Jason Cosper

Tag: development

  • Playing with Laravel Valet

    I finally had the chance to do a little WordPress work in Laravel’s lightweight development environment Valet last week. My hot take?

    It's the best. I love it.

    If you’re interested in setting it up on your Mac, there’s a solid tutorial that outlines how to get started by Tom McFarlin over at Tuts+. And if you’d like to go down the rabbit hole even further, Aaron Rutley has written a script that helps you create and delete sites under Valet in seconds.

    I’m going to spend a little more time with this over the coming weeks. Maybe I’ll put something interesting together if I can find the time… No promises though.

  • DuoTone Themes for Atom

    DuoTone themes – Syntax themes for Atom
    simurai.com

    While I’m normally a Solarized Dark guy — seriously, I’ve Solarized Dark’d all the things on pretty much every computer I touch — these Atom syntax themes are really pleasant.

    duotone-dark
    duotone-dark-sea
    duotone-dark-space

    I’ve been looking to change things up lately, so I’m going to try living with darkSea for the next month. I’ll let y’all know how it goes!

  • Too Many Images

    GitHub – addyosmani/tmi: TMI (Too Many Images) – discover your image weight on the web
    TMI (Too Many Images) – discover your image weight on the web – GitHub – addyosmani/tmi: TMI (Too Many Images) – discover your image weight on the web
    github.com

    I love single use command line tools. This one helps you determine a URL’s image weight and even lets you know where you should start optimizing.

  • WordPress Coleman

    I’ve spent a lot of time since WordCamp San Francisco thinking about Matt’s expressed desire for faster, Chrome-like automatic patching in his State of the Word. Mainly, I got caught up in the “how” of it. Like how could they balance development on the trunk alongside rapid-fire, stable core releases?

    Then I read about the move to develop.svn.wordpress.org & Grunt for WordPress core development this morning and realized that it’s only a matter of time before WordPress has its own Canary build.

    For the uninitiated, Chrome Canary is a version of Google’s Chrome browser that has the most cutting edge stuff crammed into it. The stuff that’s not quite ready for the general public, but still needs testing. Firefox is doing something similar thing with Aurora.

    But WordPress can’t just go and call their cutting edge test branch Canary, can they? So, after combining the list of jazz greats in the version history along with my middling knowledge of the genre, I propose the early-adopter build be named after an innovator who was notorious for shaking things up: Ornette Coleman.

    Think about it. WordPress Coleman has a pretty nice ring to it, right?

    Anyway, now that I’ve given the project a name, I’ll just be hanging around waiting for an auto-updating build. Don’t worry though, I can be patient…

    Addendum: As my buddy Mike Schroder pointed out in IRC, you could totally do something like this right now with the Beta Tester plugin and the bleeding edge nightly builds. But I’m thinking about something that’s a little less likely to break things as trunk development progresses.

    Addendum 2: The Legend of Curly’s Gold: Yes, I realize that WordPress 4.5 used “Coleman” as its release name. This post was written 3 years before that release dropped. Nobody likes a pedant.

  • Vagrant, Casked

    While following the directions on how to set up 10up’s wonderful dev environment for WordPress, I noticed that Vagrant was using a .pkg installer.

    Now there’s nothing wrong with installing software that way. Hell, doing things via a graphical installer is easier for most end users. But Vagrant isn’t really something that was made for “end users”. It’s a command line utility to create and manage development environments.

    So I did a quick check to see if I could install Vagrant via my favorite package manager, Homebrew. And while there’s nothing in the vanilla install of Homebrew, I stumbled onto an independently maintained add-on called brew-cask that allows you to install Mac applications on your computer via the command line.

    Using it is as easy as loading up your terminal and typing:

    brew tap phinze/homebrew-cask && brew install brew-cask

    Then, to get Vagrant installed, just run this command:

    brew cask install vagrant

    Hell, you can even install VirtualBox if you’d like:

    brew cask install virtualbox

    Pretty nice, right?

    Oh, and if you’ve been holding out on using Vagrant in your dev environment, consider giving it a try. It’s way more flexible than MAMP and nowhere near as quirky.