A modern text-based web browser in your terminal

Browsh is a small browser that you can run inside your terminal. If you don't want to install it locally, you can test is out by ssh'ing to it.

ssh brow.sh

Here's a screenshot of the https://www.brow.sh/ running in Browsh.

Browsh homepage

How cool is that! I don't see myself using this as my main browser soon, but it sure is a pretty cool project. It goes without saying that you should not type any sensitive data while using it via ssh.

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Using EditorConfig

Frederick Vanbrabant recorded a new cool video, this time on EditorConfig.

EditorConfig helps developers define and maintain consistent coding styles between different editors and IDEs. The EditorConfig project consists of a file format for defining coding styles and a collection of text editor plugins that enable editors to read the file format and adhere to defined styles. EditorConfig files are easily readable and they work nicely with version control systems.

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10 Tips for Javascript Debugging Like a PRO with Console

console.log isn't the only command that can help you debug JS. Yotam Kadis, Editor of AppsFlyer, shares 10 more ways.

For the past decade, one of my passions is front-end development (especially javascript). As a craftsman, I love learning new tools of the trade. In this story, I’m going to give you some awesome tips for debugging like a pro, using the good old console.

https://medium.com/appsflyer/10-tips-for-javascript-debugging-like-a-pro-with-console-7140027eb5f6

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A pair of helping hands when naming things

In a new post on his blog Sebastian De Deyne shares a few services and tools he uses to help him with naming things.

One of the hardest (and sometimes frustrating) tasks in a programmer's day-to-day workload is naming things. When I have a hard time finding that perfect word, I generally wind up in one of two situations:

  • I have a plausible name in mind, but I'm not entirely satisfied with it
  • I have no idea what I could possibly name it

Luckily, there are tools out there that can be of help.

https://sebastiandedeyne.com/posts/2018/a-pair-of-helping-hands-when-naming-things

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Rainglow: a collection of beautiful handcrafted themes

Dayle Rees, author of various popular books on PHP and Laravel, has recently blown new life into his efforts of creating IDE and terminal themes. He created themes for most of the popular apps out there including: PhpStorm, VS Code, Atom, iTerm2, ...

You can preview all the themes on: https://rainglow.io/

I've been using Dayle's Material Peacock for quite some time. Currently I'm digging white based themes and I'm on the GitHub theme.

github theme screenshot

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My VS Code Setup

In an absolutely fantastic post Caleb Porzio, engineer at Tighten Co., goes through his VS Code setup. He goes over his extensions, key bindings, must-have settings, ...

I’m using VS Code as my primary editor these days and am really digging it. My setup is by no means perfect, but I've made lots of little tweaks along the way that you may benefit from. I've set up these nifty categories, so feel free to jump around and try stuff out as you go, or come back later and use it as a reference.

http://calebporzio.com/my-vs-code-setup-2/

I've made the switch from PhpStorm to VS Code a couple of weeks ago and have been using it ever since. I like the speed improvements over PhpStorm, the zen feel, the xdebug experience, ... It just feels lighter (and I mean that in a good way) compared to PhpStorm.

If you want to give VS Code a shot too, go watch the free Visual Studio Code for PHP developers course on Laracasts.

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A little story about the `yes` Unix command

yes is a Unix command that will spit out and infinite stream of y's. In a post on his blog Matthias Endler, an engineer at trivago, shares that there's more than meets the eye to make this happen in a performant way.

The trivial program yes turns out not to be so trivial after all. It uses output buffering and memory alignment to improve performance. Re-implementing Unix tools is fun and makes me appreciate the nifty tricks, which make our computers fast.

https://matthias-endler.de/2017/yes/

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Improving the performance of PhpStorm

PhpStorm is a fantastic editor. Unfortunately it can be quite slow. Brent, one of our developers at Spatie, blogged a few tips to make it run a bit faster. I've followed all his suggestions and PhpStorm now feels a bit more responsive.

I didn't start this post by writing my own thoughts, because I figured people were looking for some quick tips to speed of their IDE. As a PHP developer, I think that PhpStorm is such a powerful tool, which helps me to write good and maintainable code. I don't want it to stand in my way though, so good performance is an absolute requirement.

https://www.stitcher.io/blog/phpstorm-performance

Hopefully future versions of PhpStorm will be more performant out of the box.

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HTTP Tools Roundup

Curl is not your only tool when creating or testing out APIs. On her blog Lorna Jane Mitchell made a nice list of alternatives.

At a conference a few days ago, I put up a slide with a few of my favourite tools on it. I got some brilliant additional recommendations in return from twitter so I thought I'd collect them all in one place in case anyone is interested - all these tools are excellent for anyone working APIs (so that's everyone!).

https://lornajane.net/posts/2017/http-tools-roundup

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Stay up to speed with PHP by reading these feeds original

by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

In the PHP ecosystem we're blessed with so many people blogging about their favourite language. Everyday new interesting content on PHP gets posted somewhere on the web. Visiting each blog separately to see if new content has been posted is quite tedious. Luckily this problem has been solved long…

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Make git work better with GitHub original

by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

A few months ago I installed a command line utility called hub. I'm really fond of it. It's aim is to make it easier to interact with GitHub from the commandline. It's a wrapper around the standard git command. Once it's installed you can do stuff like this (take from the manual page) # clone your…

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Packages that make developing Laravel apps easier original

by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

In this post I'd like to share some of the packages that make developing a Laravel app easier. laravel-debugbar This package really needs no introduction as it is one of the most popular packages around. It's made by Barry Vd. Heuvel and it's a real powerhouse. Once the package is installed it…

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Top 5 programming fonts

Eric L. Barnes of Laravel-news and dotdev fame, did a little research on the most used fonts for programming.

Everyone has their ideal development setup, and many have spent countless hours customizing it to perfectly suit their needs. Outside of a color scheme, the next typical change is the font in use and every year new fonts are introduced giving us more to choose from than ever before.

To find out what everyone is using, I asked on Twitter and Facebook and had a ton of responses. Based on the answers here is a list of the top 5 programming fonts in use today

https://laravel-news.com/2016/10/top-5-programming-fonts/

I'm a big fan of Fira Code myself. It has some nice ligatures and it just looks very good. Here it is in action in my IDE:

screen-shot-2016-10-21-at-23-56-34

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