Laravel Origins: A PHP Documentary

Life in Arkansas is definitely slow paced compared  to the other tech hubs around the country, like San Francisco or definitely New York. We're very far away from those places right now. There's a lot of outdoor stuff to do.

A lot of lakes, a lot of hiking and there's not a lot of  big distractions for sure. So I can kind of focus on the business, focus on hanging out with my family and kind of a slower pace of life for sure. Sometimes when I need to do a little thinking, I like to grab my guitar and just kind of doodle and stare at the code until I  have some clue what I want to do.

Most programmers have this feeling  of being overwhelmed sometimes. You kind of feel like you're  inundated with just. .

. "Here's a new tool! " "Check out this!

" "Here's a new library! " "You need to be learning this! " "The 10 frameworks you need to learn in 2022.

" So when I took a look at  Laravel it was very clear. . .

Okay, this is somebody who  didn't just release a tool and he's going to abandon it two weeks later. Many of us were really strongly  considering leaving for Ruby on Rails, or Python or something else, because there had been so  many little frameworks in PHP that none of them ever  really got to the point where it was giving us the opportunity to program  the way the rest of the modern web was. Back at the time, PHP had a bit of a bad rap and there was a time when I started to think "Oh maybe I need to upgrade my language, move to something a bit more  serious or professional.

" It really feels to me like Laravel kind  of brought PHP back into the spotlight and really made it feel like a good choice  for building modern web applications again. It had excellent documentation, the developer experience was very good. And just looking at the documentation, it was instant magic for me.

It was just something that was really clean, really expressive, really flexible for what I needed to do. And it was just everything  that I had wasted my life writing over and over and over and over again was all built in there, it was all perfectly aligned. There was great tutorials, really helpful people.

Laravel makes it easier to write good PHP code. Like really, really easy, because it takes care of rooting  or database access whatever and it's flexible. And Laravel grows like a plant.

That sounds bullshit, I'm sorry. I could tell that whoever made it sort of had an obsession  with making things expressive and simple and clean. There was just an aesthetic to the framework and I think almost everyone  in the Laravel community would say and agree that Taylor  sort of takes attention to detail to a level that probably nobody else does.

Taylor's definitely got a bit  of awareness of good branding and how to create a community  that's modern and passionate and you know a little bit  flashy, a little bit exciting but not in a cheesy way or anything like that. Like it's genuine. Laravel bought the idea of simplicity and that came from Taylor.

Taylor is interesting because he is  super minimal in what he likes to do. Like there are things when you write code that  have no effect on how the application runs and I was noticing with the framework that he does it everywhere. And when I mean everywhere, it's everywhere.

It's down to how he will form a comment. You've probably heard other  people talk about this already but one of the most famous things is the way he structures like the code comments  in the Laravel source code so that every comment is three lines long and each line is like three  characters shorter than the one before and he does it over and over  throughout the entire framework, there's probably a hundred cases of that. And again it doesn't make any difference but I find that so appealing because again, it's an attention to detail that you do not see anywhere else and you know when you care that  much about things like that, that literally don't matter, how much care must be going into  the things that actually do matter that you might not even  notice as a user of the tool.

If it's open-source, it's free, but if it's a product, you  put a lot of focus on it and Taylor has been dealing with the  framework as a product since day one. Even before monetizing around it. He's always coming up with new ideas and new projects or new ways to  do things easier in Laravel and I really like that because it inspires us.

Not just in Laravel, the  whole PHP community actually. Yeah I can do that, I can blow smoke  up his ass all day, no problem. Taylor built Laravel in a way  that makes people's lives better and it was intentional.

And sometimes that's because as a programmer, my programming job is easier but also as a non-programmer, it's easier for me to join this community. So Taylor's personality comes  through very much in Laravel and in the community and in the code. Everyone asks me why I called it Laravel and there's really not any big, you know, magical story about where that name comes from.

I was actually having so much trouble coming up with a name for Laravel that I just thought, I'm just gonna think of random words, just like gobbledygook you know, make up my own language basically and just like the word Laravel came to me because it rhymed with. . .

I was playing a game at the time that had like a boat in it called like a Caravel you know, like a big ship with like sails and stuff or something like that. And T was like, "What rhymes with that? " and I thought Laravel.

And I was like, That sounds like something I would use, you know what I mean, like that sounds like a  professional development framework so I just stuck with Laravel and that's what it's been ever since. This is Hot Springs, Arkansas. This is where I grew up.

