Steve McDougall
Steve McDougall is a conference speaker, technical writer, and YouTube livestreamer. During the day he works on building API tools for Treblle, and in the evenings spends most of his time writing content, or contributing to the PHP open source community. Whatever you do, don’t ask him his opinion on twitter/X @JustSteveKing
twitter: @JustSteveKing
Articles
Building an API Starter Kit for Laravel
By Steve McDougall
by Steve McDougall
Published in Time For PHP, December 2024
How Steve Writes Laravel Code
By Steve McDougall
I get asked all the time how I approach a project when it comes to Laravel, so I thought I would walk through how I build Laravel applications to answer these questions. by Steve McDougall
Published in PHP Is Listening, September 2024
Llamas, Llamas everywhere
By Steve McDougall
AI. It is more than just a buzzword we see floating everywhere on the internet. It is in our phones and our applications. Everywhere you turn, some company is doing something with AI. Whether it is a new LLM being released or a new company training their LLM on the data you have been adding to their platform for years. by Steve McDougall
Published in AI Llamas, June 2024
Cloudy with a chance of elephants
By Steve McDougall
Cloudflare is a service most of us love. It is pretty much the kind of networking required by projects/applications these days, and I cannot think of anyone who may even come close. They have not only built trust but also have the infrastructure and knowledge in place to not be challenged. They are useful for a lot of things, and when building an application for a production environment, you can almost guarantee you will need more than one of their services. by Steve McDougall
Published in PHP Reflections, May 2024
APIs In The Wild Wild West
By Steve McDougall
For the longest time, we have been struggling with talking to third-party APIs and having service classes that rely on static variables littered throughout our applications. by Steve McDougall
Published in World Community, March 2024
API Essentials: A Developer’s Guide to Authentication, Validation, and DTOs
By Steve McDougall
This article is aimed to walk you through how I handle requests in my API projects – typically Laravel at the moment. What I do, why I do it, and where I think it could be improved. by Steve McDougall
Published in The PHP Gambit: Winning Strategies in Code, February 2024
Hooked On Functionality: The Whimsical World Of Webhooks In PHP
By Steve McDougall
Let’s dive into the fun and exciting realm of sending webhooks in PHP, where we will decode their magic and utility in modern web development. Using webhooks, we can turn our typical web application into something more event-driven and aware of other systems and their events. by Steve McDougall
Published in Bad Bug Bounties, January 2024
Controlling Quality in Laravel
By Steve McDougall
I want to give an overview of the tools I like to use for controlling the quality of my code, how I configure them, and how I like to use them. Many people have “their” approach to this, but I find discussing it openly is how we learn from one another and start to adapt. by Steve McDougall
Published in Generating Efficient PHP, December 2023
Alternative Architecture in Laravel
By Steve McDougall
In Laravel, we are used to writing our code exactly as it comes out of the box. Model View Controller (MVC) pattern is something we are extremely familiar with – and the documentation leads us in this direction by default. However, does this work in every scenario? What happens when features pile up or our team grows to a point that makes it harder to manage and not trip over each other? Some people at this point would look to split the application out into multiple services or micro-services; however, that isn’t always very beneficial. Let’s take a walk down the path of Software Architecture and see what we can find. by Steve McDougall
Published in Command Line Picasso, November 2023
Taking Laravel To The Orchestra; Building A Symfony Inspired Application.
By Steve McDougall
Clean code. Something not often associated with a typical Laravel application is it. With that Active Record database approach and the magic static calls everywhere – those used to stricter frameworks, such as Symfony, often shudder when they open a Laravel project. What if I told you it didn’t have to be like that? by Steve McDougall
Published in Software Archeology, October 2023
Getting Modern with Our Monolith
By Steve McDougall
by Steve McDougall
Published in The Spectrum of PHP, September 2023
Fantastic SDKS and How To Build Them
By Steve McDougall
I have been integrating with external APIs for longer than I can remember, and I often end up frustrated and want to look for alternative solutions. Stick with me as we look at some challenges and even explore how they can be fun to build.
by Steve McDougall
Published in Packing Up PHP, August 2023
