I’m Steven, a software engineer and technical leader based in the west coast of Scotland. I’m the CTO at Digitonic, where we develop technologies for the investor relations and igaming industries.
Step-by-step guide to deploy Sentry Self-Hosted on an AWS EC2 Ubuntu 24.04 server provisioned via Forge. Configure Docker, swap, SSL with Nginx, MaxMind GeoIP, Slack & GitHub integrations, Mailgun SMTP, Laravel backend + browser tracing, and connect GitHub Copilot via Sentry’s MCP server. Includes troubleshooting.
Malicious bots were burning through my Laravel Nightwatch quota by hitting fake routes like /wp-login.php and /.env. Inspired by Michael Dyrynda’s approach using Cloudflare WAF, I built a portable NGINX blocklist that stops these 404s before they reach Laravel — no proxy required.
Speed up Laravel onboarding with a powerful Makefile. Automate Herd Pro setup, install dependencies, and seed databases for a consistent, one-command setup experience.