This is a town with a lot of history. A lot of history for me, because I started my programming journey here, built my first website and pretty much spent my entire childhood here so it has a special place in my heart because this is where my  journey really got started. So when I first started building Laravel, I didn't have any plans of releasing it.

I was just building it to solve my own problems, to build my own businesses and then once I got like  five or six months into it, I was like, maybe I have something here that would be interesting to people. Because it was sort of like a fresh  take on how to write PHP applications. It was a little bit polarizing  in the PHP community because it's very opinionated and it's very pragmatic.

My heart and my passion is  empowering the individual developer to build something cool. Because that really goes back  to the origin of Laravel, which was me in my apartment with a business idea. How can I launch it, you know?

How can I build it productively, efficiently and quickly and get it out there for the world. And so I think Laravel was always just sort of rebellious. Let's kind of step back and build something totally new from a fresh perspective and really focus on being fast, productive  and fun to use for the developer.

This is Lakeside High School. This is where I went to school when I was a kid, and this is where I built  my first computer programs on my TI-83 graphic calculator to give me all the answers on my tests and I also got started in web design here because I was in computer lab and helped update the school  website and things like that. So this is kind of the beginning of  my career you might say, right here.

And then in college, I majored in Information Technology and once I graduated, I was hired by a large  trucking company that's based here in Arkansas. And that's where I really learned  like real world programming and it's also where I first kind  of got exposed to open-source and people that like to  program in their free time, which was not something I was  really exposed to before that. So I think I first sort of became friends  with Taylor back in probably 2015.

He I think knew who I was from being  involved in the Laravel community and I, of course, knew who he was  as the creator of the framework and we were just kind of like  casual internet friends for a while. But then around that time, we were both also doing a  lot of conference speaking and there was one conference we went to, which was ZendCon in Las Vegas, and when we went there, Taylor decided for that trip he was going to rent like a  different supercar every single day. So he rented this Lamborghini and me and him kind of went out, just driving up and down the  strip basically for hours in this Lamborghini.

But we're just like laughing our asses  off at the ridiculousness of ourselves, with all these people on the sidewalk just yelling out "Lamboooo" at us, like every time we drove past and we just kind of had  this like magical experience that really I think kind of formed the foundation of our friendship. I started writing Laravel in late 2010 and I didn't actually release  it until almost Summer of 2011. The first day I remember  I got four stars on GitHub and I was just like super pumped that anyone would notice this thing I had written.

Like I was really excited about it honestly, even though it was a really small start but people just latched on to it soon after and that was really like the first  open-source project I'd ever launched. So in late 2011, I was still doing . NET and I got an email from a guy named Ian Landsman, who ran a company called UserScape and they build help desk software, customer support software, and he said something like.

. . "Hey.

I saw Laravel. I really like how you set it up. I like the features I like sort of the philosophy behind it.

And we want to rebuild some stuff, modernize some stuff, some of our PHP code base here at UserScape and we want to do it on Laravel. " Honestly, he was kind of  taking like a leap of faith I would say on Laravel at the time, because it was not the dominant  PHP framework at all, you know, it probably wasn't even in the top three  PHP frameworks in terms of popularity. But I guess it just like  resonated with him personally and how he likes to program or whatever.

I was really excited you know, "Yeah, sure" and I came on board. And another person who started at  the same time as me is Eric Barnes, the creator of Laravel News. So I first met Taylor in IRC and I remember he was, you know, very approachable at the time, he was always there for anybody  trying out the framework.

And I was familiar with Eric because he was sort of known in the  Code Igniter ecosystem a little bit or sort of like was in those circles. It was sort of funny, so I applied, I got hired and then I started like the  first week of January 2012. And sure enough, as soon as I you know logged in, Taylor was there and he was working there too.

The cool thing is Ian gave  me those first six months to just work on Laravel like full-time because we had a lot of things  we needed to do at UserScape and we needed to add those features into Laravel to like actually make it possible  to do some of those things. Like I wrote the whole queue system, the whole database migration system, the whole bundling system, all in those first like six  months of working at UserScape, which I think is really cool  for Ian to have done at the time because like there wasn't necessarily  an immediate payoff for that. He just like had this faith in Laravel, and faith in me I guess, to develop it and to build  something cool out of it.

So as we worked at UserScape together, Ian would give him every Friday off, to work on Laravel, so what was really cool though is, while we worked on projects  throughout the week for UserScape, he would find you know  little pain points in Laravel and then every Friday he would fix  those and just add new features for whatever we were working on, to make our lives easier. And then eventually, Ian kind  of like nudged me out the door. Like "Laravel's too big.

