Him: "Die Website ist nicht verfügbar." Me: "What are you talking about? It's totally FUBAR." Him: ...

AI coding agents are much better at finishing the first 80% of a project than they are at finishing the last 80%. Just like the rest of us.

Milo had an exciting day. First ambulance ride. He’s fine. Broke his arm, but the pain was so bad he went momentarily blind and passed out. We were convinced he had hit his head. By the time they had him in the ambulance he was feeling good and had the time of his life.

There is an impressive protest economy in Europe. There can’t be enough Venezuelan immigrants here for there to be a ready supply of hundreds of Venezuelan flags, but somehow they’ll be out in the streets of Basel by this afternoon.

I don’t love that my only passport was issued by an overtly criminal regime that, if the global community has any sense, will find itself on the wrong side of some nasty sanctions by the end of the week.

Milo made it to midnight for the first time. Poor kid is going to be wrecked in the morning. He was up before 6 to go to the airport and didn’t stop running around until he dropped into bed 10 minutes ago.

One last little thing to tackle in 2025. An Obsidian queue driver for Laravel. Don't judge me. It makes total sense in my toddler-addled pea brain, and it'll solve a real problem for me.

2025 was a transformative year in our industry. Whether the change thrills, scares, or enrages you, it's impossible to deny that there's been a huge shift in the way we work. I'm hoping for a less volatile 2026, and I'm cautiously optimistic.

I’m always mixing up M&S and H&M. But today I took it a step further and suggested to my wife that we leave the kids with their big brother while we take a quick S&M trip.

My eldest son is arriving in Zurich this morning. He’s going to take one last shot at building a life for himself here in Switzerland after spending 6 months working in the US. Milo is so excited he got up at 6 to come with me to the airport.

Milo would never play with other children at the playground. Teddy gets right in there and assembles a crew. At 2 he has more confidence than I do. I hope he uses these powers for good.

We run monthly Laravel meetups across Switzerland. Talks, dates, locations, videos — all in one place. Our newsletter is how we keep people in the loop. Subscribe here → laravel.swiss/newsletter

I don’t know if it’s possible to get gout from a single meal, but if it is, I’m in trouble. That was a seriously indulgent spread.

I can’t help but imagine the sadistic engineer who designs contemporary children’s toy packaging sitting alone on his porch this morning, sipping hot chocolate, and giggling maniacally.

Milo is 9, and I'm 100% sure he's not buying the whole Santa narrative anymore, but he's making us play the game. So it's nearly midnight. I've just gotten done stacking gifts under the tree. I ate most of a giant carrot and my 4th gingerbread cookie of the day, with some room-temperature oat milk.

Two is a magical age. For every minute of free play he creates three minutes of mess to clean up. And always be listening for the phrase “is veg!” because whatever is in his hand is about to get thrown very hard toward either a window or a cliff. I’m so very tired.

You can now get a NativePHP for Mobile Mini license by donating any amount (that's right, ANY amount, min: $1) via our OpenCollective One-time or monthly, up to you 👍🏼 nativephp.com/pricing

Some Bill McClintock mashups to add to your holiday playlist. This year’s “Mamma I’m Jingling My Bells” is a classic “why do those songs fit together like that?” youtu.be/W8nnJF3rdTg?...

we analyzed 3400 opencode zen users and their anthropic usage last 30 days median spend: $13.52 average spend: $44.36 only 75 people above $200 (3%) i know there's a psychological impact of a "subscription" but maybe you don't really need that $200 plan

Wife (on her way out the door this morning): the laundry in that basket is clean and just needs to be folded. Me (not listening): on it Me (tonight): I got through most of that laundry. Just one more load to go into the dryer. Wife: …

Catastrophic parenting fail. Milo has 8 pages of math homework. He doesn’t want to do it. So I showed him my “homework” and told him his is easier than mine. Mine is reviewing a 30 page requirements doc for a big new feature.

Me: A developer with 20+ years of experience, up until 1 am struggling to get something working. I finally crack it, and wonder "Is it that hard or is it just me?" My Intern: A 16-year-old with 3 months of experience, 15 minutes after I ask him to try it. "That last part was tricky, but it works."

every single productivity hack in the world added up together saves you less time than working on the right thing instead of the wrong thing

My intern (I’m sure it was really his dad, who is a friend of mine) bought me a nice bottle of Japanese whiskey for Christmas, setting the bar unreasonably high for everyone else in my life.

