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I am Steve McDougall. I help teams build APIs and Laravel systems that stay stable under load and stay readable a year later. Everything I publish — the writing, the videos, the talks — lives here permanently, unranked by an algorithm and free to read.

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Article

Accepting Data You Don't Control

Webhooks and callbacks you did not design. An ingest server in Laravel 13 that owns the envelope, stores the payload whole, and validates where failure means a retry, not data loss.

Aug 2026 · 14 min read

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If you want to watch
Video

Laravel "clean" architecture - episode 1

In this stream we are going to discuss and figure out the best way we can create a Laravel application while following some best practices - while still keeping the developer experience we all know an

2:13:15 · 25.8K views

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If you want the whole thing
Series

Building Software in the AI Era

Master the tools, habits, and operating models needed to ship high-quality software in a day-to-day workflow shaped by LLMs, moving past outdated sprints and velocity metrics.

Structured, start to finish

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The whole library

ArticleSept 2026

The Second Pattern: The Ones I Left Out

Five patterns I know well, that come up constantly, and would not reach for in PHP. Not because they are bad ideas, but because of what the runtime does and does not give you.

ArticleSept 2026

The Second Pattern: Blackboard

A pipeline works until one step both needs and improves the same piece of information. That is a cycle, and a topological sort has exactly one contract: there are no cycles.

VideoAug 2026

JustSteveKing Live Stream

0:00

VideoJul 2026

Messing around with Hermes and Tabstack

Steve and Tessa are messing around and building a Hermes agent with Tabstack and probably some other developer tools, too.

1:23:26

PodcastJun 2026

PHP Alive And Kicking: Episode 32 Tessa Kriesel & Steve McDougall

A lively episode talking all things tabstack with Tessa Kriesel and Steve McDougall, oh also Steve wrote a book.

PHP Alive And Kicking

TalkMay 2026

Stop Building CRUD APIs (do this instead)

Laravel Serbia · online

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