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.
Laravel Vite in Docker: The Manifest Race and Why Build Context Matters
Vite and Docker seem simple until your assets 404 in staging and you're staring at a manifest.json that may or may not exist yet.
Vite's Laravel plugin is genuinely good when it works, and genuinely maddening when it doesn't. The failure mode I've hit most often isn't the code — it's the container build order and what ends up (or doesn't end up) in when PHP tries to read the manifest. What Problem Vite Actually Solves Here Before Vite, Laravel…
Read the daily →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…
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