LARAVAWY

Your road to senior Laravel.

The architecture, the scaling, and the hard-won lessons that take you from writing Laravel to leading it.

laravawy — someone who loves Laravel a little too much 😂
How I estimate software: ranges, not dates
Tech Lead Notes

How I estimate software: ranges, not dates

Early in my career, a manager asked how long a feature would take, and I said "Tuesday." I don't know why I said Tuesday. I wanted to sound like someone who had it handled. It w…

August 20, 2026Read more
The one-word fix for 'Column is ambiguous' in Laravel
Laravel in Practice

The one-word fix for 'Column is ambiguous' in Laravel

Saw this tip online and it was too good not to pass on. If you've ever shipped a query that worked fine for months and then blew up with Column 'tenantid' in where clause is amb…

August 5, 2026Read more
We moved a live store from MySQL to Postgres. Here's what actually broke.
Debugging

We moved a live store from MySQL to Postgres. Here's what actually broke.

We run a multi-vendor e-commerce platform, one of our own projects: shops, catalogs, carts, orders, subscriptions, referrals, the whole thing. Ninety-plus migrations, real traff…

July 28, 2026Read more
Eight months, no plan, nothing shipped. We shipped it in two.
Debugging

Eight months, no plan, nothing shipped. We shipped it in two.

A team had been building a health platform for eight, maybe nine months. The client had run out of money. And there was nothing to ship — not because the code didn't exist, but…

July 28, 2026Read more
GEO vs SEO: getting found when nobody googles anymore
Tech Lead Notes

GEO vs SEO: getting found when nobody googles anymore

Think about the last time you needed to know something technical. Did you open Google, scan ten blue links, and click through? Or did you just ask ChatGPT or Claude and read the…

July 28, 2026Read more
Laravel finally resizes images for you
Laravel in Practice

Laravel finally resizes images for you

Every Laravel app I've built that takes an avatar ended the same way: composer require intervention/image, wire up a facade, write a little service class, and hope the next dev…

July 26, 2026Read more
What actually breaks at 100,000 users (that never breaks in a demo)
Built at Scale

What actually breaks at 100,000 users (that never breaks in a demo)

The first time I shipped a dashboard to a hundred thousand active users, nothing I had tested was what broke. Everything that failed had passed every check I ran. It worked on m…

July 25, 2026Read more
Where your queue jobs go to die under load
Built at Scale

Where your queue jobs go to die under load

The support ticket said "I never got my invoice email." I checked the logs. The job ran. It succeeded. failedjobs was empty. Everything said the email went out. It did not.

July 18, 2026Read more
The indexes you're missing (and the one that's hurting you)
Built at Scale

The indexes you're missing (and the one that's hurting you)

A client sent me a query that took 4.2 seconds. One WHERE, one ORDER BY, a table with three million rows. I added a single index and it dropped to 11 milliseconds. They asked if…

July 11, 2026Read more
Caching in Laravel without the stampede
Built at Scale

Caching in Laravel without the stampede

We cached the homepage's "trending products" query for five minutes. It was our slowest query — about 900ms, a big aggregation across orders. Caching it took the homepage from s…

July 4, 2026Read more
Taking one endpoint from 800ms to 80ms
Built at Scale

Taking one endpoint from 800ms to 80ms

The order-details endpoint took 800 milliseconds. Not broken, just slow enough that the app felt heavy everywhere it was used. The team's instinct was "the server needs more mem…

June 27, 2026Read more
The N+1 you can't see (it's hiding in your accessors)
Built at Scale

The N+1 you can't see (it's hiding in your accessors)

I've fixed hundreds of N+1 queries. The easy ones are right there in the controller — a foreach with $order-customer inside it, obvious the moment you read the code. Those aren'…

June 20, 2026Read more
The Friday deploy that charged customers twice
Debugging

The Friday deploy that charged customers twice

It was 4:40 on a Friday. The change was tiny — a one-line tweak to how we called the payment provider, plus a bump to the queue worker's timeout. Small, tested, reviewed. I depl…

June 13, 2026Read more
Code review people don't dread
Tech Lead Notes

Code review people don't dread

I once left forty-one comments on a junior's pull request. I was proud of it. Thorough, I told myself. The next day he barely made eye contact, and his next PR sat open for a we…

June 6, 2026Read more
Hiring a mid-level Laravel dev: the signals that actually matter
Tech Lead Notes

Hiring a mid-level Laravel dev: the signals that actually matter

The best hire I ever made failed my first question. I asked him to explain service containers and he stumbled, went quiet, then said "honestly I use them every day but I've neve…

May 30, 2026Read more
Saying no to a feature without being the 'no' person
Tech Lead Notes

Saying no to a feature without being the 'no' person

For about a year I was the engineer everyone learned to route around. Not because I was wrong, I was usually right, but because my answer to new ideas was a flat "no, that'll br…

May 23, 2026Read more
My first 90 days as a tech lead (and the habit I had to break)
Tech Lead Notes

My first 90 days as a tech lead (and the habit I had to break)

Three weeks into leading my first team, I stayed late to "help" by rewriting a junior's feature myself. It was faster my way. I pushed it, felt productive, went home. The next m…

May 16, 2026Read more
Breaking down the task that scares you
Tech Lead Notes

Breaking down the task that scares you

There's a specific kind of ticket that makes my stomach drop. Not the hard ones, hard is fine. It's the ambiguous ones. "Migrate billing to the new provider." "Add multi-tenancy…

May 9, 2026Read more
1:1s that aren't just status updates
Tech Lead Notes

1:1s that aren't just status updates

For my first few months as a lead, my 1:1s were thirty minutes of me asking "so, what are you working on?" and nodding at answers I already knew from standup. We both left sligh…

May 2, 2026Read more
Get the business logic out of your controllers
Laravel in Practice

Get the business logic out of your controllers

I once opened a OrderController@store method that was 240 lines long. Validation, a discount calculation, three model writes, a Stripe charge, two emails, a Slack notification,…

April 25, 2026Read more
Form Requests are the most underrated thing in Laravel
Laravel in Practice

Form Requests are the most underrated thing in Laravel

Most Laravel devs meet Form Requests once, in a tutorial, use them to hold a rules() array, and never look deeper. That's a shame, because a Form Request is the cleanest place i…

April 18, 2026Read more
Testing Laravel without mocking everything
Laravel in Practice

Testing Laravel without mocking everything

I inherited a codebase once with 900 unit tests and no confidence. Every test mocked the repository, mocked the model, mocked the mailer, mocked the thing three layers down. The…

April 11, 2026Read more
Three Eloquent features that clean up your models
Laravel in Practice

Three Eloquent features that clean up your models

The messiest Laravel model I ever wrote wasn't messy because of Eloquent. It was messy because I ignored the parts of Eloquent that exist specifically to keep it clean. The same…

April 4, 2026Read more
The migration that locked the table for eight minutes
Debugging

The migration that locked the table for eight minutes

The deploy looked boring. One migration, adding a lastseenat column to the users table with a default of now(). I'd written a hundred like it. I ran it at 2pm on a Tuesday becau…

March 28, 2026Read more
Chasing a memory leak in a Laravel queue worker
Debugging

Chasing a memory leak in a Laravel queue worker

The alert came in at 4am: one of our queue:work processes had been OOM-killed. The supervisor restarted it, it processed jobs for about forty minutes, and got killed again. It w…

March 21, 2026Read more