A free and open-source tool to automate your refactoring tasks — I wanted to upgrade a project to PHP 8.2 and figured I could use Rector for this. Not only was that the case, but I also completely underestimated how easy it was going to be. What is Rector? Rector is a free and open-source tool written in PHP allowing you to automate various…

For scenarios in which we don’t know the constraints of the target environments — A common aspect of a PHP developer’s job is to deal with Composer dependencies. We use the work of others as Lego bricks to build our own projects, making the most of the beautiful thing that is the open-source movement. As typical end-users of these community efforts, we maintain a…

A beginner’s guide to economics, government and Bitcoin — Economics is boring. It’s full of complicated terms, obscure references and people who seem to live in a different reality. Yet economics is at the core of our societies — it defines the rules of human coordination. That’s kind of a big deal. Bitcoin is annoying. It’s full of complicated…

Enable Vim in your favourite code editor to boost your productivity — I’ve been using Vim for 5 years… Mainly because I don’t know how to exit it If you were to ask people about their experience of Vim, this is what their answer would look like — a joke about quitting the program, and a sigh of relief when Nano is…

A series that will show you how to build a powerful development environment leveraging the flexibility of containers — Among developers, exposure to Docker ranges from having vaguely heard of the technology to using it on a daily basis, the latter category singing its praises while the former is sometimes still struggling with the sheer concept of containers. Wherever you are on your journey, as a developer there are…

Last year, GitHub quietly released a feature that was quickly noticed by the community — profile READMEs A profile README is a global README file for your GitHub profile, which you can set up by creating a public repository whose name is identical to your GitHub username. For instance, as…

What it is, how it works, how to extend it, and why you may not need it after all — ⚠️ This content is outdated. It was written just a few days after Laravel Sail’s initial release and Sail has received some updates since then, and more will undoubtedly come. Please visit my blog for an up-to-date version, where this guide was initially published. Thank you. Truman continues to steer…

OpenAPI definitions are great to generate documentations, but there is much more we can do with them — OpenAPI is a specification intended to describe RESTful APIs in JSON and YAML, with the aim of being understandable by humans and machines alike. OpenAPI definitions are language-agnostic and can be used in a lot of different ways: An OpenAPI definition can be used by documentation generation tools to display…