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
Laravel Maintenance Mode That Actually Works: down --render, Secret Bypass and the Octane Trap
php artisan down boots the framework to tell you the framework is broken. Here are the four flags nobody sets, the multi-server failure everyone hits once, and what Octane quietly does to all of it.
Laravel Read Replicas: Route Reads to a Follower Without Serving Stale Data
The read/write split is four lines of config. The read-after-write bugs that turn up a fortnight later are the actual work — and sticky only covers one of them.
Laravel Secrets in Production: The Complete Guide to env:encrypt, Secrets Manager and Rotation
Almost every Laravel deployment guide stops at "put it in .env and don't commit it". That is the absence of a secrets strategy. Here are the three patterns that actually work, and how to rotate a credential without taking the site down.