NEW Laravel Scout + Typesense — A Production Guide to Typo-Tolerant, Faceted, and Vector Search Laravel Scout + Typesense — A Production...

Engineering,
taught &
leadership, practised.

I'm Steven — CTO at Digitonic, a PHP engineer since 2010 and a keen golfer with a terrible handicap. This is where I write it all down.

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Order.php

// app/Domain/Trading
final class Order extends AggregateRoot
{
    public function place(Money $total)
    {
        $this->recordThat(new OrderPlaced(
            total: $total->amount(),
        ));

        return $this;
    }
}

● all tests passing PHPStan level 10 Laravel 13

Steven Richardson

CTO, Digitonic · Laravel Certified

HCP 19

The Irvine Golf Club

Shipped with —

…and a few friends I can't name.

THE WRITING

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FEATURED laravel

Laravel Scout + Typesense — A Production Guide to Typo-Tolerant, Faceted, and Vector Search

Devs reach for the Scout database driver, watch a LIKE query crawl on 200k rows, and realise they need a real engine. Here's the full Typesense path — async indexing, facets, hybrid vector search, and a Pest test suite.

May 29th, 2026 · 16 min read

pest

Pest 4 Snapshot Testing for Laravel API Responses — Catch Accidental Schema Drift

Pest 4 has snapshot testing built in. One expectation locks down the shape of your JSON responses so renamed keys and disappearing fields stop slipping into production unnoticed.

May 29th, 2026 · 8 min

tailwind

Tailwind v4 text-shadow Utilities — Make Headings Pop Without Custom CSS

After twenty years of inline `style="text-shadow: …"`, Tailwind finally has a utility for it. Here is the v4.1 cheat sheet — sizes, colour tinting, dark-mode swaps, and @theme customisation.

May 28th, 2026 · 7 min

/NOW

Currently shipping, reading, and thinking about.

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Building

A SaaS product on Laravel Cloud for Investor Relations teams.

Writing

A series of AI engineering articles.

Reading

"Life 3.0 - Being human in the age of artificial intellegence" by Max Tegmark.

Golfing

The Irvine Golf Club on Sundays, regardless of weather.

Engineering, taught & leadership, practised.