Episode
Flight booking mistakes, Laracon AU, and dead letters
- Published
- Apr 9, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2961
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://share.transistor.fm/s/3b8e2253
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Summary
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