I finally took a look at writing a custom live template with PhpStorm. I've used them several times to automate scaffolding a foreach statement or other random suggestions that a Tab keypress leads to automated scaffolded code. But I never really dove in to see how they work or could be customized.

I'm a huge fan of using data sets for PHPUnit test cases to cover as many permutations as possible with given inputs. The only problem is when you want to execute a specific data set for the test. I'm not much of a PHPUnit command line guru since I run tests individually in PhpStorm.

I accidentally found a cool keyboard shortcut for PhpStorm, and probably every IntelliJ IDE. On macOS, you can use Shift + CMD + Apostrophe to force your tool window to expand to the entire screen. I'm assuming for Linux and Windows this is Shift + CTRL + Apostrophe. I don't know about anyone else, BUT I AM VERY EXCITED.

I write a lot of tests for all of my Drupal code. I try to live by Test Driven Development. It delivers cleaner code. It helps define your architecture without full implementation details. I also despise clicking and manually testing things.

2018 was a weird year. It felt like it just zoomed by and nothing eventful happened. In fact, I feel like most people I have talked to this year felt the same exact way. But, then I sat down to my end of year write up and realized that this year was way more packed than I thought.

Recently, while working on a little project, I decided to clean up some of the commits on the master branch before pushing it to Packagist. To be lazy, I decided to use PhpStorm's interactive rebase tool instead of the good ole command line.

BUT I COULD NOT! And I started to go mad.

Working in object-oriented programming is great. You can define interfaces which specify a contract that implementers need to fulfill. You can then extend these to define your end requirement and provide the implementation. This also means you can guarantee an object that implements that interface will have a guaranteed set of known methods.

When I work, I try to follow the principles of Test-Driven Development. I have found it to aid me in writing cleaner code, identifying odd coupling of components or crazy accidental dependencies between components. It also lets me write my API first by using mocks against interfaces I have defined. PhpStorm's auto-test functionality speeds up my test-driven development process.

Recently I ran a good ole composer update on a client project. This updated Drupal and PHPUnit. I ran our PHPUnit tests via PhpStorm and ran into an odd error. Here's how I quickly fixed it!