Laravel Development

Laravel is the framework we have shipped more production systems on than any other, and the reason is unglamorous: a competent team can build a correct, well-tested, maintainable business application in it faster than in anything else, and the person who inherits it in three years will recognise what they are looking at.

Octane, and when it is a trap

Laravel Octane boots the application once and keeps it resident, serving requests from a long-lived worker under FrankenPHP or Swoole. On an I/O-bound API we routinely see request throughput improve by a factor of three to five and p95 latency drop below 40 ms, because you are no longer paying for framework bootstrap on every single request.

The trap is that a resident worker changes the rules. Static properties persist between requests. Singletons hold state you did not mean to keep. A container binding that captured the first request's user will happily serve that user's data to the next person. Octane is a performance tool for a codebase that is already disciplined about state; it is not a fix for a slow application, and we will not switch it on to paper over N+1 queries. We find those first, with Telescope and Pulse, and fix them.

Queues are where the application actually lives

Anything that talks to a system we do not control goes on a queue. Payment webhooks, GST filings, carrier APIs, invoice PDFs, e-way bill generation, notification fan-out — all of it is a job, backed by Redis, supervised by Horizon, on a named queue with its own worker pool so a slow third party cannot starve your checkout. Jobs are idempotent, because a queue will deliver twice eventually and that day should be uneventful. Failures land in a dead-letter table with the full payload, and there is a screen where an operator can inspect and replay one without a developer opening a terminal.

This is the single largest architectural difference between a Laravel application that survives its first Diwali sale and one that does not.

Filament for the back office, and it is not a compromise

Nearly every business application needs an internal admin, and it is nearly always the thing that gets three days at the end of the project and is hated for the next five years. We build it in Filament instead: resources over the same Eloquent models, real role and permission scoping, bulk actions, exports, audit trails, custom pages where a table is the wrong answer. Your operations team gets a tool they can actually work in on day one, and your engineers stop being a human CRUD interface for anyone who needs a record changed.

The rest of the discipline

Pest for tests, with feature tests that exercise the HTTP layer and the database rather than mocking everything into meaninglessness. Migrations always reversible. Sanctum for API tokens, Passport when a real OAuth server is genuinely required. Scout with Meilisearch or Typesense when search matters. Telescope in staging, Pulse in production. Every deploy behind a health check with a one-command rollback, because the important question about a release is not whether it will fail but how fast you can undo it.