NEW Build a Real-Time Chat App with Livewire 4 and Reverb Build a Real-Time Chat App with Livewire...

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

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FEATURED livewire

Auto-Refresh a Livewire 4 Dashboard with wire:poll

wire:poll keeps a Livewire 4 dashboard's metric cards current on an interval, with no JavaScript. Here's how to tune it, throttle it, and scope it to an island.

July 18th, 2026 · 7 min read

laravel

Auto-Delete Stale Records with Laravel's Prunable Trait

Some tables only ever grow. Here's how Laravel's Prunable trait deletes stale rows on a schedule — safely, in chunks, with a hook for cleaning up related files.

July 17th, 2026 · 6 min

livewire

Build a Real-Time Chat App with Livewire 4 and Reverb

Most chat tutorials stop at 'message appears' and lean on Pusher. This is the end-to-end, first-party build: Reverb, DB-first persistence, private and presence channels, typing indicators, channel auth, and deployment — with no hand-written message JS.

July 17th, 2026 · 18 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.