Articles

Below are some of my featured articles. You may also browse the archives for all my articles.

Main Thread 8 minutes

Fast Laravel Case Study: Laravel News

A technical deep dive into caching the most-requested Laravel News pages with Cloudflare.

Main Thread 5 minutes

Shift's first flat year

2025 was the first "flat" year (no growth) in 10 years of Shift.

Main Thread 14 minutes

Flying around the world with Laravel and the Stock Market

The complete story of flying around the world, first class - all paid for by Laravel and the Stock Market.

Main Thread 5 minutes

Why another side-project

Asking myself why I decided to work on yet another side-project.

Main Thread 8 minutes

Launching another side-project

Coming to my decision to launch another side-project and key takeaways for working on side-projects.

Main Thread 6 minutes

4 personal finance tips for Indie Hackers

A review of the personal finance decisions which increased my calm as an Indie Hacker running a successful SaaS.

Main Thread 6 minutes

Spawning workers based on queue workload

The backstory for building a feature to spawn additional worker servers based on the job queue workload.

Main Thread 37 minutes

Grinding to $1,000,000 in revenue over 6 years

A review of growing my SaaS product to $1,000,000 in revenue over 6 years, both from a business and personal perspective.

Main Thread 6 minutes

Configuration precedence when testing Laravel

A deep dive into the precedence of the various configurations when testing Laravel applications.

Main Thread 5 minutes

Avoiding inheritance in Laravel

Developers often choose to use inheritance. However, in Laravel, this may prove to be a painful decision.

Main Thread 11 minutes

Crafting maintainable Laravel applications

10 tips for crafting maintainable Laravel applications which leverage features of the Laravel framework while remaining easy to upgrade.

Main Thread 4 minutes

Why your team should not be upgrading old Laravel applications

Why upgrading your old Laravel applications is a waste of your resources with a pitch for Shift do it instead.

Main Thread 8 minutes

Start testing your Laravel applications

An in-depth guide to using HTTP Tests to get started writing tests for your Laravel application.

Main Thread 6 minutes

10 practices for readable code

A set of 10 practices for writing code with a focus on improving readability and reducing complexity.

Main Thread 2 minutes

You changed the code, you didn't refactor the code.

A closer look at the important difference between changing code and refactoring code.

Main Thread 4 minutes

Compensation tips

Advice on compensation, seeking raises, and determining when to change jobs shared from my own experiences.

Main Thread 5 minutes

Practicing YAGNI

A summary of my talk at Laracon US 2016 on "Practicing YAGNI".

Main Thread 2 minutes

Are you a Boy Scout?

A look at how the simple practice of "boyscouting" can improve your code.

Main Thread 3 minutes

The Reading List

A list of books culled over the years on the journey to improve my craft as a software engineer.

Main Thread 2 minutes

Why I leave a job

A reflection on the core criteria of a good job after deciding to leave The New York Times.

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