In my job I’ve noticed that the number of web sites, applications and APIs keep growing and all need servers to run on. I’m not a Systems Administrator but being a lone developer I want to try and keep as much of my time focused on doing what I love, building great apps for people. To help combat the issue of managing multiple servers I started to experiment with Chef and I have to say, after a bit of a learning curve, I like it, or I like what it enables me to be getting on with. Recently, I’ve been tasked with working alongside another developer and the topic of a development environment came...

After reading a post on the IDE used by @skoop as one of the tools he uses in his everyday development, I felt inspired to do the same and hope that others find my individual set up useful to them. The first and most obvious place to start, is that which is at the centre of the universe for a PHP developer, his IDE of choice and at present, that honour goes to PhpStorm. Back in the day when I first started out coding in PHP I used PHPEdit. It was free and built around speed and productivity. I still miss their drop marks feature and surprised other IDEs have not incorporated this into their...

Google the phrase ‘VirtualBox set up’ or similar and you’ll find plenty of guides that will instruct you on the install of a Virtual Machine (VM) with the network adapter set to either NAT or Bridged. While these options work fine, as a web developer you are quick to realise their limitations. So what does a web developer need from their VM networking set up? Simple: To simply and consistently connect to the guest VM from the host, and To connect to the Internet, remote servers and web applications from the guest VM with the same ease as the host. Once a VM has been installed, the...