

One of the things that most articles I’d read or tried to follow miss out one core thing that frustrated me: most have the “how”, but not the “why”. So, I thought: why not give it a go again? And so I did, going step by step though Gary and Derick’s video, with the goal to implement it into our development process for our Open Source project Awe-der. These thoughts of mine were also circulated in others’ replies to the tweet, but it was when Tighten’s Matt Stauffer and Twilio’s Gary Hockin stepped in to offer livestreams with Derick to set it up that I took notice – the resulting content is now excellently documented at with others’ contributions.

It’s been around years – I started writing PHP professionally in 2016, by which time Xdebug had existed for 14 years. Like many PHP developers with significant experience: I know of Xdebug.

Let’s clear up some existing thoughts I had on Xdebug – some readers might nod in agreement or have/had similar experiences: I thought, ‘Do I need to revisit Xdebug?’, and I realised that I’d fallen into Derick’s trap. Quite the controversial “hot-take” from Derick, and while it certainly caused quite the stir (that it was probably designed to), it made me think.
