Author Archives: Gary Hockin

About Gary Hockin

Gary Hockin has been creating code to power web applications for 15 years, the last three of them at an extraordinary level. He is handsome, talented, funny and articulate, and also extremely modest. Gary is a valued contributor to Zend Framework 2 and is a member of the community review team. He's married and has two wonderful children, and when he's not coding, writing about code, speaking about code or reading about code, he can usually be found in the pub playing pool.

PHP Annotated Monthly – February 2017

Posted on February 9, 2017 by Gary Hockin

As 2017 gets going, let’s take a look at everything of interest in the PHP world, with Gary Hockin, Developer Advocate for PhpStorm at JetBrains.

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Cloning From GitHub

Posted on January 30, 2017 by Gary Hockin

In the third video in our series, Trisha Gee and myself look at how you clone your own copy of a repository from GitHub.

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How to Keep a Git Fork up to Date

Posted on January 20, 2017 by Gary Hockin

As part of our series on solving problems in Git, Trisha Gee and myself have recorded a new video on “How to Keep a Git Fork up to Date”.

Posted in Cool Feature | Tagged | 4 Comments

Working With PHPUnit and PhpStorm

Posted on January 17, 2017 by Gary Hockin

Community stalwart and Laravel aficionado Adam Wathan blogged on his PHPUnit workflow in Sublime text. I was sent a Tweet asking how you do this in PhpStorm: Anyone know how to run a single test method in PHPStorm? https://t.co/4ddSCLJNQD — … Continue reading →

Posted in Cool Feature | 3 Comments

Git Questions – How do I switch branches without losing my work?

Posted on January 16, 2017 by Gary Hockin

Git can be hard, particularly if you’ve been dropped in at the deep end and are only used to working in a specific way, so it’s our intention to address how to accomplish certain version control tasks in a JetBrains IDE … Continue reading →

Posted in Screencast, Tutorial | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

VCS in Depth for PhpStorm

Posted on January 10, 2017 by Gary Hockin

Last summer the PyCharm team released some amazing content introducing the version control system (VCS) in PyCharm. These videos are equally as relevant to PhpStorm as they are to PyCharm, as the two IDEs share the same underlying platform.

Posted in Cool Feature, Cross Promotion, Screencast, Tutorial | Tagged , | 1 Comment

PHP Annotated Monthly – January 2017

Posted on January 9, 2017 by Gary Hockin

Happy New Year! New year, new PHP Annotated Monthly, a roundup of all that’s happened in the last month or so with Gary Hockin, Developer Advocate for PhpStorm at JetBrains.

Posted in PHP Annotated Monthly | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Auto-detection of Testing Frameworks

Posted on December 23, 2016 by Gary Hockin

Running your test suite through PhpStorm is useful and saves a lot of time. Unfortunately, configuring your test runner can be repetitive and painful – until now. PhpStorm 2016.3 can autodetect your autoloader from your Composer settings, saving you the task … Continue reading →

Posted in Cool Feature | 3 Comments

Updating Your Templates in PhpStorm

Posted on December 21, 2016 by Gary Hockin

In the recent What’s New video for PhpStorm 2016.3, I noticed I was always adding PHP 7’s strict type declaration declare(strict_types=1) to every new file I created.

Posted in PhpStorm, Tutorial | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Semantic Variable Colours – New in PhpStorm 2016.3!

Posted on December 15, 2016 by Gary Hockin

Using a unique colour for each variable in scope arguably improves code readability. This particular feature has been made it into PhpStorm 2016.3 so you can give it a try.

Posted in Cool Feature | 2 Comments