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
Upgrade Postgres Under a Live Laravel App with Logical Replication
pg_upgrade needs the database stopped for a window nobody can predict. Logical replication gets you a cutover measured in seconds — if you handle sequences, DDL and your queue workers correctly.
The Eloquent Events That Never Fire
Observers are a convenience, not a guarantee. Half the write operations in Laravel never load a model, so they never fire an event — and nothing tells you.
The Serializer Nobody Configures: igbinary for Laravel Cache and Queue Payloads
Laravel's Redis connection has a serializer option that is unset by default. Turning on igbinary can cut cached payloads by a third — and will silently orphan every existing key if you do it wrong.