Until Taylor makes it part of Homestead, here's one way to add SSL support for your dev sites. Plenty of room for improvement, so please add your ideas. For example, generating the ssl certs in the loop, instead of including them.
Separate routes for large applications into multiple smaller route partial files that are automatically loaded at runtime. Example 'app/routes.php' file.
I made a response macro that makes use of the JSend specification (http://labs.omniti.com/labs/jsend).
UPDATE (2014-09-15): Added the setting of the content type.
Generate navigation menu's that look clean using a custom class HTML::nav(); Automatically set active state, use conditions to display links, and optionally pass only one value for both url and link name if you want to type a little less
This macro has the same signature than HTML::linkRoute() but wraps the hypertext link with <li></li>.
If the current URL is the specified route, then <li> becomes "active" (<li class="active>...</li>).
I use it to quickly build menus. Work well with Bootstrap.