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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 php

Stop String-Concatenating URLs: PHP 8.6's UriBuilder

Every Laravel app has a method that bolts a path and a query onto a URL it did not generate, and it is always subtly wrong. PHP 8.6 finally gives the language a typed way to do it.

November 2nd, 2026 · 10 min read

postgres

Upgrade Postgres Under a Live Laravel App with Logical Replication

pg_upgrade needs the database stopped for a window nobody can predict. Logical replication gets you a cutover measured in seconds — if you handle sequences, DDL and your queue workers correctly.

November 1st, 2026 · 17 min

laravel

The Eloquent Events That Never Fire

Observers are a convenience, not a guarantee. Half the write operations in Laravel never load a model, so they never fire an event — and nothing tells you.

October 31st, 2026 · 12 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.