Development
My Laravel Cloud Bucket List
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&
Jon Purvis
Development
Thoughts on the Laravel AI SDK
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
Development
Livewire 4
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.
Development
Some ways of speeding up your tests
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
Conferences
I'm heading to PHPUK 2026
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
Development
Trying out Vitest
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
Development
Trying Laravel Pinout
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
Development
Flaky Tests
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
Development
SaloonPHP now has a Leaky Bucket
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
Development
Why I'm not a fan of certifications
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
Development
Laravel Telescope Integration for SaloonPHP
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
Music
The Raven Age
This week I was lucky enough to see The Raven Age live in Manchester on the Monarchy Tour! The Raven Age fast became one of my favourite bands after seeing them open for Iron Maiden earlier this year. ℹ️George Harris, guitarist for the Raven Age is the son of