The notebook

All AI & LLMs Cloud & DevOps Industry Insights Laravel & PHP Modernisation Performance & Scale SaaS & Product Security & Compliance

All posts 113 posts

31 May 2026 Laravel & PHP Filament v5 in Production: Admin Panels in Days, Not Weeks What v5's unified schema, native multi-tenancy, and slimmer JS bundle change in practice, with real hour counts from client admin builds. Includes the boundary line: the customizations where... → 28 May 2026 Laravel & PHP A Pragmatic Pest Testing Strategy for Laravel Client Projects What to test when the budget is fixed: feature-tests-first ratios, which units earn dedicated tests, and how Pest's architecture presets and mutation testing fit a solo-freelancer CI. A cand... → 27 May 2026 SaaS & Product What an MVP Really Costs in 2026: Numbers From Real Projects Quotes for the same MVP idea range from €15k to €150k — and most of them are honest. The scope tiers, the AI surcharge and the hidden 20–35% that explain the spread. → 25 May 2026 Laravel & PHP Laravel Sanctum vs Passport: Picking API Auth in 2026 The 90/10 rule — Sanctum for SPAs, mobile, and first-party tokens; Passport only when you are genuinely an OAuth2 authorization server for third parties. Includes token-ability patterns, tes... → 22 May 2026 Laravel & PHP Laravel API Versioning and Resource Design That Ages Well URL-based versioning with per-version controllers and API Resources, and when Laravel 13's first-party JSON:API support is worth adopting over hand-rolled resources. Framed around the freela... → 20 May 2026 Industry Insights Interview the engineer before you sign Most agencies will never let you interview the engineer who will build your product. Here is why that matters, what to ask in 45 minutes, and the code test I would happily take myself. → 19 May 2026 Laravel & PHP Laravel Queues at Scale: Horizon Tuning and Idempotent Jobs The failure modes that only show up past ~100k jobs/day: retry_after vs timeout mismatch causing duplicate processing, queue starvation, and non-idempotent retries. Concrete Horizon supervis... → 16 May 2026 Laravel & PHP End-to-End Type Safety with Laravel, Inertia, and React A practical wiring guide: laravel-data + TypeScript Transformer to push typed DTOs from PHP 8.4 to React props, catching contract drift at build time instead of in production. Shows the exac... → 16 May 2026 Industry Insights Working across a 10-hour time difference, honestly The time difference is the first question US clients ask me. The honest answer: it breaks some workflows, quietly improves others, and lives or dies on async discipline. → 13 May 2026 Laravel & PHP Livewire vs Inertia in 2026: How I Choose for Client Projects A decision framework based on product shape (content site vs tool), team JS skill, and future API needs — not framework hype. Grounded in Livewire 4 / Inertia 3 realities and the freelance a... → 10 May 2026 Laravel & PHP PHP 8.4 Property Hooks in Laravel: Wins, Traps, and Refactors Where hooks and asymmetric visibility genuinely shrink code (DTOs, value objects, form objects) versus where they collide with Eloquent's magic accessors and hydration side effects. Includes... → 09 May 2026 Industry Insights What "dedicated developer" actually means when you buy it "Dedicated developer" can mean one engineer on your backlog — or a rotating seat shared across three accounts. How to tell which one you are actually buying, before you sign. →