Cogway

About Cogway

Cogway is a site of interactive explainers for Laravel and PHP. Each page takes one concept and turns it into something you can step through, break, and run again.

Why it exists

Some things are hard to learn from prose. How a queue retries a failed job. What eager loading actually changes about the number of queries. Why replaying an event stream rebuilds a projection. You can read three articles about any of them and still hold the wrong mental model, because reading is passive and these are mechanisms in motion.

The ecosystem is full of beginner tutorials and thin above them. Cogway aims at the mechanism: the part you actually get wrong in production.

How the explainers work

There is a diagram, but it has controls. You dispatch a job and fail it. You kill the worker mid-run. You toggle eager loading and watch the query counter climb, then collapse. There is a timeline you can scrub backwards, so you can replay the moment you missed. Every page also has a "break it" preset, because the failure mode is usually the thing people get wrong.

Underneath, each explainer is a pure state machine. State is derived by folding a list of actions from the start, never mutated. That makes the timeline and shareable state fall out for free, and it makes the logic testable without a browser. That matters, because accuracy is the whole product: a simulator that is subtly wrong about backoff is worse than no simulator.

Who builds it

Cogway is made by Alberto Arena, a software engineer working with Laravel and PHP. Longer writing lives on the blog. It is a static site: no backend, no accounts, no tracking beyond optional analytics you can decline.

Get in touch

Spotted an inaccuracy, or want to suggest an explainer? Email [email protected]. Corrections are welcome and get fixed. Or start with the explainers.