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Writing about Laravel, PHP, developer tools, and building software.

ai budget CircleCI claude claude code cli cloudinary code review content Dhh eloquent Filament flywheel image manipulation image processing Laravel laravel envoyer memory systems Mocking obsidian openclaw orm pestphp PHP PHPUnit queue queue management refactoring social spec first Tailwind Testing TUI ynab

Mar 31, 2026 · 9 min read

My AI Agent Knows What Project I'm Working On Before I Tell It

Every Claude Code session started cold. I built a hook that reads my first message, matches keywords to projects, and loads the right vault context automatically. Now sessions pick up where the last one left off.

claude code ai obsidian openclaw

Mar 26, 2026 · 6 min read

Not Every Podcast Has a Transcript - Now I Don't Care

I wanted searchable transcripts for every podcast I listen to. Whether the show publishes one or not, I get the same note.

claude ai obsidian openclaw

Mar 24, 2026 · 8 min read

I Built a Content Flywheel That Runs on Obsidian and AI Skills

Sunday night, my AI agent syncs stats from four platforms, reviews what worked, and generates next week's content calendar. I built the whole pipeline with Claude Code skills and an Obsidian vault.

ai obsidian openclaw content flywheel social

Mar 19, 2026 · 10 min read

I Wired OpenClaw into My Obsidian Vault. Here's What It Can Do.

I had four Claude sessions running, each one an island. The fix wasn't a better AI. It was a structured knowledge base the AI could actually read.

claude claude code ai obsidian openclaw memory systems

Mar 5, 2026 · 9 min read

I Rebuilt My Personal Site with Claude AI and Claude Code. Here's Exactly How.

I rebuilt my entire personal site from scratch in 24 hours using Claude AI and Claude Code. Here's the exact process I followed.

Laravel claude claude code ai spec first Tailwind Filament

Jan 31, 2025 · 3 min read

Building a YNAB CLI in Laravel

I've been using You Need a Budget (YNAB) since 2019 and love it. I'm in the budget daily, entering transactions, tinkering, and ensuring my family is on track with our financial goals and current priorities. However, as the transactions and payees pi...

ynab Laravel budget cli TUI

Sep 1, 2024 · 6 min read

Colocating Tests in Laravel

In a typical Laravel application, tests are housed in the /Tests directory and spread across /Tests/Feature and /Tests/Unit, which mimics the structure within the app/ directory. While this is a great starting point for apps, it quickly breaks down w...

Laravel Testing pestphp PHPUnit

Sep 26, 2023 · 2 min read

Improve Your Productivity While Utilizing Laravel Mocks

Laravel has numerous test helpers and mocks within the framework, which is fantastic. However, I see other engineers getting caught up on debugging issues when they arise. The Laravel docs show this as an example Queue::assertPushed(function (ShipOrd...

Laravel Testing pestphp PHPUnit Mocking

Aug 17, 2018 · 9 min read

Tips, Tricks, and Good Practices with Laravel's Eloquent

This is a talk I gave at TrianglePHP on Aug 16, 2018. We'll learn how Eloquent functions on the basic levels and continue through some more well-known methods and some possibly lesser-known ones. Then we'll finish with some more advanced ideas and te...

Laravel eloquent PHP orm

Apr 6, 2018 · 3 min read

Deploying Specific Branches with Laravel, CircleCI, and Envoyer

A few weeks ago I was trying to update a side project's CircleCI config from version 1 to version 2 since they are depreciating V1 in August 2018. In the process, I was curious how I could deploy specific branches to specific environments in Laravel'...

Laravel CircleCI laravel envoyer

Feb 28, 2018 · 3 min read

Revisiting Our Work

I recently watched David Heinemeier Hansson’s (@dhh) video on code comments and refactoring. While it’s interesting to see how he tackles these code changes, the most interesting thing to me is what he said he does with the codebase. “I read throu...

Dhh refactoring code review

May 31, 2017 · 2 min read

How to order by all() in Laravel

One common issue that I see with Laravel newcomers is that they have hangups using Eloquent correctly. The most basic reference given in the documentation and tutorials is using the all() method. $users = User::all(); But what happens when you want ...

Laravel eloquent