" Like, you know, "You can do this full time. " And really without Ian hiring me at UserScape and like taking that leap of faith, like I feel like the story of  Laravel is really different because I wouldn't have been  working on it full-time, like I wouldn't have nearly the focus or the time to really develop it into what it is today. And January 1st, 2015 actually was my first full-time day on Laravel and ever since then, I've been working on it  full-time as my full-time job.

"And that's going to be a real match. " "No, I thought you had it. " So I got a Playstation for Christmas and I was telling Taylor that I got a PS4 and he's actually like "You gotta download Rocket League and play me, because I don't have anyone to play with because Jeffrey abandoned me.

" He was always better, just to  be frank, which drives me nuts. And we started playing 2v2, like on the same team, and we hop on a call, like a Facetime audio call or whatever and just play probably for an hour a day honestly, and we've been playing for  probably four or five years now and we're still terrible. It's super fun, you know, and it's like the foundation of our  entire friendship at this point.

We lost to the Urinal Buddies. That actually does pretty much  sum up our Rocket League career. Losing and more losing.

Alright, we'll win next time. So the main things I remember  from those early years of Laravel is just the cool people, that just really I think catapulted  Laravel to the next level. One is Dayle Rees from the UK, who wrote sort of the first  beginner book for Laravel.

Back then, the only resource you could find when you are trying to learn Laravel was the documentation and a little bit of videos here and there but then the books Dayle Ress wrote were becoming  like the first results you see in Google. And it was just so popular, so instrumental for bringing so  many people into the ecosystem. Like in those first few years, if you ask anyone like "How did you get started with Laravel?

" Like greater than 50 chance, they're saying "Dayle Rees. " So there's, yeah there's there's an odd tale about something  that shows up in the Laravel code base. So Taylor and I were headed  to one of the LaraconEUs.

So we agreed to take a trip  together to Switzerland. And then on our second day there, we decided to take this trip  up one of the mountains. And when we got to the top, I realized that I still had GPRS.

And we thought, you know, what can we do? We're at the top of a mountain, we need to to show something  if we've got internet up here, we're nerds, so we decided that there was  probably just enough internet that we could we could commit  to the Laravel code base. I think that there's a comment  that's still in the codebase, or at least you'll be able to  find it in the version history, that just says something like.

. . Taylor and Dayle committed this  from the top of Jungfraujoch, XX elevation, and just like a smiley face  or something like that.

I think I was one of the first at the  time to start writing about Laravel. There wasn't really much out there  apart from the documentation itself, so I would write about just the parts  of the framework that would interest me. And through that I got to know Taylor, he realized that I was putting together these  little sort of third-party pieces of documentation and people were starting to enjoy those.

And I was hanging around on  IRC one day and Eric Barnes, who was working with Taylor at the time, he suggested that I take these blog posts  and turn them into a book of some kind. There was nothing out for Laravel at the time, so I certainly have Eric to thank  for what happened after that, and I wrote a book called, I think it was called Code Happy. And it was like the first  starter introduction to Laravel, as a full book that you could download.

It was more popular than I expected. It was up on my website and within a few weeks, it had sold like thousands of copies, something I certainly didn't expect. I was just really happy that I was  able to help push people towards this thing that Taylor had built, because I was excited about it and I thought that more people  needed to hear about it.

So I first learned about Laravel from Jeffrey Way, which you'll probably hear from a lot of people. Jeffrey Way, Jeffrey, and Jeffrey, Jeffrey Way, Jeffrey Way for sure is a very big reason  that a lot of people know about Laravel and fell in love with Laravel because  he is such an amazing teacher. What Dayle Rees did in writing and for books, Jeffrey Way did for videos and tutorials, and he's just taken it to the next level, where it's like one of the most premier tutorial sites on the internet  for building web applications.

Programmers know exactly what I'm talking about. When you want to learn something, it requires googling the entire  web and finding 100 different tabs, each of which is like a little puzzle  piece that solves the problem for you. In each tab is like a little  “aha” moment where you're like, okay this explains that definition better  than anywhere else I've seen so that helps and this has an actual code example  that I can use and see if it works and then you kind of combine them  all and that's how you learn things.

But it does get a little bit frustrating. You don't know where to find the next  little piece of knowledge, you know, all you have is a Google search. So Laracasts was kind of built to create  the educational platform that I wish had been available to me when  I was first getting started.

