Thoughts on development, building products, and lessons learned along the way.
I built a real-time fuel price comparison app for Australia. Live petrol, diesel and LPG prices on a colour-coded map so the cheapest station is obvious at a glance. Free for now while in early release, no sign-up, on iPhone and the web.
Every queued job needs eight things the Laravel scaffold doesn't give you. 23 findings verified against Laravel 13.4.0 with links to real GitHub issues spanning 2015 to 2026.
Laravel's maxExceptions feature doesn't work when the failure mode is OOM. The exception counter lives in the catch block, which never executes during a fatal error. End-to-end proof on Laravel 13.4.0.
I rebuilt my personal site from Statamic SSG to Astro 6 with React islands. Here's what changed, what I added, and why static pages should ship zero JavaScript.
A blameless post-mortem on a reverted Laravel framework PR. What happened, what we learned, and the path forward.
Another round of contributions: 14 PRs merged across 5 Laravel repos, with a deep dive into serializable-closure bug fixes.
I benchmarked my Ryzen 9950X3D against my M1 MacBook for real Laravel + Claude Code work. The results were not what I expected.
A reflection on contributing 20 merged pull requests across 12 Laravel repositories in under two weeks.
I was unblocked from the Laravel GitHub org yesterday. Here's the full list of 91 PRs across 27 repos, confidence percentages, and what still needs review.
19 bugs fixed across the Laravel ecosystem: 10 Windows-specific, 9 cross-platform. Every fix verified on Windows 11 and macOS with reproductions and full test runs. Patches linked.
A PUBG stats and match replay tool. Search any player across Steam, Xbox, or PlayStation, then watch a full 2D replay with movement trails, zone shrink, and live kill feed.
A free PWA for scanning and generating barcodes in 27+ formats, including EAN-13, UPC-A, Code 128, and QR. Works offline, installs to your phone, validates check digits.
A no-signup poker blind timer for home games. No ads, no accounts, just open it and go. Source is on GitHub.
A friend told me to get a traditional job and build apps on the side. I thought it through and picked the opposite path. Here's why building my own apps is the right move for me right now.
KPIs are useful, but they aren't the goal. Take care of your people and your customers and the numbers take care of themselves. A case for people-first metrics with a lesson from Trek Bicycle.
A step-by-step guide to wiring a three-state dark mode selector (light, dark, system) with Alpine.js and Tailwind, including persistence and system preference detection.
An updated take on sharing data between Laravel and React: PHP 8.1 enums give you type safety, cleaner syntax, and encapsulated behaviour that class constants cannot.
Share PHP class constants with your React frontend through Inertia shared data to create a single source of truth for dropdowns, form options, and validation rules.