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
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.
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.
PHP 8.6's SortDirection Enum: Typed Sorting in Laravel Queries and Collections
PHP 8.6 adds a global SortDirection enum, and Laravel 13 already accepts it in orderBy() and sortBy(). Here is what it does, what it deliberately does not do, and the one validation gotcha that will bite you.