I think Laracasts is probably one of the Laravel  community’s most important like secret weapons, in terms of pulling in new people and  getting people excited about the framework. When I originally launched Laracasts, I got a lot of pushback  because people would say to me, “why are you creating Laracasts?  Why not create PHPcasts?

“Why are you creating silos? ” “Why don't you service the  entire wider general community, instead of focusing on this small group here? ” So what's nice about Laracasts is  it is for one type of developer and when you join, everyone else there is just like you.

If you use Laravel, if you use PHP, if you're kind of a full-stack developer where  you need to reach for CSS every once in a while, it is for them. It's not for Python developers, it's not for Ruby developers. They might get something out  of it if they join the site but it's not targeted at them.

It's just such an amazing resource that  honestly not many other frameworks enjoy. To have this whole library of video tutorials, where anyone can learn how to use Laravel and he's just done an amazing job with it, and I think he's been very instrumental in recent years of onboarding so many  people into the ecosystem. I'm sure Laracasts has had a nice  impact on Laravel's popularity, but it would be nothing without Laravel, so Laravel's success is due exclusively to  Taylor and the the team that works on it.

I saw on Twitter that Taylor is  looking for employee number one, and I thought yeah that that would be nice, it would be good for the guy who will be  joining Laravel as employee number one, but I never thought for a moment that  it would be someone from Cairo, Egypt, so I didn't even apply. But then Taylor reached out  and we had a little interview, and after that he told me that I'm going  to join Laravel as employee number one. At Laravel, we get a lot of  freedom to do our own thing, to handle our side of business, which we are all assigned to in our kind of ways, and that's been very like refreshing  from previous kind of jobs, where you had like a more  stricter mindset to the way things were controlled in certain  processes at the company.

Honestly, it's pretty crazy, I wake up every morning and working for Laravel, it doesn't really feel like work to me. So I really think that I am  in a privileged position, I'm working so close with the  community and on the other side, because I work with a tool that  empowers so many creators out there. Working for Laravel is definitely not  like working for a different company, because in a company, you have hierarchy, and you have bosses, but within the community, or working with Laravel, it's mainly like your boss  is actually the community.

Basically we're like all one big team, working on Laravel, working on the paid projects, working on the open source side of things, and we just like have this really strong focus to improve developer experience  for every PHP developer out there and providing a really quality set of products  and first-party libraries to achieve that goal. So as time has gone on, I've built this sort of commercial  ecosystem around Laravel. Laravel is like five people or  something running like three SaaS apps, like that's unheard of.

So now we've got Laravel Forge, Laravel Envoyer, Laravel  Spark, Laravel Nova, Laravel Vapor, and when you put them all together, they really complete the whole journey of Laravel, of a really great development experience and then they let you ship your code out  to the world to launch it to the masses. That's basically all handled by  the other team members at Laravel, so that I mainly focus on sort of nurturing and  shepherding Laravel as an open source project, because that's actually still  what I'm most passionate about. Which is not necessarily working  on the commercial products, which I like building out in the beginning, but I like shepherding the open-source project, kind of curating what features are in, what features are out, what do we need, and that's sort of like what I still  am personally really interested in.

So I sort of set the business up to  where I can mainly focus on that, mainly focus on open source  development, R&D and things like that. People have been inspired by Laravel, by the framework, but also by being part of the community. So we have Laravel News, we have companies  building products on top of Laravel like Tighten, and also so many opensourcers out  there being inspired by Laravel.

So Laravel News started 10 years ago, and it started off as a Twitter account, and then later it turned into like this  news and media website that is today. Taylor would then work on the framework and  then I can take everything they work on, write about it, keep the community informed, and then they don't have to worry about  writing articles and things like that. Thankfully I've been able to hire a writer, got people running a podcast for us, and it's just progressively  grown over these last, you know, these last 10 years.

When we started Tighten, it was actually just two of us but  at this point we have 30 people. As the Laravel community grew,  we also grew as a company. And one of the things that really  impacted our growth was when we said, you know what, we're not just a shop that happens to use Laravel, we really wanted to identify in saying, we do the best Laravel work there is, we wanted to really own that.

You know, something like Tailwind CSS, I don't think would have ever been built  if I had never been pulled into that world and seen what it was like to make  things that could be used by, you know, millions of people. It definitely encouraged me to want to take the little idea that I had with  Tailwind when it first started, and turn that into something that could help  tons of people and get lots of people excited. And all these cool things, they're  also because of the community, because we are united and also  because we empower each other.

