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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September 7th, 2026 · 10 min read

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

laravel

Laravel Maintenance Mode That Actually Works: down --render, Secret Bypass and the Octane Trap

php artisan down boots the framework to tell you the framework is broken. Here are the four flags nobody sets, the multi-server failure everyone hits once, and what Octane quietly does to all of it.

September 5th, 2026 · 9 min

/NOW

Currently shipping, reading, and thinking about.

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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.