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.
Stripe Checkout vs. Elements: The Migration Cost Nobody Talks About
Stripe Checkout gets you live fast. Elements gives you control. The problem is what nobody tells you about moving between them once you've shipped.
Stripe Checkout is one of those decisions that feels obviously correct in week one and quietly wrong by month six. I've made it twice for clients, and both times the migration to Elements cost more than the original integration. I want to put some actual numbers and specifics on that, because the Stripe docs don't…
Read the daily →Soketi: Pusher Drop-In That's Mostly Great Until It Isn't
I self-hosted Soketi as a Pusher replacement for a Laravel app and it worked beautifully — right up until it didn't. Here's what actually breaks at scale.
Soketi is one of those tools that makes you feel very smart for about three weeks. You cut your Pusher bill, you own your infrastructure, and the Laravel broadcasting layer doesn't know the difference. Then you start scaling and you realize you've traded a boring SaaS line item for an interesting ops problem. I've run…
Read the daily →Laravel Boot Order: The Class-Resolution Bugs That Only Bite in Production
Service provider boot order in Laravel looks harmless until it silently breaks class resolution in production. Here's what I learned the hard way.
Twice in the last three years I've pushed what looked like a clean deploy and watched a feature silently stop working in production — no exception, no log entry, just wrong behavior. Both times the root cause was service provider boot order. Not a missing env var, not a caching issue, not a race condition. Just…
Read the daily →Healthchecks.io Is the Dead-Man Switch Your Laravel Scheduler Needs
Your cron jobs are silently failing and you don't know it. Here's how I wire Healthchecks.io into Laravel Scheduler so I actually find out.
The scariest class of production bug is the one where nothing throws an exception. The job runs, exits zero, and Laravel is perfectly happy — but the work didn't actually happen. I've had scheduled imports stop pulling data because an upstream API quietly changed an endpoint. I've had cleanup jobs that stopped…
Read the daily →The nginx Worker Math That Actually Applies to a Laravel Stack
Most nginx tuning guides throw numbers at you without context. Here's the math I actually use for single-VM Laravel deployments.
Every nginx tuning article eventually tells you to set and and then moves on like that's the end of it. It isn't. Those defaults will get you through a lot, but when something goes sideways under load — and it will — you need to understand the actual math, not just the cargo-culted config. I've tuned single-VM Laravel…
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