NEW Deploy Laravel to a VPS with Kamal 2: A Complete Guide Deploy Laravel to a VPS with Kamal 2: A...

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.

Read the latest About me

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

Latest from the journal

View all posts →

FEATURED livewire

Protect Livewire 4 Properties from Client-Side Tampering with #[Locked]

Every public Livewire property is sent to the browser and accepted back, so a user can rewrite it in DevTools. #[Locked] shuts that door for the properties that matter.

July 15th, 2026 · 6 min read

laravel

Persist Multi-Turn Chat History with the Laravel AI SDK

A stateless agent forgets every turn. Here's how to wire persistent conversation memory into a Laravel AI SDK agent, resume a chat by ID, and stop long histories from wrecking your token budget.

July 14th, 2026 · 7 min

php

Parse HTML5 Properly with PHP 8.4's Dom\HTMLDocument

For twenty years, parsing HTML in PHP meant fighting DOMDocument's mangled UTF-8 and XPath. PHP 8.4's Dom\HTMLDocument finally does it properly.

July 14th, 2026 · 6 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.