NEW Renovate for Laravel: Automated Composer and npm Updates That Do Not Drown You in PRs Renovate for Laravel: Automated Composer...

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.

THE WRITING

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FEATURED filament

Filament v5 Database Notifications: A Real-Time Drawer Backed by Reverb

The import finished twenty minutes ago and nobody told anyone. A toast cannot fix that — the notifications drawer can, once you understand the payload shape Filament actually queries for.

September 24th, 2026 · 11 min read

livewire

Livewire 4 Single-File Components: When to Put PHP and Blade in One File (and When Not To)

Livewire 4 makes view-based components the default, and make:livewire no longer writes to app/Livewire. Here is what actually changed and how to decide between one file and a component directory.

September 23rd, 2026 · 10 min

tooling

Renovate for Laravel: Automated Composer and npm Updates That Do Not Drown You in PRs

Renovate's default config opens a PR per package and buries the repository within a day. The value is entirely in packageRules — here is the Laravel configuration that turns forty PRs a week into one.

September 22nd, 2026 · 15 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.