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
Upgrading a Laravel App to PHP 8.6: Deprecations, Session Defaults and a CI Checklist
PHP 8.6 lands on 19 November 2026. Here's the ordered checklist I run on Laravel apps — CI first, deprecations second, production runtime last.
Check Your LLM's Homework: Verifying Laravel AI SDK Output with Jev
A second LLM grading the first one is slow, expensive and wrong in the same places. Here's how I verify Laravel AI SDK answers with Jev instead.
PHP 8.6's Time\Duration: No More Guessing Whether That Timeout Is Seconds or Milliseconds
PHP 8.6 ships Time\Duration, a nanosecond-precision value object for stopwatch time. Here's the whole API, where it beats DateInterval, and how to bolt it onto a Laravel app whose framework still wants ints.