You can find different people from different  cultures and from different backgrounds and it accepts all kinds of people. When I knew my wife was pregnant, the first  people I told about it was my friends at Laravel. Before Covid, I was in conferences like  three, four or five times every year, and then Covid happened and we weren't  able to see each other for over two years.

And my wife actually had the idea, so why don't we just meet in some city in  Europe and have some days there together. And all of a sudden almost everybody  was on board to meet in Portugal, and yeah, that's how we came up with Laracation. So Ian Landsman had the idea  to have a Laracon conference, which I thought was something  that we couldn't pull off, like I didn't think people would be  interested enough to come to the conference.

And he thought we could do it. He thought we could have a small event, maybe just 100 people, and so we actually pulled it off. And every year, you know, it just keeps getting bigger and bigger, until the last Laracon we did in the US had  almost a thousand people in Times Square and it's just become this big amazing  event that we have every year, both in the US and Europe  and now Australia as well.

Seeing like the Laracon logo  on the corner of Times Square, like blew my mind, like to see that little framework that, you know, grew up to be something that would  be on Times Square is pretty amazing. Everyone that I've talked  to in the Laravel community, people you see at Laracon and stuff like that, they're not there for work usually. They're there because it feels like  their favorite band is in town.

I was invited to a Laracon in Amsterdam  and I was kind of scared at first. But then it ended up being like  one of my favorite conferences, and that was the first time I got  actually inside the community, you know, and meeting the people who are  actually doing Laravel work. And I really enjoyed how welcoming everyone was.

I think Laravel does have this  sense of everybody's welcome, and you don't always get that. Sometimes there is like a cool kids club, and I don't see that with Laravel, which is really nice. I know some other code communities that  aren't that friendly and open-minded, and especially if you're a woman,  and you're asking a question, they’re like, “What are you doing here?

” “You don't belong here. ” And in Laravel it's like, okay you have this question, you can go to Laracasts, or I can help you, or try this and that and whatever, and this is like really unique I think. All right, welcome back to season  four of the Laravel podcast, the first episode where we've  got an actual interviewee, so I'm your host Matt  Stauffer and just a reminder, this season of the podcast is going to be  each episode about an individual topic, that is really helpful for people  who are new to the framework.

I don't think I've ever seen a community that is  so competitive about helping people more for free. People are racing to release more free articles, more free tutorials, more free YouTube videos, more free tools, to offer to other people for  the benefit of the other people. And it's a weird kind of competition, right?

It's competing to help others, not competing for your own benefit, and that's just a really fascinating  and wonderful part of this community. So from the very first day  I actually launched Laravel, I knew that I wanted the  community to be a certain way. I wanted it to be friendly, I wanted it to be chill, to be welcoming.

And part of that, I think, is because I knew like internally that  everyone wants to belong to like a group, you know what I mean? Like, everyone wants to  have this sense of belonging and I wanted to create that  sort of like atmosphere where everyone could feel like  friends and really work together to build something cool in the  Laravel ecosystem from day one. So historically, the programming world has been  primarily male and primarily white, especially in the US, and so what we have to do intentionally is say, if we believe that that's  not the way it should be, if it should be open and accessible to everybody, that means we have to do really  intentional work to make this change.

The good news is there are  people in the Laravel community who are actively trying to make a change. Zuzana Kunckova from Larabelles  is a fantastic example, because she found herself a woman  in a primarily male space and said you know what, I wanna I bet  I'm not the only one, right? I want to find other people I can connect with and so she made it an intentional space for women and non-binary and trans  developers to be able to be celebrated, supported and to  have a network of connection.

Getting into tech, I started quite late. I wasn't one of those people  that started as a teenager, you know young people learning how to code, no. I started to code when I was 35 or 36 even.

So I was kind of looking for  something in common with other people, so a community for either women or parents, you know like new Laravel developers, but I couldn't find anything. So I actually asked on Twitter once if there  is some community for women Laravel developers, that I haven't found yet, and I was told that no there isn't one, and why don't I create one. So this is what I did.

The purpose of Larabelles is to  first of all bring us together, so this is what I'm doing right now, bringing everyone together. The next thing I'm going to be focusing  on is maybe bringing more people, maybe even new developers into Laravel. I think this is very important.

If we want to invite more people, or if we want the Laravel community to be diverse, this is exactly what we need to do. We need to make people feel comfortable, simply by encouraging people  to be nice to each other. And I think that's that's at  the beginning of everything.

