Open Source Momentum
A year at Laravel gave me experience I could not have gotten anywhere else. Now that chapter is done, and there is a backlog of open source work to ship. Statamic MCP rewrite, new addons, and more infrastructure tooling.
I left Laravel last month and joined Geocodio as Principal Software Engineer, Infrastructure. Different domain (geocoding at scale), same discipline (building production infrastructure that handles real traffic).
Cbox and the open source packages never stopped during my year at Laravel. They just ran at a slower pace while my day job took priority. Now I've a year's worth of accumulated ideas to pour into the projects.
What is shipping
There's a backlog, and I'm working through it:
Statamic MCP is getting a complete rewrite. The v1 architecture with 140+ individual tools was a mistake. I've a much better design: 11 router-based tools that give LLMs fewer choices and better reasoning. The v2 architecture is already in progress.
Statamic Filter Builder and Reverse Relationship are ready for release as Statamic 6 addons. Both originated at TV2 Regionerne and have been running in production for years. The Cbox versions are cleaned up, documented, and tested.
Laravel Health needs to ship. It has been sitting in my private repos for too long. Kubernetes probes, Prometheus metrics, container-aware health checks using System Metrics.
What I learned at Laravel
Building infrastructure at Laravel's scale taught me things I couldn't learn building solo:
The queue manager work showed me how much complexity hides behind dispatch(). The eBPF projects gave me a new toolkit for process-level observability that I had never touched before. And working with a team of infrastructure engineers who think about the same problems from different angles sharpened every instinct I had about container orchestration.
All of this feeds back into the open source packages. The FPM Exporter is getting insights from real-world scaling at Laravel Cloud scale. Queue Autoscale is getting a better understanding of queue behavior under load. Init's getting the operational lessons from running thousands of containers.
Speaking
During my time at Laravel I gave "Blood, Sweat & Kubernetes" at meetups in Copenhagen, Aarhus, and Budapest, and spoke about Laravel runtimes at the Copenhagen meetup in June. I plan to keep speaking at Laravel Denmark events about PHP infrastructure topics.