Stefan Kecskes

Never stop learning, because life never stops teaching

Setting up XDebug for dev environment

Debugging PHP in editor I would like to describe how to set up xDebug to work in your phpStorm IDE. There are different options available depending on your preference - you can have xDebug always try to initiate a connection for your devbox, or you can use browser plugins and extensions to choose when xDebug should try to run. Requirements sudo access to virtual host config files Automatic connection This method means that you don’t need any browser extensions, cookies or bookmarklets, but may cause small performance issues because xDebug will try and initiate a connection to your computer on port 9000 every time you load a page on your dev.

Speed up your website with Pagespeed mod

Speeding up websites Last year, in September 2014, when I was working for one of my clients, I was asked to look for some options on how quickly and easily speed up the loading of the webpages. They were using Apache2 webserver and they didn’t plan to move away from that. At that time, the client hadn’t any frontend developers. Nobody in team had solid knowledge about bower, gulp, less, sass and other cool toys of frontend guys.

Laravel validator for CSS selectors

Laravel 5.1 Validators Last week I was building a backend tool in Laravel, where you could create layout in bootstrap 3 and add CSS selectors like id or class to any container. You wanted to be able to enter more than one class name into input field. Let’s say that you want to add 2 classes: col-xs-6 infoBox_4. Laravel hasn’t validator for this type of string, so I decided to make one.

Move Local Git Repository to Bitbucket

Collaboration thanks to the remote repository As I described in previous post, when I joined to my current company, we hadn’t any versioning system, not even SVN, and we used to FTP all files to a number of backup folders. I introduced Git on local servers. Everything started to seem better, but after some time we started to work with some people from abroad and one of colleagues started to work from home.

Setting up a Git Repository

Code repositories Repositories these days are one of the basic stones of any software development. It allows teams of people to work together on one piece of software and allow every team member to see who made what changes, when and why. Repositories basically holds the copy of all changes made to code and also gives you the latest, most recent version. I don’t want to go deeply into why is it good and why we (developers) can’t live without it.