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.
…and a few friends I can't name.
Latest from the journal
Generate Speech from Text in Laravel with the AI SDK's Audio Class
The Laravel AI SDK turns text-to-speech into four lines and hands you a Storage path instead of a byte string. Here is the whole surface — voices, queueing, serving — plus the hash cache that stops you paying twice for the same sentence.
Transcribe Audio in Laravel with the AI SDK: Uploads, Storage and Speaker Diarization
Transcription ships in the Laravel AI SDK with queueing, diarization and faking built in. Almost nobody knows it's there, so here's the whole path.
Run Laravel Behind PgBouncer in Transaction Mode Without Breaking Booleans
PgBouncer's transaction mode breaks PDO prepared statements, and the classic emulated-prepares workaround then breaks your boolean columns. Laravel 13.17 fixes both properly.