Steve McDougall — Articles

The most copied OpenAPI document in the world is a bad API for an agent, and it takes a third of a second to find out.

An agent never reads your API.

From 2029 every UK VAT invoice has to be structured data that passes about eleven hundred rules.

The PHP Foundation made the case for funding upstream maintenance through procurement.

Five patterns I know well, that come up constantly, and would not reach for in PHP.

A pipeline works until one step both needs and improves the same piece of information.

A consumer that receives an ID and immediately asks you for the record has not been decoupled from you.

Everyone calls it a Saga.

API design is a user experience problem and nobody argues any more.

Carrier B did not go down, it got slow, and every worker sat inside an eleven second call that returned a valid 200.

A payload that is 40KB almost always and 12MB occasionally cannot be sized for.

Select then insert handles the easy half of duplicate delivery and misses the concurrent case, which is the half that actually fires.

Commit then notify loses messages.

Carrier B speaks GraphQL, so the response arrives shaped like your query and feels like it belongs to you.

Nine optional parameters is the symptom.

A slow Laravel test suite gets treated as a tooling problem.

You have run the diagnostics and you have a list.

The same operation runs from two entry points and they have quietly drifted.

You added it so the thing could be swapped out later.

Every Laravel codebase has a model people route around.

Every trigger in this series has been a second something.

Ten files open for a one line change is either layering working correctly or one idea smeared across a codebase.

A desktop research workspace in Laravel and NativePHP.

[Automatically generated using robots and AI, accuracy may not be 100%] Two weeks of Laravel 13: a read-through filesystem driver for zero-downtime storage migrations, a global queue pause switch, debounced listeners, and Redis cluster fixes worth upgradi…

Webhooks and callbacks you did not design.

Specs, ADRs and path-scoped rules.

The Obsidian vault I use as a system of record for every project, why the checkouts inside it are gitignored, and why half of it is generated from my NixOS flake.

The Streamable HTTP transport replaced HTTP+SSE and quietly made MCP servers stateless.

How auto-imported flake-parts modules, wrapped desktop packages, and a single base16 palette file shape one NixOS config - and where each one bites.

A workflow that sleeps for three days is not a workflow you can test by waiting.

Build a real order fulfilment workflow in Laravel: signals from webhooks, timeouts, retries, branching, sleep and saga compensation, one step at a time.

Replace a procedural PHP monolith with Laravel one route at a time.

Stop letting undocumented fields into your Laravel API.

The Laravel AI SDK is provider-agnostic, but its built-in web tools aren't.

How to run AI across the whole dev lifecycle: the right agent at each stage, human gates on judgement, and decision records that keep architecture honest.

Fibers give PHP concurrency.

A developer's review of Tabstack, the Mozilla-backed web API that gives AI agents clean extraction, browser automation, and cited research without a scraper.

The Polling API gives PHP 8.6 native epoll and kqueue at last.

A hands-on look at Mozilla's tabstack CLI: a single Go binary that turns any URL into clean Markdown or JSON, runs browser automation, and scripts neatly.

Practical tips for building Laravel APIs developers trust: contract-first design, versioning, RFC 9457 errors, idempotency and more.

Mocking your own Actions tests the wiring, not the behaviour.

Sevalla simplifies cloud hosting by providing intuitive app deployment, database hosting, and object storage.

Learn how to build device-based rate limiting in Laravel with Fingerprint.dev, Redis caching, and custom middleware to avoid the limits of IP-based throttling.

Tempest makes API development feel lightweight by combining typed request objects, attribute-based validation, discovery-driven routing, and built-in mapping with minimal ceremony.

Use state machines and workflow engines in Laravel to keep business rules explicit, auditable, and resilient across async processes.

Map entities and relationships before you write migrations so your schema starts on solid ground.

Turn vague tasks into user-focused features with clearer outcomes and better stories.

Use layered thinking to place logic in the right part of your application before it turns into a mess.

A practical mindset shift for turning thinking-first habits into mid-level engineering judgment.

Think through requirements, assumptions, and structure before you open your editor.