Linkrail
In BetaA web analytics platform built to be dead simple to understand. No dashboards you need a manual for, just clear answers about your traffic.
Hi, I'm Matt.
I build software and love to share my experience.
Colorado-based developer with 20+ years designing and building SaaS applications. I write about web development and how to take complicated problems and turn them into solutions that feel easy.
What I'm Building
Writing
Building an ORM to Understand the Ones I Use Every Day
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.
Encrypted Form Tokens: Hiding Server-Side Dispatch from the HTML
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.
Tokenize Before You Prompt: LLM Insights Without Exposing Data
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.
Typed & Testable Views in PHP
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.
A New Codebase Every Morning
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.