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
PHP 8.6 Readonly Property Defaults: Cleaner DTOs and Interface Properties in Laravel
PHP 8.6 lifts the four-year ban on default values for readonly properties. Here's what that changes for DTOs, interface properties and Laravel action classes.
A Laravel Validation Rule That Scores Spam and Toxicity with Jev
Honeypots stop bots, not humans dropping promotional links. Here's a Laravel validation rule that sends the submission to Jev, reads the score and the confidence, and fails open when the API is unreachable.
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.