High-performance Agentic Engineering
A live demo workshop — building a real feature from research to merged PR using Claude Code, Skills, and MCP.
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Articles, slides, videos, and projects by Christopher Pitt
Latest posts
The future of AI development
I want to tell you a story about what I learned I should be building, and what I think it means for the future of AI development. I'm a developer, and my employer recently encouraged me to start using AI in my daily work.
Building with Friday
A live demo of Friday, my personal AI assistant, building a feature from scratch while I explain how it works.
Creating the most expensive e-book reader
Why settle for a fancy e-book reader, when you can use an impractically sized 35 year old device instead? Join me as I show you how to convert modern e-books into Gameboy games; and how I turned this into a free service for other masochists.
Turning Something Old Into Something New
I love taking broken retro tech and fixing it up. It’s deeply satisfying giving something a second life. Join me as I show you how I fixed and modernised a 20 year old gaming console; and how you can do the same.
Playing PS2 Games in Discord
I wanted to play a retro couch-coop game with my friend, but they were too far away. So, I connected a game controller to the internet and created website they could use to join in the game. Follow along as I explain how I used soldering, IoT, web sockets, and video streaming to do what would have taken 3 minutes with a Steam game. 🤦♂️
Web Components for fun and profit!
Web components are an underused superpower of the modern web. They allow intricate rendering and interactivity without the difficulty of modern JS frameworks or build pipelines. I’d like to show you how they work, and some of the interesting ways I’ve used them recently. It might surprise you how well they fit into your web applications. They'll actually increase the utility of the frameworks…
Oops! I Made a Game Engine
I needed to teach a bunch of non-coders how to write JS, so I built a game engine. Not the wisest choice, but definitely one that taught me much about how game engines work. Follow along as I show you more of the interesting things I learned through this process.
Building and Programming Robots
Who is your favorite superhero? Mine is Iron Man. Not because he’s noble or even very good. It’s because he builds cool suits. I’ve never felt more like Iron Man than when I modified a LEGO Technic set so that I could control it with computer code.
Zombies and Binary
Minecraft is a bit of a hidden gem when it comes to teaching. It’s capable of simulating computation and electronic circuitry. One of things that can’t be unseen once you know it’s there.
Just Dad Things
I have been thinking about my dad this week, more than usual. First, I wondered how much of what remains of someone is an invention of our memories; or what they actually were.
You can just do things
I was visiting a friend who had just moved house. He was chucking stuff out, and happened upon an old Thinkpad. He's stopped using it because the battery was so bad that it wouldn't run without being plugged in. So, he gave it to me.
Floaty in 2026
Some time ago, I created a JS port of Pico-8. I challenged myself to host a workshop (for work people) where I taught non-coders how to make a game. Games are a powerful tool when teaching programming, because of their rapid iteration cycles, fun outcomes, and a general acceptances of newcomers.
I Wrote The Talk Abstracts
I came to find that the topics I want to talk about — the topics I can prattle on about, with no preparation — are topics that are difficult for organisers to justify. I had a sense about this, which I previously mentioned…
Cooperative Multitasking with Generators
One day, while staring out the window at all the async/await languages playing ball, I wondered what it would take to do the same in PHP. This talk became the answer to that question.
Build Your New Portfolio with Filament
The carpenter's chair is always broken. I get it; you're far to busy building cool web things to spend time on your portfolio. Especially when you've got so many cool features you want to add. That's where this talk can help you.
Modern Admins with Filament
Filament is an open-source admin builder for Laravel. It's built on the TALL stack, so using and customising it involves using skills you already have. In this talk, we'll show you what we've learned while using it.
Monads in PHP
Many developers get lost in the hype of object oriented design. They miss out on how expressive and succinct their code could be if they tried functional programming.
Multi-tenant apps without fuss
Multi-tenant apps are cool because they can work for many brands, with a single codebase. They may generate more money than single-tenant apps, but they also tend to be a lot more complex. They don't have to be, though...
More Talk Abstracts To Write
Going to conferences, while living in these remote areas, made me feel like I was wanted. I loved the travel, too. The last conference I felt truly wanted at was Laravel EU (days before my youngest child was born). That was 5 years ago.
Some Bad Writing
Read an interesting, albiet brief post about actually doing the thing I claim to be so bad at that I avoid it.
Oops! I made a game engine
I needed to teach a bunch of non-coders how to write JS, so I built a game engine. Not the wisest choice, but definitely one that taught me much about how game engines work.
3D printing, making thumbnails of models
One of the reasons I got a 3D printer was to learn what it would take to run a small 3D printing side-hustle. I had zero ideas about where to focus or what to print; but I saw a similar experiment run by a YouTuber. When my oldest child started asking for 3D prints I knew it was time.
3D printing, the setup
t's been about a month since I got my first 3D printer. I have been having so much fun that I've hardly shared on social media. When I saw Chris tooting about getting into 3D printing; it occurred to me that my experience could help others getting started.
The Airport Pattern Library
Seems I only wokr on this silly PHP pattern library thing when I'm in airports. There might be something to that...
Monads in PHP
This talk is about the wonderful Monad pattern; what it is, where to find it, and how to use it.
