Freek.dev

Laravel / PHP / AI

Posts tagged with code

How to render markdown with perfectly highlighted code snippets

by Freek Van der Herten – 6 minute read

When reading technical blogpost around the web, you might have noticed that code highlighting is not always perfect.

Shiki is the code highlighter that uses the textmate parser VSCode uses under the hood. The code highlighting it provides is near perfect, even when using modern syntax. It supports 100+ languages (via our package Blade is supported too), and all VS Code themes.

I'm proud to announce that we have released three new Spatie packages that make it easy to use Shiki in your PHP projects:

  • shiki-php: makes it easy to call Shiki from PHP to highlight a given code snippet
  • commonmark-shiki-highlighter: allows commonmark to highlight all code snippets in a markdown fragment
  • laravel-markdown: a batteries included Laravel package that offers a Blade component to easily render Markdown with highlighted code snippets and a class to render Markdown manually.

We're already using this package to render all our documentation pages, our guidelines, and this very blog you are reading.

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Determining the start of the next business day in Oh Dear

by Freek Van der Herten – 9 minute read

When a site is down, Oh Dear sends a notification every hour. Since last year, our notifications can be snoozed for a fixed amount of time (5 minutes, 1 hour, 4 hours, one day).

In the evenings and weekends, our users might not want to receive repeated notifications. That's why we've added a nice human touch: all notifications can now be snoozed until the start of the next workday.

In this blog post, I'd like to share some of the code that powers this feature. We'll focus on how the start of the next workday is calculated.

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Sharing learning via code

– stakeholderwhisperer.com

Konstantin Kudryashov, one of the speakers at the upcoming Full Stack Europe conference, makes the case for sharing new insights early.

When you build new feature as a team, and it requires a lot of new learning, do not hoard new knowledge in your head. Instead, incrementally commit each unit of learning into working code. Hide that partial logic behind a feature flag. The feature would be incomplete, but work-in-progress outputs will expose meaningful and demonstrable progress. To increase team’s awareness of outputs, add links into the feature tracker or documentation.

Read more [stakeholderwhisperer.com]

Highlighting code blocks with league/commonmark

– sebastiandedeyne.com

My colleague Seb wrote a cool package that adds tags and classes to code blocks in html, so they can be highlighted with css.

I created a spatie/commonmark-highlighter package that supports higlighting with CommonMark. After you register two custom renderers, all code blocks will receive a set of tags and classes, so they're already prepped to be highlighted by CSS when your content arrives in the browser.

Read more [sebastiandedeyne.com]

How to make syntax highlighting more useful

We think syntax highlighting makes the structure of code easier to understand. But as it stands, we highlight the obvious (like the word function) and leave most of the content in black. Rather than highlighting the differences between currentIndex and the keyword function, we could highlight the difference between currentIndex and randomIndex. Here’s what that might look like:1-TVSPOYO1z8GOVs3tuxNRqA
https://medium.com/@evnbr/coding-in-color-3a6db2743a1e

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The case for maintainable code

Developers and their employers are often at odds over matters like clean or beautiful code and with good reason: neither ships a product or increases sales. Most end users don’t care what the code looks like, as long as the product works and meets their needs. That means that beautiful code goes out the window when the rubber meets the road and crunch time sets in.

The fact of the matter is that framing code discussions in terms of beauty or attractiveness doesn’t help the case for getting code that’s clean. But there’s another way to frame the discussion that makes more sense, and achieves both the goal of writing clean code and meets the needs of most businesses: the concept of maintainable code.

http://www.brandonsavage.net/the-case-for-maintainable-code/

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