Open source: tools born from real problems

ekswai (opens in a new tab) talks to several job board APIs, so each integration lives in its own package. Each one is a small PSR-18 client that normalizes a provider's quirks into the same DTO, so it works on Laravel, Symfony or plain PHP. MIT licensed, still early at v0.1.x, born from what ekswai actually needed: six of them already run in production there.

job-boards-core (opens in a new tab) holds the shared contract, the DTO and a small PSR-18 HTTP helper the connectors build on. Missing a job board you need? job-boards-skeleton (opens in a new tab) is a template repository: clone it, rename it, implement the interface, done. Contributions are welcome, especially new connectors.

EU VAT validation, done right

Validating European VAT numbers means hitting the VIES database of the European Commission. The service is unreliable, the responses are inconsistent, and wrapping it correctly in Laravel takes more code than it should. laravel-vat-eu-validator (opens in a new tab) handles all of this cleanly. 489K+ installs later, it still works.

The Italian data ecosystem

Anyone who has worked with Italian geographic data knows the challenge: regions, provinces, and municipalities change over time, codes must match official ISTAT standards, and the data is scattered across government sources that were not designed for developers.

laravel-istat-geography (opens in a new tab) (9K+ downloads) provides complete ISTAT data for Laravel: regions, provinces, municipalities with their official codes and relationships. Its companion, laravel-istat-foreign-countries (opens in a new tab) (2K+ downloads), does the same for foreign countries using ISTAT classification.

Then there is laravel-email-fixer (opens in a new tab). Italian users have predictable email typos: gmail.it instead of gmail.com, hotamil.com, libero.t. The package sanitizes, normalizes, and auto-corrects malformed email addresses before validation. A small thing that saves a lot of bounced emails.

Tools for developers

laravel-clean-architecture (opens in a new tab) (4K+ downloads) generates a complete domain structure with a single Artisan command. Actions, Services, Controllers, Models, layer separation, dependency validation. For anyone who wants Clean Architecture in Laravel without the boilerplate.

commit-timesheet-generator (opens in a new tab) was born from a concrete need: generating reports for clients who have no idea how much work goes into a project. It takes the Git commit history and transforms it into a professional timesheet. Simple, effective, saves an argument.

PHPVector and community

My friend Enrico Zimuel (opens in a new tab) convinced me to study vector mathematics and performance optimizations seriously. That led to my involvement in PHPVector (opens in a new tab), a pure-PHP vector database with HNSW (opens in a new tab) and BM25 (opens in a new tab) algorithms. I am a maintainer and main contributor of the project, pushing the boundaries of what PHP can do with numerical computation.

Working on PHPVector is a different kind of engineering challenge. No CRUD, no web frameworks. Algorithms, memory layout, squeezing performance out of every operation. The kind of deep technical work that makes you a better engineer across every domain.