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.
Latest from the journal
Laravel 13 PreventRequestForgery: Origin-Aware CSRF Protection in 5 Minutes
Laravel 13 renames VerifyCsrfToken to PreventRequestForgery and adds a Sec-Fetch-Site origin check on top of the token. Here's what changed, how to configure it, and the upgrade traps.
Laravel Reverb in Production — Horizontal Scaling, Presence Channels, and Load Balancing
Single-node Reverb is a fine starting point, but a real cluster needs Redis pub/sub, sticky sessions, supervised processes, the right health check, and connection monitoring. Here is the full playbook.
Laravel AI SDK Structured Output — JSON Schema Enforcement for LLM Responses
Stop parsing markdown fences and stripping prose out of LLM replies. The Laravel AI SDK ships a HasStructuredOutput contract that forces the model to return JSON matching the schema you describe in PHP — and the same agent works across every supported provider.