North Meets South Web Podcast

Flight booking mistakes, Laracon AU, and dead letters

North Meets South Web Podcast

Show Notes

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 Links Laracon AU Laravel Horizon Sentry Dead 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

More from North Meets South Web Podcast

Oct 15, 2026

In this episode, Jake and Michael discuss the value of consistency, the final preparations for Laracon AU, and how AI is changing the economics of building software. Michael shares how his custom-built conference operations platform is simplifying everything from attendee registration and dietary requirements to merchandise, QR codes, and venue deliveries. This leads to a broader conversation about highly specialised software, declining costs of building apps, and whether traditional SaaS subscriptions still make sense.

Sep 17, 2026

Michael and Jake celebrate episode 200 in the most outlandish way possible: with no special plan whatsoever. Michael shares an update on his home renovation, including construction progress, verandah engineering, outdoor kitchen plans, landscaping, structured cabling, smoke alarms, CCTV, and the ever-growing list of "small" additions that come with a major building project.

Sep 3, 2026

Jake and Michael are joined by TJ Miller, David Hemphill, and Chris Gmyr to talk about the realities of working with non-technical stakeholders that are now empowered to deliver software through AI. Show links TJ Miller David Hemphill Chris Gmyr KFC's Picklecore Menu Luma Brighter Learning Zillow Rula Health Laravel Nova Lovable Laravel AI Refactoring to Collections Rector PHPStan

Aug 13, 2026

In this episode, Michael and Jake recap Laracon US Boston, from Malaysian food and an undefeated dodgeball run to Laraprom, the great nachos-with-rice debate, conference logistics, Aaron Francis stepping into Laravel’s VP of Marketing and Community role, and a reminder to make room for silly software. Jake shares his work rebuilding Boom Party, the fast-paced Bomberman clone his team used to play after stand-up, along with hosting decisions and a creative workflow involving Claude, Gemini, and Suno. Michael closes things out with what was supposed to be an easy Pest 5 upgrade but turned into a much bigger test-suite adventure: converting old PHPUnit-style tests, untangling inheritance, tracking down mysterious parallel test failures, discovering the pain of stray exit statements, and ultimately getting repeat runs across an approximately 18,000-test suite down to just eight seconds. Show links Pomplamoose Spindrift IZZE Laracon US Aaron Francis Sidecar Whimsy-driven development by Christina Martinez Boom Party Fly.io

Jul 17, 2026

Michael and Jake catch up ahead of Laracon in Boston, beginning with Michael's increasingly complicated home extension. Jake shares a family trip to Cedar Point, then the conversation moves to how a Laravel Cloud weekend challenge inspired Michael to build Fitrack, a personal app for coordinating training around a single fitness goal.

See all episodes →