I'm a Mac user, and I enjoy the sheer simplicity (and speed) of Laravel Valet for all of my local-development needs. I use it for Laravel projects, Symfony projects, pure-PHP ones, and also most WordPress development.
Category Archives: PHP
How to Learn PHP Unit Testing With Katas
All PHP code gets tested. Most of it is tested by the developer when they check to make sure the webpage looks right in their browser; some when you run an API response tool, like Postman. Some of it is tested when that same developer writes automated tests and runs them against it---this is our focus. Sometimes code is first tested when the unfortunate client or user feels like using the feature and tests the developer's work. Hopefully, they're not disappointed.
PHP Web Scraping: What to know before you start with Symfony Panther, Goutte, and more
First and foremost, scraping the web (in PHP) is bad, mkay? PHP web scraping isn't worse than doing it with other languages, it's just that web scraping in general is most likely to be looked by with disdain by content-producers. And it'll make your code more brittle than it should be, and is general going to make an application more complex to build.
A Complete Guide to PHP Namespaces
Namespaces are a great feature of PHP. They've taken it from being a complex-to-scale and rather small-scale-only language into something where most projects have a healthy-level of outside code (pulled in with the Composer dependency manager) and a whole lot more clarity about what is where and why.