Colorado-based web developer with over 20 years of experience on the web, and almost 15 years of that spent designing and building SaaS applications. I write about web development and how to take complicated problems and turn them into solutions that feel easy.
phossil is a small PHP site kit that brings the build-to-dist workflow JavaScript developers are used to over to PHP. You write routes, views and typed components, develop in Docker with Vite and Tailwind reloading as you go, then build every route into a folder of plain HTML ready for any static host. This site is built with it.
Visit phossil →Shop Counter is a production tracking application for machine shops and independent makers. It provides a fast way to log what got made, what got scrapped, and where the time went. Operators record each run as it happens: the machine, the part, the clock, the counts. The hours that aren't spent making parts get logged too, so setup, changeovers and maintenance show up in the numbers. The reporting turns all of that into trends, scrap analysis, and a picture of how each machine and operator is actually doing.
A web analytics platform built to be dead simple to manage and understand. No dashboards you need a manual for, just clear answers about your traffic.
I build sites with typed PHP components and views, and I want the same quick dist/ deploy that JavaScript developers take for granted. phossil is a new project that keeps PHP for development and crawls the site into static HTML that any static host can serve.
React taught me to think in components with typed props. This is how I get the same thing in plain PHP: a tiny abstract base, a typed options object per component, and a static factory that renders.
A strict Content Security Policy sounds like a project. In Laravel it is one middleware and a handful of directives. Here is the whole thing, why each line is there, and how to keep it from breaking local dev.
Build the tools you rely on. Not to replace them, but to understand them. Here's how working through an ORM decision turned Doctrine's typed fields and Eloquent's casts from magic I used into choices I could actually read.
Most CSRF tokens only prove a request came from your form. This article explains how to take form tokens further: they can carry the processor class and method to run, so the URL becomes a hint and the token becomes the source of truth.
Swap data for abstract tokens before calling an LLM, then detokenize the response. You get AI-powered insights while the real data never leaves your server.
Replace loose template variables with typed PHP view classes that enforce contracts between controllers and views, compose like React components, and unit test without booting a framework.
AI can build a feature in an afternoon that used to take a week. That's great, but that speed comes with a cost, and it is not just in the code.