You have to… People need to be kind to each other and  respect each other for whoever they are. I am a woman. I am a covered Muslim, and I was changing career later in life.

So I was a parent as well. I had other responsibilities, so all  these things invite comments from people. And the fact that I felt comfortable talking  to people within the Laravel community… I think it speaks a lot about  what the people are like.

Ultimately, no community would need a special  kind of minority mini group within the main group. Like it'd be nice if we didn't have to have that. But having those things is how  we get enough women to where we don't actually need those communities anymore.

So yeah, I think Larabelles and  everything Zuzana is doing is is fantastic and I really just hope to see it  you know keep growing and growing. When I first wrote Laravel, I had no  idea it would get as big as it got today. I didn't even think it would be in the  top five PHP frameworks in the world, much less to become this sort of like  dominant player in the PHP ecosystem.

As Laravel's grown and got more popular,  larger companies have started using it. We've seen job ads from Apple  looking for Laravel developers, the United States government, the Winter Olympics built their APIs on Laravel, Vice Video, the Boston Celtics have internal  systems running on Laravel. There's all kinds of interesting  companies using Laravel, that I never would have expected  to use it when I first wrote it.

And I think Laravel becoming a global  phenomenon is one of the coolest aspects for me, because it's allowed me to interact  with so many people around the world. It's crazy because if I go to you know  our analytics for the Laravel website, the Laravel website has been visited from literally every single  country in the entire world. And it's just like… I never would have expected this  sort of like geographical reach when I was first sitting in my  apartment building Laravel in 2010.

It's been a really amazing experience honestly, and one of the coolest parts  about building Laravel. As the technologies we work with change,  Laravel always has to breathe and adapt. There's always going to be new things coming and while losing Taylor's contributions  to the framework would be really rough and of course he's the benevolent  dictator for life, right?

Like he defines what's going  in, what's not going in, there are so many other people  who are brilliant and capable and really creating great  contributions to the Laravel framework. The thing I'm most proud of honestly is the impact  it's had on so many people around the world. Like there's thousands and thousands  of people that have built a career off of something I created  in my apartment in 2010.

And they've been able to  take care of their families, they've been able to change careers and build out a life they wanted. To me, that's really what I'm more proud of, more so than any like technical  achievement Laravel achieved. So no, I had no idea that it  would be anything like it is today and it just totally blew my mind that it would ever be this big of a deal.

As an actual framework, it's really hard to imagine things that  could be done to really improve things. Yet somehow, every year he comes up with something new  to add that no one else has thought of, that makes it way better. I once heard that in the programming community, every two years about half of the members  in the programming community are new and you also see that if you  take a look at some statistics, like how many times that  Laravel is being downloaded or any of the packages.

And all of these curves just go up. I think software engineering  and web development, you know, we're adding thousands of  new developers every year. It's becoming more and more popular  that for anyone who's heard of PHP, it's sort of the natural place that they end up.

And you can think like is it growing even more? I see Taylor is always publishing  new things and new features and I know that at some point in the project, this will slow down a bit. All projects like this have an arc  and they grow and they get really big and then at some point they just do fall off.

This is how everything goes. So history would tell me that Laravel  will eventually taper off a little bit. But also interesting is it's been  nine years at this point, maybe more, and it's only getting bigger  and bigger every year.

So where Laravel is going to go in  the next five years, I don't know, but I'm excited to find out. Laravel allows you to focus  on just building things, to solve actual people's problems. It reignited my love for coding, it's captivated my interest for eight years now and I don't know where I'd be without it now.

I don't know if I'd still  be programming, who knows? Yeah so, I consider myself a benevolent  dictator for life on Laravel. And I think it has a lot of  benefits honestly to that sort of structure behind an open source project, because you can shape the project as one  cohesive whole and one cohesive vision.

It's hard to get everyone on the same page versus just having one person that  can steer the ship in a certain way. Good or bad, but at least you're like  heading in one direction as a whole. Building a tool and having it survive  and be popular for 10 years is already, I would say, a really big challenge.

But then okay, how can I take it another 10 years? Because I still like working on Laravel. Like I'm the guy on the Titanic, you know, playing the violin all the way down.

Like I'm I'm sailing with this ship like forever. So I just still think about… How do I keep Laravel fresh? How do I bring new people  into the Laravel ecosystem?

What's the next big thing over  the horizon that we can build? And that's what I still  think about on a daily basis.