I’ll be presenting two talks at PHP Tek this May. I wanted to share what I’m working on.
Kubernetes for PHP Developers: From Docker Compose to Production
The first talk tackles something I’ve written about frequently: the frustrating gap between local development and production deployment.
Most PHP developers I know have mastered Docker Compose. Redis spins up with one command. PostgreSQL just works. Local development is smooth.
Then they try to deploy to production.
Suddenly there’s a wall of YAML. Deployments, Services, Ingresses, ConfigMaps, Secrets. The vocabulary alone takes a week to absorb. Actually configuring it correctly? That’s where teams burn months of runway.
This talk is the translation guide I wish someone had handed me years ago. Docker Compose concepts mapped directly to Kubernetes primitives — the mental model transfers if someone shows you how.
I’ll walk through real examples, including how I deployed DailyMedToday (a Laravel app with PostgreSQL, Redis, and queue workers) to production Kubernetes in an afternoon using Displace.
Semantic Search and Embeddings in Laravel
The second talk explores something different: how to build search that understands meaning, not just keywords.
Traditional search matches words. You type “peace” and get results containing “peace.” Useful, but limited.
Semantic search matches concepts. You type “feeling overwhelmed by life” and get results about peace, stillness, surrender, and rest — even if those exact words never appear in your query.
I built this into DailyMedToday. The meditation archive uses PostgreSQL’s pgvector extension to store embeddings generated by MongoDB’s Voyage AI. Users can search by feeling, by situation, by question — not just by scripture reference.
The talk covers the architecture: how embeddings work, how to generate them, how to store and query them efficiently in Laravel. It’s practical, code-heavy, and based on production experience.
See You in May
PHP Tek runs May 19-21 in Chicago. If you’re attending, I’d love to connect. I’ll be around for the entire event, probably talking too much about infrastructure and AI.
If you can’t make it, I’ll be sharing related content here, on X/Twitter, and through Mastodon over the coming months.
What topics would you want me to cover in more depth before the conference?