# Flight booking mistakes, Laracon AU, and dead letters

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/north-meets-south-web-podcast-706861/flight-booking-mistakes-laracon-au-and-dead-letters
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/north-meets-south-web-podcast-706861/flight-booking-mistakes-laracon-au-and-dead-letters.md
Podcast: [North Meets South Web Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/north-meets-south-web-podcast-706861)
Published: 2026-04-09T15:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://share.transistor.fm/s/3b8e2253
Audio file: https://media.transistor.fm/3b8e2253/4bfd8fa3.mp3
Processing state: not_requested
JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/north-meets-south-web-podcast-706861/episodes/flight-booking-mistakes-laracon-au-and-dead-letters
Duration seconds: 2961

## Resource

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

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## Transcript

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