Build 01 28 entries
Filament Atelier
16 Aug to 13 Sep 2026
A visual page builder for Laravel, shipped as a Filament plugin. Developers define blocks in code, clients arrange them and watch the real page update as they type.
Read from entry 01 →96 entries
The build diary, with the bugs left in
What changed this week, what broke and what I got wrong, written while the work is still happening. These entries are not tutorials, and they do not pretend the work went smoothly.
- Diary entries since 05 Jul 2026
- 96
- Builds with their own series
- 16
- Latest entry, 2026
- 13 Sep
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Every entry belongs to a project, so a series reads in order with previous and next links between entries.
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Build 02 19 entries
GitBasedDocs
10 Sep to 13 Sep 2026
A private docs site that reads Markdown from one GitHub repo. Write in Obsidian, push, and a few seconds later the pages are live for the people you shared them with. Each project is a folder in the repo, and a reader sees only the projects an admin linked to their account. Anyone else gets the same 404 as a project that does not exist. A webhook starts a delta sync that fetches only changed files, a timed recheck covers a missing webhook, and pages are served from SQLite, so reading never calls GitHub. It renders the Markdown Obsidian and GitHub both know: Shiki code, Mermaid diagrams, KaTeX math and Obsidian callouts, plus wikilinks and image embeds. Next.js 16, React 19, next-auth v4 and Drizzle on SQLite, about 9,200 lines of TypeScript, MIT.
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Build 03 13 entries
MD Kanban
6 Sep to 10 Sep 2026
A kanban board where every card is a markdown file on your disk, built so you can watch what an AI coding agent is doing without asking it. Each connected folder is a project, each subfolder groups work, and each task is one `.md` file whose YAML frontmatter holds status, priority, assignee, due date and labels. Dragging a card between columns rewrites the file, and the agent edits the same files from its side. That is the whole design: Jira and Linear keep state behind an API, so an agent needs credentials and a connector before it can move a card, while a folder is something it can already write to. The repo ships the contract twice, as `AGENTS.md` for any agent and as a Claude skill, and tracks its own remaining build as task files inside itself. Vue 3, Vite, TypeScript and Tailwind v4 over the browser File System Access API, about 1,800 lines, MIT.
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Builds 04 to 16 34 entries
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The log
Every entry, newest first
Showing 1 to 15 of 24
6 entries, 1 build
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#87 10:05
Filament Atelier Part 25 of 28The editor was a dead end with one exit, and the preview lied about it
Clicking a nav link inside the builder's preview navigated the iframe to that page's live URL. The canvas then showed one page while the section list edited another, with nothing to tell you. Fixing it meant deciding what an iframe inside an editor is actually allowed to do.
Laravel · FilamentPHP · Plugin · Tools · Livewire · UI · UX
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#85 08:37
Filament Atelier Part 23 of 28The demo needed a booking form, and a form needs someone to not trust
The example app grew into a whole cleaning company: services with pricing tiers, products with variations, and forms that turn a page into a lead. One rule survived every shortcut the demo tempted me into, and it is the only part of it I wrote tests for first.
Laravel · Blade · FilamentPHP · Plugin · Tools · Web Application · UX
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#84 08:36
Filament Atelier Part 22 of 28The design tokens were correct, and no block was reading them
Building a demo site with a teal brand, I set the primary colour token and the hero button stayed black. The tokens shipped in v0.2.0, the editor preview and the public page both read them, and the two loudest elements in the block library had the colour hardcoded the whole time.
Laravel · Blade · Tailwindcss · FilamentPHP · Plugin · UI · UX
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#82 08:35
Filament Atelier Part 20 of 28A field nobody can list is a form field with no consumer
Custom fields on a page type are worth nothing until something puts them on a page. Building the block that lists them meant handing every block view the page it is rendered on, which turned out to be a one-line change to the renderer and the most useful thing in the release.
Laravel · Blade · FilamentPHP · Plugin · Tools · UI · UX
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#81 08:34
Filament Atelier Part 19 of 28The storage shape for custom fields was already in the codebase, one column over
A page type declares its own fields, and the plugin never learns their names. That leaves one question: where the values go, and what happens to the translated ones. I designed a shape, then noticed the SEO column had been storing the same thing correctly since the first release.
Laravel · FilamentPHP · Plugin · Tools · Web Application · UX
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#80 08:33
Filament Atelier Part 18 of 28Services needed their own sidebar entry, and Filament had already solved it
The ask was simple: services and products should sit in the sidebar next to Pages, not hide behind a dropdown on a page form. The design I approved cost a Filament resource subclass per type in every app that installs the package. Reading the framework source before writing it found the mechanism that removes the subclass entirely.
Laravel · FilamentPHP · Plugin · Tools · Web Application · UI · UX
2 entries, 2 builds
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#79 18:51
GitBasedDocs Part 13 of 19Two UI critique rounds
A UX review and a scored critique (27 out of 40) on GitBasedDocs, what each one found, and the fixes that landed as one commit per finding.
UI · UX · Frontend · ShadCN · Tailwindcss
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#64 18:04
MD Kanban Part 11 of 13Moving cards without the mouse
Keyboard drag, a Cmd K palette, undo after a drop, subtask counts and a list view for MD Kanban, plus a scroll bug fixed with one CSS class.
Tools · Vue · Web Application · Frontend · UX
1 entry, 1 build
1 entry, 1 build
3 entries, 1 build
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#48 19:49
Filament Atelier Part 13 of 28What is left, and the things I am not going to build
Seven releases in eight days took Atelier from an MVP to something with a sitemap, structured data, revisions and CI. This is the honest state of it: what works, what is missing, what is deliberately refused, and the two gaps I cannot close by writing more code.
Laravel · FilamentPHP · Plugin · Tools · Web Application · UI · UX
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#46 19:47
Filament Atelier Part 11 of 28One shell per site was a decision I never made on purpose
Marketing pages want a navbar and a footer, documentation wants a sidebar, a landing page often wants neither. The blocks are identical in all three. v0.2.0 makes the shell a per-page choice, and the test for it caught a bug where a custom layout worked live and crashed in the preview.
Laravel · FilamentPHP · Plugin · Tools · Web Application · Blade · UI · UX
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#45 19:46
Filament Atelier Part 10 of 28The sitemap was not broken, it just looked it
A sitemap opened in a browser as a wall of unlabelled URLs and timestamps in a serif font. The XML was valid, correctly typed and parsed cleanly. What was missing is the thing every serious sitemap ships and mine did not, and the fix is one processing instruction crawlers ignore entirely.
Laravel · FilamentPHP · Plugin · Tools · Web Application · SEO · UX
2 entries, 1 build
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#39 10:02
Vouch Part 6 of 6Where the compliance actually lives
Twenty-nine dashboard screens across three roles, and the four that exist because the EU AI Act and NYC Local Law 144 say they have to.
Figma · UI · UX · Dashboard · AI
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#38 10:01
Vouch Part 5 of 6Designing a job board at two breakpoints
Fifteen desktop screens and thirteen mobile ones, and the places where mobile had to become a different design rather than a narrower one.
Figma · UI · UX · Website
FAQ
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A build diary entry. It covers what changed that week, what broke and what I got wrong. They are not tutorials and they do not pretend the work went smoothly.
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