The Daily
A note a day on APIs and the realities of shipping web applications. Stuff I've actually learned across 25 years of doing the work.
Telescope Will Burn You in Production
Laravel Telescope is the best debugging tool I've ever accidentally left in production. Here's why I don't use it anymore, and what I run instead.
Telescope is a genuinely great debugging tool. It's also one of the most dangerous things you can leave running in a production environment, and the Laravel ecosystem doesn't talk about that loudly enough. I've seen it expose request payloads, slow down apps under load, and balloon databases — all while sitting…
Read the daily →Build vs. Buy Your Admin Panel (And When You're Fooling Yourself)
Filament and Nova are genuinely good. But I've watched teams spend three weeks customizing one into something they should have just built from scratch.
Filament and Laravel Nova are both genuinely good pieces of software. I've used both in production. But I've also watched a project start as "we'll just use Filament" and end three months later as a barely-recognizable fork with seventeen custom Livewire components, a hacked-together permission system, and a teammate…
Read the daily →Structured Laravel Logging You Can Actually Query (No Datadog Required)
You don't need a $500/month observability platform to query your logs. Here's how I set up structured logging on a single VM that doesn't make me want to grep through walls.
Most single-VM Laravel apps I inherit have the same log setup: the default channel, a wall of unstructured text in , and a developer who's been doing and hoping for the best. That's fine until something breaks at 2am and you're staring at a 400MB log file trying to correlate a user ID across five different request…
Read the daily →Shaving 600MB off a Laravel Image with Multi-Stage Builds
Multi-stage Docker builds aren't magic — they're a scalpel. Here's what they actually copy, what they silently skip, and how I got a Laravel image from 980MB to 340MB.
I spent an embarrassing amount of time thinking multi-stage Docker builds were basically magic — build your stuff in one container, copy it to another, done, small image. Then I deployed a Laravel app to a client's VPS and watched the image clock in at 980MB. That's when I actually sat down and read what does and…
Read the daily →SQLite as Your Laravel SaaS DB: Where It Holds Up and Where It Breaks
I ran SQLite as the primary database on a real single-tenant Laravel app. Here's what actually happened when the load got serious.
SQLite in production gets dismissed immediately by most people who've never actually tried it for a real workload. I was one of those people — until a client situation forced my hand, and it worked better than I expected for longer than I expected. Then it didn't. Here's the honest version. The Setup That Got Me Here…
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