Conferences

Adding Eric the Red and Sentaur to the Herd

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 the main organiser of that conference and arrange a trade for a Sylius (Green) as I had 2 duplicates, so it was the perfect opportunity to get rid of one!
Sentaur: I realised ahead of time that Sentry were a sponsor, and I thought they may have a booth, so I packed a spare Enfys (Rainbow) in hopes of sparking up a trade. I was able to trade one for a Sentaur as they had a booth and has ElePHPants! Towards the end of the conference, I was able to snag a 2nd Sentaur to take back for my team! Very cool of the Sentry team for allowing this!

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Turns out, the Sentaur offered at this conference is a different generation to the one from Laracon US. This one is a darker purple and has different coloured headphones!

I'm currently writing a (rather long) post about Laravel Live UK, which will hopefully be coming next Sunday!

Adding Holly to the Herd

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.

Using Cursor Security Agent

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.

Laravel Moat

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

Laravel Pulse now supports `use_upsert_alias`

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

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Adding Holly to the Herd

Using Cursor Security Agent

Laravel Moat

Laravel Pulse now supports `use_upsert_alias`