog Keith Damiani wrote an article how you can mold the dd helper to your liking.
An important part of every Laravel developer's debugging arsenal is the humble dd() helper function—"dump and die"—to output the contents of a variable and terminate execution of your code. In the browser, dd() results in a structured, easy-to-read tree, complete with little arrow buttons that can be clicked to expand or hide children of nested structures. In the terminal, however, it's a different story. ... Fortunately, it's simple to build your very own customized version of dd() to help tame your unwieldly terminal output.