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 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.
The Serializer Nobody Configures: igbinary for Laravel Cache and Queue Payloads
Laravel's Redis connection has a serializer option that is unset by default. Turning on igbinary can cut cached payloads by a third — and will silently orphan every existing key if you do it wrong.
Extraction That Cannot Hallucinate: Regex Finds, Jev Picks, Laravel Normalises
An LLM asked for an invoice total can transpose a digit and sound certain. Let a regex find the candidates, let Jev pick one, and let PHP copy the span unchanged.