Conferences
My next conference is booked! I'm excited to be heading back down to London again for Laravel Live 2026 in June. The conference last year was absolutely fantastic; the talks were great and I got chatting to a lot of wonderful people. The speakers are still being announced,
Development
A few weeks back, I woke up to a text from my good friend Sam Carré who I co-maintain SaloonPHP with. He'd received an email overnight from a security researcher who claimed to have found 3 security vulnerabilities with SaloonPHP. Both our first thoughts was that it was
General
Towards the end of 2021, I decided to rebuild my blog right here, on Ghost. I'd used Ghost before and loved it and the only reason I stopped was because I failed to keep up a regular posting schedule. Before Ghost I used WordPress, which was definitely an
ElePHPants
It's very rare that an ElePHPant gets put up for sale on eBay, even rarer when it's one I still need for my collection! I spotted a seller on eBay selling around 20 ElePHPants as one lot, so I send him a message asking if he&
ElePHPants
I was finally able to add Le Monstre to my Herd! This is the ElePHPant that was released to celebrate FrankenPHP reading 10,000 stars. Having used FrankenPHP before, I was happy to support it by purchasing a couple of ElePHPants! I also got A LOT of FrankenPHP stickers! Getting
Development
Over the last couple of years, I've been using and contributing to https://elephpant.me/ which is a website for collectors of PHP Elephpants to manage their collections and find new trade partners. After over a year of inactivity on the repository as a whole, I reached out
Shopify recently announced that they are changing the length of the JSON metafield type from 2MB to just 16kb. This change will be coming in to play in their 2026-04 update and although current apps will be grandfathered in at the existing 2MB limit, all new apps will need to
Hello! 👋 Welcome to my place on the Internet. I'm a PHP Developer, Gamer and Collector of Elephpants.
February is a month I look forward to because it’s time to head down to London for PHPUK! I learnt my mistake from last year where I did the whole trip in one day and decided this year, to travel down the evening before and stay in the nearby
I've been using Laravel Cloud for a bit now to test whether it's a good fit for our Shopify Apps. Overall it's an amazing product and based on our usage it will do what we need! There's a couple of things I&
This week I took the Laravel AI SDK for a spin! It hasn't officially released yet, I think that'll be coming at Laracon, but it's on Github and available to pull down into a project so I did just that! The Laravel AI SDK
I'm a big fan of Livewire, the SaaS I've been building for the last couple of years has been using Livewire since its inception! I recently updated it to Livewire 4 and wanted to talk about a few of the new features and functionality it adds.
At work, I've been focusing on getting the test suites for our various Shopify apps running quicker. The biggest gain was switching our CI/CD pipelines to use Pest Parallel testing, but our runners only have 2 processes so although they are quicker now, it's only
I've just booked my ticket for PHPUK 2026! After last years conference, I was 100% sure I was going back and I'm really looking forward to getting back down to London for another conference, networking with like-minded people and of course, listening to all of the
For our Shopify Apps at work, we have a fantastic PHP test suite for each one, using PestPHP to power them and we maintain 90% coverage. One of the gaps though is Javascript testing. We've had a couple of issues come up recently that no Pest test would
At Laravel Live last year, I got to watch a talk by Dan Johnson who showed his incredible package, Pinout. Laravel Pinout allows you to control hardware via a Laravel application and I knew as soon as the talk finished, I'd have to try it out! I ended
If you're writing tests for your application, you've probably came across tests that both pass and fail. These are known as flaky tests and can be quite hard to track down, especially if they only fail 1 in 100 or 1 in 1000 times. Flaky tests
One of the many things I've been working on lately is adding Leaky Bucket to the SaloonPHP Rate Limit Plugin. This request actually came in via a Github issue, but (maybe selfishly) I actually saw a use case for one of my own applications, so I set to
I've seen a bunch of stuff on Twitter recently about developer certifications, specifically Laravel certifications. Of course, a couple of years ago, Taylor Otwell announced the end of the partnership with the "Laravel Certification Program". At the beginning of this year, we discontinued our official partnership
This week, I've been working on getting Laravel Telescope working with SaloonPHP. This was previously doable using the SaloonPHP HTTP Client Sender package but we recently decided to abandon this package and instead build the functionality into the Laravel plugin. If you still require saloonphp/laravel-http-sender in your