Freek.dev

My colleague Ruben explores the wonderful world of GitHub actions.

You can write workflows in YAML, which makes them easy to write and read. In the beta version of GitHub Actions you had to use Ocaml, which was quite hard to comprehend, and there was almost no documentation. If you were a bit frightened by the beta version, like me, then rest assured: the YAML version is easier to use, and the documentation is well written.

Read more [rubenvanassche.com]

Pro-tip: set custom prefixes for your local, staging and production environments using the Tab ReTitle Chrome extension ?
Never accidentally debug the wrong tab again! https://t.co/hRfaKesKwL pic.twitter.com/DU1llvdpQd

— Alex (@AlexVanderbist) July 15, 2019

Read more [twitter.com]

In the first blogpost on his new blog, Mathias Hansen, co-creator of geocod.io, walks us through how he customized the look of macOS. ChunkWM seems particularly interesting.

ChunkWM neatly arranges all of the windows on my screen. skhd which me to define global hotkeys to control ChunkWM. Pecan (built on Übersicht) renders the neat status bar that you see at the top of the screen

Read more [www.codemonkey.io]

A couple of week ago I wrote a blogpost that contains all the software, hardware and settings I use. I've seen a couple of devs writing the same kind of post. Here are some of them:

• Michael Dyrynda, organiser of Laracon AU and co-host of the Laravel News podcast
• Christoph Rumpel, author of "Build Chatbots with PHP"
• Taylor Otwell, creator of Laravel and related services
• Wes Bos, creator of courses

Did you write down your setup as well? Post a link in the comments below! ?

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Remy Sharp, a well known JavaScript developer, published a cool list of standard CLI tools replacements.

I'm not sure many web developers can get away without visiting the command line. As for me, I've been using the command line since 1997, first at university when I felt both super cool l33t-hacker and simultaneously utterly out of my depth. Over the years my command line habits have improved and I often search for smarter tools for the jobs I commonly do. With that said, here's my current list of improved CLI tools.

Read more [remysharp.com]

Till Krüss released a cool Alfred workflow to easily search the docs. Here it is in action.

Behind the scenes it uses an Algolia index to retrieve the results. I've been only using it for a day and I can't image how I could have lived without this so long.

https://github.com/tillkruss/alfred-laravel-docs

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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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In a new post on his Medium Blog, Laravel.io maintainer Dries Vints wrote how he managed do drastically improved the build time of the popular forum.

CircleCI 2.0’s builds run with Docker which makes spinning up new instances super fast. If you use pre-built images which are customized to your needs, you don’t even need to do any provisioning during the build which saves you quite a bit time. Pulling various images and orchestrating them in a CircleCI 2.0 config allows for very rapid build times. If you add their new workflows to their mix you could easily enable parallelization and speed things up even more.

https://medium.com/laravelio/how-circleci-improved-our-build-time-8d5c40b8cc60

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Barry Van Veen shares how you can install a package from a local path into your project. This is extremely handy when developing a package because you can immediately toy with it in a full application.

This article explains how you can require a package from a local path into your project with Composer. This way you can run a local copy of a repository and test any changes you make. Because the local repo will be symlinked changes are shared in real-time, there is no need for intermediate committing and updating.

https://barryvanveen.nl/blog/44-package-development-run-a-package-from-a-local-directory

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Martin Hujer shares some pretty good tips for working with Composer.

Although most PHP developers know how to use Composer, not all of them are using it efficiently or in a best possible way. So I decided to summarize things which are important for my everyday workflow.

The philosophy of most of the tips is "Play it safe", which means that if there are more ways how to handle something, I would use the approach which is least error-prone.

https://blog.martinhujer.cz/17-tips-for-using-composer-efficiently/

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Frederick Vanbrabant published another delirious rant on his blog. This time it's about atomic commits.

Atomic commits, sometimes also called micro commits, is the practice of explaining your thought process in the form of commit messages and code. It comes down to documenting the way to the solution.

https://frederickvanbrabant.com/2017/12/07/atomic-commits.html

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Christoper Pitt published another excellent piece over at Sitepoint. This time he describes how he built a watcher to automatically recompile his preprocessed code and rerun the tests.

In order to reduce the burden of invoking the transformation scripts, boilerplate projects have started to include scripts to automatically watch for file changes; and thereafter invoke these scripts.

These projects I’ve worked on have used a similar approach to re-run unit tests. When I change the JavaScript files, these files are transformed and the unit tests are re-run. This way, I can immediately see if I’ve broken anything.

https://www.sitepoint.com/write-javascript-style-test-watchers-php/

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I ❤️ Laravel's tinker command and use it everyday. Caleb Porzio, an engineer at Tighten Co, wrote a good post on the that command, containing lots of cool stuff I didn't knew tinker could do.

Although some of the value Tinker provides is clear at first glance, it also has loads of hidden and exciting features available out-of-the-box. Let’s walk through and take a look at some ways you can super-charge your Tinker workflow.

https://blog.tighten.co/supercharge-your-laravel-tinker-workflow

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Serial blogger Matt Stauffer wrote a good tutorial on how use forked repos.

I just recently joined a new open source project, and there were a few folks on the team who weren't familiar with how to contribute to an open source project by forking your own copy, so I wrote this up for the docs of that project. I figured I'd also share it here.

If you join a new open source project, it's very likely that you won't get direct access to push commits or branches up to the repository itself. So, instead, you'll fork the repo, make the changes on your version of the repo, and then "pull request" your changes back to the original.

Here are the steps to take.

https://mattstauffer.co/blog/how-to-contribute-to-an-open-source-github-project-using-your-own-fork

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Nikush Patel created an awesome little site where he shares PHPStorm tips. Every tip is demonstrated by an animated gif.

I'm a big fan of PhpStorm and an equally big fan of keyboard shortcuts and optimised workflows, so I wanted to share all the best tips and tricks I know to help everyone else make the most of PhpStorm as well!

I produce useful tips in bite-sized gif recordings so they are easier to consume than reading the docs.

http://phpstorm.tips/

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In a short post on his blog Joeri Timmermans explains how to create per project git alias that can be shared with a team.

http://www.pix-art.be/post/how-to-create-custom-git-aliases-for-a-project

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