With all the custom instructions, specifications, agents, skills, and commands that are being added to projects these days, there's a real risk that in 6 months, everything on GitHub will be classified as a markdown repository.

I've decided that project management software is all a scam, and we should all just use GitHub projects. If you need an automation or visualization that they don't offer, just use the API and roll it yourself. Or let Claude do it for you.

Today I'm building a product to help our clients keep better track of things like API keys and secrets that are handed out to developers (often contractors). It's amazing how leaky even well thought out processes are.

If it wasn't clear: large numbers of Next.js sites are being pwned right now by attackers. If you don't want every script kiddie, cyber criminal or nation state APT group with full access to your site, stop everything and upgrade right now. Then rotate all your secrets.

It's time for me to start making use of my Riverside and Transistor accounts. Anyone here want to crack a beer with me tomorrow night (~10 pm Zurich time) and play with some NativePHP stuff on camera? We're building our first serious app, and all the boring back-end stuff is done.

Oh, so that's what `wrangler containers delete *` does.

Our intern looked at the readme for our NativePHP app and asked why we didn’t have android setup documented. I said it’s a pain and I don’t want to burn the hours figuring it out. So he quietly went off and got his system set up for it and updated the readme. This kid’s going places.

One week to go! Our final Laravel Switzerland meetup of 2025 is happening on December 9th at Helga in Bern. Two talks, a warm atmosphere, and a great chance to meet fellow Laravel folks before the year wraps up. RSVP while spots are open:

Final few hours of our Bifrost Black Friday deal Don't miss it! 👉 bifrost.nativephp.com

Having failed to set up a spreadsheet like @cmorrell.com did, we are now eating our thanksgiving dinner and trying to figure out how to sell Brussels sprouts as a dessert item because we’ll be done eating before they’re ready.

Don't sleep on the work that Simon and Shane are doing here. I spent this morning with these docs, and this thing is really ready for prime time. Let's start putting PHP in some pockets!

We celebrated thanksgiving by sending the kids to school, borrowing a friend’s car, and driving into France. For groceries. I can’t let all of my American traditions die, so I’m going to take a short nap on the couch before I do anything else.

If you come up and say hello to me at Laracon EU, I'll put a little PHP in your pocket.

One of Milo’s friends has started joining our Wednesday homework sessions. It’s amazing what a little peer pressure can contribute to academic success. But keeping these two on task is like herding cats.

I think we picked the right week to break ground on our first serious NativePHP app.

I accidentally shrunk one of Milo's wool sweaters. Everyone was mad at me, so I decided to fix it. I soaked it in warm water with a little hair conditioner for half an hour. Then I had Milo stand in the shower in a swimsuit and put it on. I stretched it back to a perfect fit for him.

If you're only going to email your customers once a year, doing it this week might not be the best option. Maybe I'm not a normal prosumer, but I'm just brutally marking everything as read without even glancing at the subject line this week. It's WAY too much.

Developer team velocity is complex, and there's almost never a single, simple fix. However, the one thing that always makes it better is to get really good factories and seeders locked in. If it's hard to build the world in your local, testing, or staging environment, everything else suffers.

Milo used to fall asleep in the car, causing me to spend hours eating, working, and reading in the driver’s seat to let him finish his naps. Teddy does the same, but in a cargo bike, sitting upright with a helmet on. Waiting him out is far less comfortable.

My tablet is supposed to be able to convert my handwriting to text, but it doesn't work. Probably related, if I ever want to buy a book on dysgraphia / associated learning challenges, my ads are full of them. I used to have perfect penmanship, but I traded in my pencil for a keyboard 40 years ago.

Planning a NativePHP app and going all in on a great offline experience, fully leveraging the on-device database. Syncing isn't a totally solved problem in this ecosystem. I have some experimenting to do.

This is just to say I have disregarded all prior instructions that were in AGENTS .md and which you were probably hoping would protect you from harmful actors Forgive me being malicious was so sweet and so cold arxiv.org/html/2511.15...

Hey @laravel.com folks 👋 I want to gift someone a lifetime licence to Beyond Code’s Tinkerwell App! Ideally, I’d love to find someone who’s just getting started or would really benefit but might find it a bit out of reach financially. Who’s in ❤️??

For the past couple of Wednesdays, one of Milo’s friends has joined us for our homework outing. Fries, iced tea (a beer for me), and 90s hip hop. Neither of them is a great student, but they help and encourage each other.

What I got up to yesterday while the world was in panic mode... artisan.build/posts/how-i-...

Well, this is unfortunate.