After three decades in software development, I'm more energized than developers half my age. This isn't because I'm special — it's because I built systems that keep me healthy, connected, and excited about showing up every day.

In this talk, I'll share the raw, unfiltered truth about surviving tech: how I organize my day to protect my mental health, why I still fly to Laracons for the hallway conversations, how following 500 people on Twitter keeps me current without overwhelming me, and why being embarrassingly honest about my struggles saved my career.

This isn't another "hustle harder" talk. It's about the boring, unsexy habits that actually work: daily routines that stick, community building when you're an introvert, embracing new tech without burnout, and giving yourself permission to be human.

If you're tired, overwhelmed, or quietly thinking about giving up — this is your permission to stay. And your roadmap for how.

RAG and AI-powered search in Laravel

Classic keyword search has limitations. Can we implement a search feature that not only matches results using the exact keywords we use, but that understands our intent to find what we are looking for? We can, thanks to AI and a technique called RAG: Retrieval Augmented Generation.

In this talk, we'll explore the Laravel AI SDK and how to use it to build an AI agent that can answer questions about your documents. We'll learn how to embed documents, what's the tech behind it and how can you apply it in your own apps.

Aaaaand I know what you're thinking: "Oh great, more AI!" But my goal is to make this talk different: practical, action-oriented, and definitely slop-free.

Talk Summary

The talk will be based on the following article I wrote for Tighten: Chat with Your Documents: A Practical Guide to RAG Using the New Laravel AI SDK

• Why generic chatbots fall short: context windows and their limits
• What is RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation)
• Keyword search vs. semantic search
• How embeddings and vector similarity work
• Chunking documents for effective retrieval
• Setting up a RAG system in Laravel with Postgres
• Ingesting content: chunking, embedding, and storing
• Query-time retrieval: finding the right context
• Building an AI agent with the Laravel AI SDK
• Chatbot UI with Livewire
• Other References

If you'd like to get a sense of my style, here are other AI-related articles I've written for Tighten's blog:

Build an AI-Powered Drawing Guessing Game with Laravel, Prism, and HTML Canvas Build Your Own Private, Self-Hosted AI Applications with Ollama & Laravel