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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.
Three places to start
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
All articles →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
All videos →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habits, and operating models needed to ship high-quality software in a day-to-day workflow shaped by LLMs, moving past outdated sprints and velocity metrics.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
All series →The whole library
Latest
Everything →The UK is mandating e-invoicing in 2029, and your invoicing code is not ready
From 2029 every UK VAT invoice has to be structured data that passes about eleven hundred rules. What that means for the invoices table you already have, and the four fields that break first.
Digital sovereignty is written in PHP, and the UK just made it fundable
The PHP Foundation made the case for funding upstream maintenance through procurement. Their proposals are written against EU rules. The UK deleted the clause that was blocking them.
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
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
Stop Building CRUD APIs (do this instead)
Laravel Serbia · online
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