North Meets South Web Podcast

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 LinksLaracon AULaravel HorizonSentryDead 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 linksScout SuiteOpenID Connect (OIDC)Laravel ForgeLaravel HorizonScrambleClaudeLoRA (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 Linksclaude --worktreeGit worktreesPhpStormNeovimTmuxLazyGitUsing GitHub CLI in workflowsarchtechx/enumsArborLaracon USGit Worktree Hub plugin for PhpStorm

Michael and Jake discuss Jake's device charging chaos, household optimisation, international power outlets, and vector embeddings.Show linksGitryinMagnetic 3-in-1 wireless chargerDesktop charging station 12-in-1Corona dischargeLaracon US ElevenLabsDaily Dose of DS (Data Science)MstyRetrieval-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 linksOpenClaw / Clawd Bot / MoltbotArborAI 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 linksOpenAI / ChatGPTAnthropic / Claude (Sonnet & Opus)OpenCode (multi-provider AI coding interface)Home AssistantZigbee temperature sensorsGitHub CopilotOllama (local LLM runner)NVIDIA DGX SparkAmp CodeMiniMax M2.1 modelSoftware for an audience of oneArborOpenCode Desktop has workspaces supportOpus 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 AUDuckpin 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 M185Dev deep-dive: shadcn docs, Inertia forms, partial reloads vs full refresh, Livewire/Alpine, and real-time updates with Pusher/ReverbShow linksRetroPie / Arcade1UpLaracon AUDuckpin bowlingKeychron keyboard3D-printed retro mouse shell for Logitech M185Taco Cat Goat Cheese PizzaInertia.jsshadcn/uishadcn-vueLivewireAlpine.jsPusherLaravel ReverbAxiosfetch

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 linksLawn HubArcade 1UpRetroPieMortal Kombat cabinetNuno's authorization on form requestsContextual AttributesGrok Code Fast 1

In this episode, Michael and Jake catch up on life and code. They talk about fatigue, seasonal shifts, lawn adventures, and the return of hay fever.We dive into replacing a legacy Salesforce integration with Saloon, frustrations with mocks, and how Saloon fakes have improved testing workflows. Michael walks through his experiments with AI tools like Claude and opencode to prototype fake gateways - treating AI as a “junior dev” pair. The discussion covers gateway patterns, middleware, registry-based response handling, and strategies for testing Salesforce without polluting production environments.From weeds and soil temps to software fakes and AI-driven dev, this one’s a mix of everyday life and practical engineering insights.Show linksLawnHub – Michael’s lawn care supplierSaloon (by Sam Carré) – Laravel/HTTP client packageSalesforce – CRM platform discussed in the episodeMockery – PHP mocking frameworkopencode – terminal tool for AI coding (by SST’s Dax and Adam, Terminal Coffee)Claude – AI model used for coding explorationGitHub Copilot – AI coding assistantStripe test cards – referenced in gateway fake analogyBond for Livewire

In this episode, Jake and Michael catch up on life, family, and tech.Michael shares proud stories about his son Eli turning into a “soccer terrorist” on the field, while Jake recounts his own stint as a stand-in soccer coach. They dive into Laracon AU updates — from speaker announcements and Road to Laracon podcasts, to quiz night and swag planning.Other highlights include experiments with AI-generated artwork, Bruce’s new social media adventures, sponsor promotion, and even a tangent on coding tools like PHPStan and how AI can help fix issues in the background.Show linksLaracon AURoad to LaraconBruce on XLaravel Live DenmarkBoost