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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 php

json_validate() vs try/catch json_decode(): Checking JSON Without Building It

json_validate() landed in PHP 8.3 and immediately got used in the one place it makes things worse. Here is what it is actually for.

August 31st, 2026 · 9 min read

Generate Speech from Text in Laravel with the AI SDK's Audio Class

The Laravel AI SDK turns text-to-speech into four lines and hands you a Storage path instead of a byte string. Here is the whole surface — voices, queueing, serving — plus the hash cache that stops you paying twice for the same sentence.

August 30th, 2026 · 10 min

laravel-ai-sdk

Transcribe Audio in Laravel with the AI SDK: Uploads, Storage and Speaker Diarization

Transcription ships in the Laravel AI SDK with queueing, diarization and faking built in. Almost nobody knows it's there, so here's the whole path.

August 29th, 2026 · 8 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.