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
PHP 8.5 Asymmetric Visibility for Static Properties
PHP 8.5 finishes what 8.4 started: asymmetric visibility now applies to static properties. Read freely, write only from inside — and ditch the static getter boilerplate for good.
Laravel 13 whereVectorSimilarTo() — Native Semantic Search in the Query Builder
Laravel 13's whereVectorSimilarTo() turns the query builder into a vector store. Plain strings in, ranked results out — no manual embedding pipeline.
PHP Custom Attributes in Practice — Beyond Laravel's Built-ins
Laravel 13 ships dozens of built-in PHP attributes, but the docs are quiet on building your own. Here are the patterns I use in production for validation, auth, and auto-discovery.