Today was a big milestone for me. For years, Composer has been a core part of my workflow: powerful, essential, but always a bit of a black box when it came to what was really happening under the hood. I've been chipping away at that mystery for a long time, learning piece by piece... and today, it finally clicked.
I published my first Composer package to Packagist and then successfully pulled it into this very site to prove I hadn’t missed a step. Nothing beats that moment when it just works.
I didn't want to create a throwaway "hello world" package just for the sake of learning the publishing process. If I was going to do this, I wanted to build something genuinely useful and use it as a test of whether I truly understood the inner workings of Composer and Packagist.
So I built dregozone/run-tools, a lightweight, no-dependency, single‑class package that gives developers a simple, reliable way to calculate the pace required to hit a target time across different distances. It supports both mins/km and mins/mile, making it handy for runners, coaches, or anyone building fitness‑related tools.
You can try it out yourself right here:
👉 Run Tools
And if you do, I’d genuinely love to hear what you think:
👉 Send feedback
This was a learning project that turned into something I'm truly proud to share, and it feels great to finally peel back the curtain on a tool that I've relied on for so long.
If youre interested in peeking at the code, it lives on GitHub, here.
