NEW Profile a Slow Laravel Endpoint: SPX, Blackfire and Reading a Flame Graph Properly Profile a Slow Laravel Endpoint: SPX, Bl...

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 rector

Write a Custom Rector Rule to Refactor Your Own Laravel Conventions

Rector gets used for framework upgrades and almost never for the thing it is best at — mechanically applying a decision your own team made. Here's the AST-first workflow, and the two mistakes that make a new rule silently do nothing.

September 8th, 2026 · 12 min read

composer

Find the Composer Packages Your Laravel App Doesn't Actually Use

Every long-lived Laravel app carries packages nobody uses and packages nobody declared. Here is how to find both, survive the false-positive wall, and gate the check in CI.

September 7th, 2026 · 10 min

tooling

Profile a Slow Laravel Endpoint: SPX, Blackfire and Reading a Flame Graph Properly

Everyone can generate a flame graph. Almost nobody can read one. Here is the loop from a four-second endpoint to a merged fix, and why Kernel::handle is never the answer.

September 6th, 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.