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 cabinet & mini arcades, gift ideas for Laracon AU
• Duckpin bowling explainer and family bowling stories (plus UNO, Yahtzee, Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza)
• The “analog is cool again” thread: mechanical keyboards, a Keychron board, and a retro 3D-printed mouse shell for a Logitech M185
• Dev deep-dive: shadcn docs, Inertia forms, partial reloads vs full refresh, Livewire/Alpine, and real-time updates with Pusher/Reverb

Show links

• RetroPie / Arcade1Up
• Laracon AU
• Duckpin bowling
• Keychron keyboard
• 3D-printed retro mouse shell for Logitech M185
• Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza
• Inertia.js
• shadcn/ui
• shadcn-vue
• Livewire
• Alpine.js
• Pusher
• Laravel Reverb
• Axios
• fetch

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 attributes in the service container, and practical approaches to request validation.

Later, the focus shifts toward AI tools like Claude, Grok, and Cursor, including their strengths, frustrations, and industry-wide adoption pressures. We reflect on the uneasy balance between developer control and AI assistance, wrapping up with thoughts on productivity, value, and what it means to let machines write code.

Show links

• Lawn Hub
• Arcade 1Up
• RetroPie
• Mortal Kombat cabinet
• Nuno's authorization on form requests
• Contextual Attributes
• Grok Code Fast 1

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 - treating AI as a “junior dev” pair. The discussion covers gateway patterns, middleware, registry-based response handling, and strategies for testing Salesforce without polluting production environments.

From weeds and soil temps to software fakes and AI-driven dev, this one’s a mix of everyday life and practical engineering insights.

Show links

• LawnHub – Michael’s lawn care supplier
• Saloon (by Sam Carré) – Laravel/HTTP client package
• Salesforce – CRM platform discussed in the episode
• Mockery – PHP mocking framework
• opencode – terminal tool for AI coding (by SST’s Dax and Adam, Terminal Coffee)
• Claude – AI model used for coding exploration
• GitHub Copilot – AI coding assistant
• Stripe test cards – referenced in gateway fake analogy
• Bond for Livewire