NEW Classifying Into a Deep Category Tree with Jev and Beam Search in Laravel Classifying Into a Deep Category Tree wi...

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.

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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.

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FEATURED laravel

Classifying Into a Deep Category Tree with Jev and Beam Search in Laravel

A 4,000-leaf taxonomy will not fit in one Choice question, and taking the best child at every level gets you confidently wrong answers. Here is the beam search that fixes it, in PHP.

October 23rd, 2026 · 15 min read

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Gate Your RAG Passages with Jev Before They Reach the LLM

Cosine similarity ranked a prompt injection first and the passage that corrected the question seventh. Here's the Laravel gate I put between retrieval and generation.

October 22nd, 2026 · 16 min

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PHP 8.6 Changes Your Session Defaults: What Breaks in a Laravel App

PHP 8.6 turns on session strict mode, HttpOnly and SameSite=Lax by default. Most Laravel apps shrug. Four specific integrations do not.

October 21st, 2026 · 10 min

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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.