Your API is not slow. One call in it is.
I am Steve McDougall. I find which call is actually costing you, stabilise that one before anything else, and leave your team with patterns they can keep running without me. No rewrite. Everything I have worked out about API design, architecture and PHP is here, free to read.
Read this first
Accepting Data You Don't Control
Webhooks and callbacks you did not design. An ingest server in Laravel 13 that owns the envelope, stores the payload whole, and validates where failure means a retry, not data loss.
Aug 2026 · 14 min read
What I write about
All writing →How APIs outgrow the design they shipped with, and what to fix first.
43 articlesArchitectureRecognising the pattern you already live inside, and pricing the exit.
43 articlesPHP & LaravelThe language got good. Most code has not caught up with it.
50 articlesShipping & ToolingDeploys, local environments, CLIs, and where agents actually help.
31 articlesEngineering LeadershipThe job changes from writing code to deciding what gets written.
30 articlesLatest
Everything →The UK is mandating e-invoicing in 2029, and your invoicing code is not ready
From 2029 every UK VAT invoice has to be structured data that passes about eleven hundred rules. What that means for the invoices table you already have, and the four fields that break first.
10 min read
PHP Alive And Kicking: Episode 32 Tessa Kriesel & Steve McDougall
A lively episode talking all things tabstack with Tessa Kriesel and Steve McDougall, oh also Steve wrote a book.
PHP Alive And Kicking
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