In this episode, Michael and Jake catch up ahead of Laracon and share a wild travel story involving flight changes, third-party booking headaches, and expensive rebooking.

Jake then shares a fun personal highlight: attending the NCAA Men's Basketball Championship and watching Michigan win.

The conversation shifts into development work, where Jake dives into building a centralised system for managing failed Laravel jobs across multiple applications. He explains the challenges of aggregating failed jobs without Horizon, how they built a custom package to expose APIs for inspecting and retrying jobs, and the nuances of Laravel's queue system.

They also explore ideas for turning this work into a Laracon talk, emphasising practical, experience-driven content over purely technical deep dives.

Show Links

• Laracon AU
• Laravel Horizon
• Sentry
• Dead Letter Queue

• (00:00) - Introduction and road to episode 200
• (01:00) - Laracon plans and travel setup
• (02:00) - Flight booking disaster and schedule change
• (06:00) - Rebooking flights and unexpected costs
• (09:00) - Lessons learned with third-party bookings
• (10:00) - Michigan wins NCAA championship
• (12:30) - Midwest geography and personal background
• (12:45) - Building a centralized failed jobs system
• (15:30) - Challenges with retries and tracking failures
• (16:40) - The "Dead Letter" package and API approach
• (23:20) - Turning real-world problems into Laracon talks
• (48:20) - Wrapping up and outro

In this episode, Jake and Michael dive into modern infrastructure security practices, sparked by an annual audit and the painful process of rotating AWS IAM tokens. That experience leads into a broader discussion on why long-lived credentials in GitHub Actions are risky, and how OIDC (OpenID Connect) enables a more secure, short-lived, role-based alternative.

Show links

• Scout Suite
• OpenID Connect (OIDC)
• Laravel Forge
• Laravel Horizon
• Scramble
• Claude
• LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation)

In this episode, we discuss using `claude --worktree` to spin up parallel feature work, and the unexpected friction that can arise when your editor doesn’t play nicely with nested worktrees.

Jake shares his experience running multiple Claude agents in parallel and problems that surfaced in PhpStorm. Michael explains how he structures worktrees differently, avoiding those issues, and the two compare workflows between PhpStorm and Neovim.

Show Links

• claude --worktree
• Git worktrees
• PhpStorm
• Neovim
• Tmux
• LazyGit
• Using GitHub CLI in workflows
• archtechx/enums
• Arbor
• Laracon US
• Git Worktree Hub plugin for PhpStorm

Michael and Jake discuss Jake's device charging chaos, household optimisation, international power outlets, and vector embeddings.

Show links

• Gitryin
  • Magnetic 3-in-1 wireless charger
  • Desktop charging station 12-in-1
• Corona discharge
• Laracon US
• ElevenLabs
• Daily Dose of DS (Data Science)
• Msty
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
• Laravel AI

Michael and Jake catch up on what’s been occupying their time lately, from AI tooling experiments to new developer workflows, before closing with a broader reflection on how new technologies are often misunderstood at first.

Show links

• OpenClaw / Clawd Bot / Moltbot
• Arbor
• AI horseless carriages

Jake and Michael return for 2026 and talk about their evolving experiences with AI; what it’s good at, what it’s not, and how it’s changing the way they work.

Show links

• OpenAI / ChatGPT
• Anthropic / Claude (Sonnet & Opus)
• OpenCode (multi-provider AI coding interface)
• Home Assistant
• Zigbee temperature sensors
• GitHub Copilot
• Ollama (local LLM runner)
• NVIDIA DGX Spark
• Amp Code
• MiniMax M2.1 model
• Software for an audience of one
• Arbor
• OpenCode Desktop has workspaces support
• Opus 4.5 is going to change everything

Michael and Jake open with retro arcade serendipity (a Mortal Kombat cabinet sighting!) and tumble into family bowling, kid-approved card games, and why tactile gadgets are back in style.

Then they pivot hard into dev-mode: shadcn/ui (and shadcn-vue), Inertia, React-ish forms, and the age-old tradeoff between “batteries-included” simplicity and modern real-time UX.

Highlights:

• Mortal Kombat cabinet & mini arcades, gift ideas for Laracon AU
• Duckpin bowling explainer and family bowling stories (plus UNO, Yahtzee, Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza)
• The “analog is cool again” thread: mechanical keyboards, a Keychron board, and a retro 3D-printed mouse shell for a Logitech M185
• Dev deep-dive: shadcn docs, Inertia forms, partial reloads vs full refresh, Livewire/Alpine, and real-time updates with Pusher/Reverb

Show links

• RetroPie / Arcade1Up
• Laracon AU
• Duckpin bowling
• Keychron keyboard
• 3D-printed retro mouse shell for Logitech M185
• Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza
• Inertia.js
• shadcn/ui
• shadcn-vue
• Livewire
• Alpine.js
• Pusher
• Laravel Reverb
• Axios
• fetch

Jake and Michael dive into a wide range of topics, from coding practices in Laravel to the evolving role of AI in software development. They kick things off with daylight savings and weekend updates before moving into technical discussions on authorization, policies, and form requests in Laravel.

The conversation expands to cover recent changes in middleware and controller patterns, contextual attributes in the service container, and practical approaches to request validation.

Later, the focus shifts toward AI tools like Claude, Grok, and Cursor, including their strengths, frustrations, and industry-wide adoption pressures. We reflect on the uneasy balance between developer control and AI assistance, wrapping up with thoughts on productivity, value, and what it means to let machines write code.

Show links

• Lawn Hub
• Arcade 1Up
• RetroPie
• Mortal Kombat cabinet
• Nuno's authorization on form requests
• Contextual Attributes
• Grok Code Fast 1