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
Ask a Model About a PDF: Document Attachments in the Laravel AI SDK
A customer uploads a contract and asks a question about it. Here is how to answer it with a document attachment instead of a PDF parser or a week of RAG plumbing.
Laravel File Storage: The Complete Guide to Disks, Private Files, Direct Uploads and Signed URLs
Every Laravel app grows a file upload, and almost every one grows it the same wrong way: public disk, absolute URLs in the database, 300 MB videos through PHP, and a bucket full of objects nobody owns. This guide builds a private document library end to end on Laravel 13 — four disks, presigned browser uploads with a confirm step, three ways to serve a private file, validation that survives a spoofed MIME type, and the prune command nobody writes until the bill arrives.
The Widget That Forgets: Partitioned Cookies in PHP 8.5 and Laravel 13
PHP 8.5 finally lets setcookie() emit the Partitioned attribute. Here is how to use it, how Laravel 13 exposes it, and who should leave it alone.