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
The Cache Hit You Still Paid For: Laravel's Memo Driver and Tagged Memoization
A Redis cache hit is still a network round trip. The memo driver collapses eleven reads of the same key into one — and as of Laravel 13.33 it finally works with tags.
Tailwind's Scrollbar Utilities: Styling Overflow Without a Plugin
Tailwind v4.3 ships first-party scrollbar-width, scrollbar-color and scrollbar-gutter utilities. Here is what they can do, what they cannot, and the one class that fixes the page jumping when a modal opens.
Reuse the TLS Handshake: PHP 8.5 Persistent cURL Share Handles in Laravel
Every outbound HTTPS call from a PHP request starts from nothing — resolve, connect, handshake, then finally send. PHP 8.5 lets a worker keep that setup between requests, and Laravel 13 exposes it in one line.