Over Engineered

Latest Episodes:

Storing Files in the Database w/ Bogdan Kharchenko and Skyler Katz Oct 15, 2025

Show notes

Sometimes you have files or other large chunks of data that you need to associate with a record in your database. It might be convenient to just store that as base64-encoded data or HTML in a "longtext" column, but that can eventually cause issues—especially as the table grows. What other options are there?

In this episode of Over Engineered, we go back to the show's roots and try to find the absolute best solution to a problem we already have an acceptable solution for.

Kilopixel Retro w/ Ben Holmen + Joe Tannenbaum Aug 23, 2025

Show notes

At the beginning of August, after six years of working on it on-and-off, Ben Holmen took his Kilopixel project live. It's a 1000 pixel display, where each pixel has to be manually toggled by a custom CNC rig, and it's whimsical and impractical and took the internet by storm. In today's episode, Chris chats with Ben and Joe about the whole project and what's next for the display.

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(Actually good) browser testing w/ Nuno Maduro Aug 08, 2025

Show notes

Up until now, browser testing in Laravel has felt… bad. Dusk was a huge step over nothing, but it's been slow and flaky and just waiting to be replaced with something better. And with Pest 4, Nuno's cracked it!

In today's episode of Over Engineered with dig into the technical details of what makes browser testing in Pest 4 both very fast and much more stable than Dusk and all the other browser testing approaches that came before it.

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Fostering Community w/ Alex Hillman Jun 26, 2025

Show notes

Alex Hillman has been thinking about and actively supporting communities for decades. In this episode, Chris and Alex talk about lessons he's learned along the way that can help meetup organizers tend their local tech communities, and brainstorm about ways that we can organize together to support meetups in general.

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Native PHP w/ Simon Hamp Apr 22, 2025

Show notes

Simon Hamp and Marcel Pociot have been working on NativePHP for a number of years, and Simon just surprised with world at Laracon EU with a NativePHP for Mobile announcement. In this episode, Simon and Chris get deep into the the NativePHP innards, explore sustainable open source, and generally just have a good time for <<checks watch>> over two hours 😅

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The next era of Larabelles w/ Zuzana Kunckova Apr 11, 2025

Show notes

Zuzana Kunckova started Larabelles five years ago, and over that time it has grown into an important part of the Laravel community. In today's episode, Zuzana and Chris talk about the future of Larabelles now that she has more time to dedicate to it.

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PHP × NYC Chaos-Cast™ Apr 07, 2025

Show notes

What happens when you get a bunch of Laravel podcasters + a bunch of mics in a room? Chaos, apparently.

Recorded live after PHP × NYC with Ben Holmen, John Drexler, Daniel Coulbourne, Chris Morrell, Ian Landsman, Dave Hicking, and Joe Tannenbaum.

Running Small Teams w/ Dan Matthews & John Rudolph Drexler Mar 28, 2025

Show notes

There's lots of advice out there for running software teams, but much of it comes from large organizations with dozens or hundreds of developers. Smaller teams have different needs. On today's episode, we pick up from a question Dan asked on Bluesky and talk about how best to approach running a small development team.

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Event Sourcery w/ Shawn McCool Nov 26, 2024

Show notes

Shawn McCool has been talking about event sourcing for years, and recently started a new series of streams on the topic. In this episode, Chris and Shawn talk about event sourcing, Verbs, and community (among other things).

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Design Patterns w/ Mary Perry Oct 18, 2024

Show notes

Design patterns can be very useful, but can also be weaponized as a way to "prove" that someone is doing something the "wrong" way. Mary has been thinking a lot about the good side of knowing design patterns, so we sat down to chat about them.

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