Application build-out
Domain modelling with Eloquent, form requests and validation, policies and gates for authorisation, and events where they genuinely decouple something.
Web & Application Development
Laravel development
Laravel is the framework I reach for when a PHP project needs structure: authentication, background jobs, scheduled tasks, a queue, and a migration history that lets more than one person work on the schema.
The interesting decisions in a Laravel project are usually not about Laravel. They are about how the data is modelled, what belongs in a job versus a request cycle, and how much of the frontend should be Blade versus a JavaScript layer. Getting those right early is what keeps the codebase pleasant at month twelve.
How I work on it
Process
Adjusted to the job, but this is the shape it usually takes.
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Model the data
Schema and relationships come before screens. Most painful Laravel projects are painful because the data model was invented one migration at a time.
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Ship a thin slice
One feature end to end (routes, tests, deployment) before broadening. It flushes out infrastructure problems while they are still cheap.
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Build out feature by feature
Each feature arrives with its tests and its migration, reviewable on its own.
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Hand over properly
A README that actually works from a clean checkout, plus notes on queues, cron entries and third-party credentials.
Questions
Things people ask
Livewire when the UI is mostly forms, tables and CRUD: it keeps the whole app in PHP and the team small. Inertia with React when there is genuine client-side interaction: drag and drop, live canvases, complex multi-step state. Mixing both in one app is usually a mistake.
Yes. Version-by-version upgrades following the official guides, with the test suite as the safety net. Jumping several majors at once is where projects get stuck, so we go one step at a time.
It can, and plenty of small sites do. You point the document root at /public and use the cron-based scheduler. But queue workers and Octane want a VPS. If the project needs those, shared hosting will fight you.