North Meets South Web Podcast

Jake shares lessons from rebuilding a permissions system around flexible roles, temporary permission leases, and delegated user management. He also discusses adding Apple Pay and Google Pay, plus designing automated text-message payment flows that use numbered choices instead of complicated keywords. Michael talks about building lender integrations, the importance of adding real context to API doc...

In this milestone 10-year anniversary episode of North Meets South, Michael and Jake reflect on a decade of podcasting, from their first awkward recordings and early Laravel community connections to the friendships, conferences, and recurring topics that have shaped the show over nearly 200 episodes.  A large part of the episode focuses on Michael's work-in-progress event ticketing platform inspir...

Michael and Jake are joined by Jason "JMac" McCreary to talk the impact of AI on Laravel Shift and modern upgrade workflows, and his latest Fast Laravel course focused on edge caching and application performance. Jason shares how Laravel Shift has evolved alongside AI-assisted development, why recent Laravel releases have changed the upgrade landscape, and why he still believes there's value in ke...

Michael shares a behind-the-scenes look at organising Laracon AU 2026, including the new committee-based CFP review process, the tooling built to manage the talk submissions, and how AI-assisted workflows helped shape the final conference schedule. The conversation dives into balancing technical depth with audience engagement, designing conference cadence to avoid cognitive overload, and why advan...

In this episode, Michael shares details from a major internal platform shift at work, including the decision to completely remove an underused public JSON API and rebuild integrations around real customer needs instead of hypothetical use cases. The conversation dives deep into Laravel Passport, Sanctum, OAuth flows, request authorisation, and some tricky edge cases around testing authenticated AP...

Michael and Jake are joined by David Hemphill to discuss David's macOS app Gent, a task runner built on the "Ralph loop" pattern for AI-powered coding workflows. The conversation covers how Gent takes a project requirements document (PRD), breaks it into small tasks that fit within a single context window, and runs them sequentially or in parallel using copy-on-write clones and Git worktrees. We d...

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 managi...

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 links Scout Suite OpenID Connect...

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 compar...

Michael and Jake discuss Jake's device charging chaos, household optimisation, international power outlets, and vector embeddings. Show links Gitryin Magnetic 3-in-1 wireless charger Desktop charging station 12-in-1 Corona discharge Laracon US  ElevenLabs Daily Dose of DS (Data Science) Msty Retrieval-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 links OpenClaw / Clawd Bot / Moltbot Arbor AI 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 links OpenAI / ChatGPT Anthropic / Claude (Sonnet & Opus) OpenCode (multi-provider AI coding interface) Home Assistant Zigbee temperature sensors GitHub Copilot Ollama (local LLM runner) NVIDIA DGX Spark Amp Code MiniMax M2.1 model...

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 cabine...

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 att...

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...

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-ge...

In this episode, Michael and Jake reflect on their recent time at Laracon US 2025 in Denver - catching up in person after six years, reconnecting with the Laravel community, and sharing behind-the-scenes stories from the conference floor. They also cover: Why this Laracon felt like a true “homecoming” Building Laravel meetups and fostering community The book (and tv show) Station Eleven (and how d...

In this episode, Michael and Jake kick things off with some Laracon travel talk, sharing their hotel plans, coffee quests, and even jokes about pillow fights at the conference hotel. Michael reveals his precise coffee scouting for the Vib by Best Western hotel, determined not to survive three days on Starbucks alone. Should you define middleware in a controller’s constructor? Michael explains why...

In this episode, Jake and Michael discuss the nuance of being “busy”, saying no to features (and why), handling user feedback early, Laravel-powered static views with dynamic data, and building tools that stand the test of time.

In this episode, Jake and Michael reflect on parenting, discuss Apple's new Liquid Glass UI, finding smarter ways to use video on the web, plus share thoughts on AI overload, Laracon prep, and why Wistia might be your next favourite video tool. In this episode: - Apple’s Liquid Glass UI - Kit.com and Wistia for video - Reflections on AI, tech bubbles, and accessibility - Laracon US and vox pop int...

In this episode, Jake and Michael discuss Jake's new stealth grill, his eldest son's takeover of the state finals (and metric's takeover of measurement), and Michael goes through the process of refining over 150 talk submissions down to the final Laracon AU schedule.

In this episode, Jake and Michael discuss using interfaces as a dictionary of constants, working with and testing inputs passed down multiple layers of the application, and refactoring legacy code with PHP's ArrayAccess interface.

In this episode, Jake and Michael discuss the ramp up of Laracon AU planning, touch base on Jake's unorthodox usage of Laravel Horizon, and Michael finally coming around to using AI.

In this episode, Jake and Michael discuss Michael's new recording gear, building integrations with external APIs using Saloon, and configuring Laravel Horizon.

In this episode, Jake and Michael discuss circles of influence and information, eloquently handling return of single values from the database, and monitoring tools for your applications.