Flight booking mistakes, Laracon AU, and dead letters

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 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