Build Your New Portfolio with FilamentPHP
These few introductory slides are for a workshop that I ran at PHPCon Poland 2024. Most of the workshop took place in a code editor, so check out the YouTube recording of it for more details.
Procedural content generation with Godot
If you're building games on your own, you know how much effort is it is to make everything from scratch. Save yourself some time and generate some of your game's content. This talk covers the practical aspects of content generation. You don't need to know a bunch of dry math to make engaging content or follow along with this talk.
Laravel: Idea to Product
Got an idea for a product or service? Laravel is the perfect framework to get you up and running, fast! In this workshop, we'll take a simple product idea and build it into a live web app.
Importing From URLs
I have just been experimenting with importing source code from URLs in PHP. I know, that thing explicitly prohibited in all new PHP installations. Remote Code Execution by design.
Deno But In PHP
I dig Deno, but probably not for the reasons you think. I do like JavaScript, but not as someone who likes to make full applications. It’s hard to make something useful in a short amount of time. At least that’s how it feels to me…
Mud Bath
It's been a heck of a week. Nick, from OfferZen, asked me if I wanted to bake three batches of themed cupcakes for a company get-together. This is the story of how I made the third and final batch...
Herding Cats
This talk covers the architecture of a multi-tenant sports media website, and the APIs that power their mobile apps.
Zombies and Binary
Minecraft is played by more than 165 million people. Imagine if just a fraction of those people could learn electrical engineering or computer programming, without even meaning to. This talk is all about how Minecraft expresses the fundamentals of electronics and programming, and how we can encourage the next generation of electrical engineers and computer programmers in a fun environment.
Building Robots
This talk is a hands-on introduction to hobby electronics, and how you can control them using JS. I'll show you Lego Technic sets which you can manipulate with an Arduino and a bit of creativity. I'll even let you control a robot or two, using a web browser.
Friends in the Laravel community
When I saw Greg’s tweet about “friends you didn’t know you had”, I physically reacted. I think it’s a wonderful sentiment, and there are many people in Laravel that I do consider to be friends; but not because they’re specifically in Laravel. Laravel us a shared interest, not the reason they are my friends.
A Case for High School Math
I've come around to the idea that high school math is a gift. Not because of why high schools teach it. It's easy to algorithmically generate and test for; which can make it seem like a good use of time. It's easy to measure. It's nicer to tell parents; "after x years, your kid has improved by y". That's not why I think it's a gift, though.
Slither Deep
Slither Deep was my third game. It took about two weeks to make, and contained everything I had learned about Godot to that point. I was fascinated with the achitecture of Minesweeper games, at the time, and this combined Minesweeper with the Roguelike genre.
Train Trouble
I made Train Trouble for a Nokia Game Jam. You can probably tell from the color and control schemes. I love the experience, though. It's challenging to make a game without any text or voice acting...
Sitch
I made Sitch for a game jam (with the theme: Switch). It's about being a bad landlord; as you frantically try to enable water and power in time for your tenants to use them, and then disable them again to save money.
Multi-tenant apps without fuss
Multi-tenant apps are cool because they can work for many brands, with a single codebase. They may generate more money than single-tenant apps, but they also tend to be a lot more complex. They don't have to be, though...
Custom Web Components to Highlight Code
I’ve just been down a rabbit hole. It started with wanting to cut back on boilerplate and ended with being able to highlight code in Reveal.js using tempest/highlight. Along the way, I made my first web component.
Using Forms on Custom Filament Pages
Let me share a little secret with you, about Filament. You probably know you can make custom pages, but what’s not immediately obvious is that you can still use Filament’s form components without having to butcher a resource class or reinvent it from scratch. This isn’t well documented, but at least it’s easy once you know how…
Bouncy Cars
Bouncy Cars is probably my favourite game, so far. I miss the days of sitting on a couch, giving a good friend a thorough whooping, in a racing game. If you’ve ever played Micro Machines, this slightly inferior take on the genre may interest you!
Invasion
Invasion is a game about trying to stay hopeful in a hopeless situation. I made it for a game jam, around the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Years later, war still rages. How can one talk about a game they’re proud of making, when the horrors it hints at are a reality for a dwindling population?
Riaan's Review
I used to work with a lovely fellow, named Riaan. We became friends. When we left the place where we both worked, we kept in contact. Since he lives so far away from me, it's been difficult to see much of him. A week ago he asked me if he could borrow a Raspberry Pi, so that he could turn it into a games console of sorts for his kids. I suggested he borrow my SNES classic mini. We arranged to…
Gitstore
Gitstore was a project I built, with Jason and Shawn. The idea was to make it easier for developers to rent out access to their private Github repositories, and to accept payments via PayPal or Stripe. At the time, nobody was doing this...
React Components
This old book is about building a CMS out of React components.
Typed PHP
This old book was from a time before PHP didn't have strong typing and a million Composer plugins.
Making Games With Javascript
Writing this book was eye-opening. The cover was about making games, but it was just a sneaky way to teach folks how to use modern JavaScript to build useful stuff. For the first time, I mirrored every code example with a live CodePen. This allowed readers to open and tinker with the examples without a lot of copy & paste.