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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.

Read the latest About me

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 laravel

Refactor Messy Conditionals with Laravel's Pipeline Facade

That forty-line filter() method full of nested ifs? Laravel's Pipeline facade turns it into small, swappable, individually testable stages — with a worked query-filter example.

July 23rd, 2026 · 7 min read

debugging

Debug Livewire and Eloquent Faster with Spatie Ray

Stop halting requests with dd() and scribbling over pages with dump(). Spatie Ray sends Laravel debug output to a desktop app so you can watch queries, events and Livewire state live.

July 22nd, 2026 · 7 min

laravel

Run Laravel AI SDK Agents in the Background with Queued Jobs

A synchronous AI call can tie up a PHP worker for half a minute. Here's how to run Laravel AI SDK agents on a queue and surface the result when it's done.

July 21st, 2026 · 7 min

/NOW

Currently shipping, reading, and thinking about.

See the full Now page

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.