Conferences & Meetups
Introduction I am writing this from the comfort of my garden, just a few days after returning from London for Laravel Live UK 2026. What an absolute blast it was. The energy this year was unmatched by any previous conference I’ve attended. It was wonderful to catch up with
Conferences & Meetups
I got back from Laravel Live 2026 yesterday morning and was able to make a couple of additions to my Herd from the conference: * Eric the Red: This is the ElePHPant that is for Laravel Live Denmark this year. I was able to reach out to Kasper Hartwich who is
ElePHPants
It wouldn't be a PHP Tek conference without a new ElePHPant. This year, the team released "Holly" as the ElePHPant for 2026. As usual these were available on the store, so I purchased a couple of them, one for the herd and one as trade fodder.
Development
Last month, we received a report from a security researcher via our helpdesk that one of our apps was susceptible to XSS attacks. The report was on a weekend, but given the urgent nature (and the fact I wasn't doing much), I got to work on fixing it.
Development
I've been on a bit of a security drive recently, what with all of the recent supply chain attacks happening in the NPM and Composer worlds. Laravel recently unveiled a new package called Moat, which reviews the security of your GitHub organisations and repositories. Whilst controls for these
Development
We hit a bit of a bug in a couple of our Shopify Apps this week. We use Laravel Pulse and realised that for a couple of them, the dashboard was completely empty. This meant that we weren't getting alerts for issues including stuck jobs and other things
Development
In Some ways of speeding up your tests I mentioned about using PCOV as an alternate for Xdebug for code coverage. Xdebug is fantastic, but it can be quite slow, which means when you're running your tests in a CI/CD environment, your pipelines can start to get
Development
I recently announced that I've became a maintainer for the Laravel Shopify package: I’m now a maintainer for Laravel ShopifyI’m excited to announce that I’m now a maintainer for the Laravel Shopify package. This is a package that I’m using heavily at work so
Packages
I'm excited to announce that I'm now a maintainer for the Laravel Shopify package. This is a package that I'm using heavily at work so I have a vested interest in ensuring it lives on. I've already worked on a couple of
PHP Developer. Eater of Chicken. Gamer of Games. Collector of ElePHPants.
I recently completed a trade with Tim Bond as he was after an Eddie, which I was able to pick up a spare from PHPUK Conference earlier this year, and I was after a Hero (Heroku). That's another one checked off the list! I have a bunch of
One of the Shopify Apps I've been working on recently uses PrismPHP. PrismPHP forms some of the foundation of the Laravel AI SDK which we hope to switch to at some point however for most of the development of our app, the Laravel AI SDK required a PHP84
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,
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
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
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&
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
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
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
