Laravel & PHP
Building a Queued PDF Export Pipeline in Laravel
How we coordinate graphics preparation, cached output and queued PDF generation in Spartacus Insights, and why exporting includes more than creating the file.
Notes from
the work.
Engineering decisions, product questions, and the less tidy parts of building things. From the latest notes back to the beginning.
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- Cybersecurity
What Years of Building Long PDF Reports Taught Me
What it takes to deliver long assessment reports with user content, charts, reliable navigation and PDF metadata, using Laravel and browser-based tools.
- Cybersecurity
Spartacus Insights Now Has a Public Home
One of the SaaS products I've been building at Digital Marmalade finally has a public website. It's been running for 5 years, and anyone can now see what it does.
- Building a product
ParkMyAWS Is Ready for Beta
The product is done: scheduling works, savings dashboard works, no credentials stored. Now comes the scary bit, putting it in front of real users.
- Building a product
Eight Weeks of Building ParkMyAWS in Public
Eight weeks ago I started posting about building ParkMyAWS. Now I'm running the final tests before opening it up to the first beta users.
- AWS
How Much of Your AWS Runs While Nobody Is Working?
Most teams use their dev and staging environments for 8 hours a day and pay for them to run 24. The math on always-on infrastructure, and why it's so hard to fix manually.
- AWS
The Hidden AWS Cost You're Probably Paying
AWS quietly bills you for things while you sleep: dev servers, staging environments, forgotten test databases. None of them feel expensive alone, but together they inflate the monthly bill.
- Building a product
The Hardest Part of Building Alone
Why deciding what not to build is harder than writing code, and the filter that keeps me focused while working on ParkMyAWS.
- Building a product
Building a SaaS After Bedtime
What it's actually like building a SaaS product in 90-minute evening sessions: the progress, the unglamorous parts, and why the coding isn't the hardest thing.
- Building a product
Why I'm Building ParkMyAWS
The origin story behind ParkMyAWS: a tool we used and lost after an acquisition, and the simpler version I'm building in late-night sessions.
- Laravel & PHP
Migrating a Legacy Laravel App with AI: From PHP 7.4 to Laravel 12
How I used Claude Code to modernise a neglected marketing site: fixing N+1 queries, stripping dead code, and jumping from Laravel 9 to 12 in a single day.
- Frontend
Why I Replaced Excel with a Web App for Payroll
How I turned a complex Cyprus payroll spreadsheet into a type-safe Vue 3 calculator, and what I learned about building financial software.
- Laravel & PHP
My Side Project Stack in 2026
The tools and frameworks I'm using across my projects in 2026, what's working, what I'd change, and why I picked each one.
- AWS
Secure AWS Integrations: The AssumeRole Pattern
How to build multi-account AWS access without ever storing credentials, using IAM AssumeRole with external IDs and temporary session tokens.
- Laravel & PHP
Action Pattern in Laravel: Why I Stopped Using Fat Controllers
How extracting business logic into single-purpose Action classes made my Laravel code easier to navigate, test, and maintain.
- AWS
Allowing GitHub Actions to SSH into Your Server
A technical guide on configuring AWS to allow GitHub Actions to SSH into your server.
- Career & personal
Impostor Syndrome: Maybe I'm Not Good Enough?
Sometimes I feel like I'm falling behind. Here's my take on impostor syndrome as a senior developer, parent, and human.
- Laravel & PHP
Running Multiple PHP Versions on a Single EC2 Instance
How we manage different PHP versions from 5.6 to 8.4 on a single server using Docker and volume mapping
- Frontend
Learning Astro by converting Next.js template.
I decided to convert the React-based template into an Astro site in order to get my hands on it.
- Career & personal
Finally launching my site
I hold this domain for some years now and it was about time to launch my site.