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.
Inngest vs. Laravel Queues: Where the Tradeoffs Actually Land
I swapped Laravel queues for Inngest on a multi-step workflow project and learned exactly where the abstraction earns its keep — and where it costs you.
Inngest sold me on the demo and then made me earn it in production. After shipping it on a healthcare-adjacent intake workflow last year, I have a clearer picture of where it genuinely beats Laravel queues and where you're paying a complexity tax for something you didn't need. The short version: if your workflow has…
Read the daily →Bind Mounts in Dev Will Lie to Your Face
The convenient dev setup that makes everything work locally is the same one that hides broken deploys until Friday afternoon.
Bind mounts in a Docker Compose dev setup are one of those things that feel like pure upside until they aren't. You edit a file, the change is live instantly, no rebuild needed. It's fast, it's convenient, and it's been quietly lying to you about whether your image actually works. I've been burned by this more than…
Read the daily →Clerk JWT Claims in Laravel: The SDK-Less Way That Actually Works
Clerk's frontend SDKs are slick, but the backend story for Laravel is 'bring your own.' Here's exactly how I wired it without surprises.
Clerk has no official Laravel SDK. That's not a complaint — it's just a fact you should know before you commit to it on a PHP project. What Clerk does have is a well-documented JWT-based session model, a public JWKS endpoint, and enough rope to hang yourself if you skip a few steps. I learned most of what's below by…
Read the daily →MariaDB Full-Text Search Is Probably Enough (I Know, I Know)
Before you spin up another service, try MATCH...AGAINST. I've been surprised more than once by how far native MariaDB full-text gets you.
Every time search comes up on a project, there's an immediate gravitational pull toward adding a dedicated search service. Meilisearch, Algolia, Elasticsearch — pick your poison. I've done it too. But the last three times I've actually stopped, benchmarked, and thought it through, MariaDB's native full-text search was…
Read the daily →PHP-FPM pm.max_children: The Math Nobody Writes Down
Everyone cargo-cults 50 workers. Here's how I actually calculate pm.max_children for a Laravel app on a single VM, and why getting it wrong kills you quietly.
Every few months I inherit a server someone else configured, and is either 10 (starving) or 500 (thrashing). Nobody got fired for either number because the app "works" — until traffic spikes or a slow query holds workers and the whole thing falls over. Here's the math I actually use, and why the defaults are quietly…
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