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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 18

The Irvine Golf Club

Shipped with —

…and a few friends I can't name.

THE WRITING

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FEATURED pest

GitHub Actions + Pest Sharding — Cut Laravel CI from 12 Minutes to 3

Split your Pest suite across four GitHub Actions matrix jobs, balance them by real execution time, and gate merges on a single status check.

June 7th, 2026 · 8 min read

laravel

Laravel Octane RoadRunner in Production — Tuning max_jobs, Worker Memory, and Supervisor

The four knobs that decide whether Octane on RoadRunner is a 5x performance win or a 3am pager: worker recycling, memory caps, worker count, and a Supervisor config that survives deploys.

June 7th, 2026 · 7 min

laravel

Laravel Job Middleware — Rate-Limit and Back Off Queued Jobs at the Job Level

Stop sprinkling RateLimiter::attempt() inside your job classes. Laravel job middleware wraps handle() with rate limits, back-off, and circuit breakers — here's the full pattern.

June 6th, 2026 · 8 min

/NOW

Currently shipping, reading, and thinking about.

See the full Now page

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.