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 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