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A Laravel and Laracon Catch-Up With Michael Dyrynda and Jake Bennett · The Laravel Podcast

0:00
Hello and welcome back to the Laravel podcast season seven.
0:03
I'm your host, Matt Stauffer, CEO of Tighten.
0:05
And this season, I'm usually joined every episode by a member of the Laravel team.
0:08
But today I'm cheating because I just had I had to have some of my oldest friends
0:14
in the Laravel community, Michael Dyrynda and Jake Bennett,
0:16
on the podcast. I'm using Laracon as an excuse,
0:19
right? Because these guys are the host of a podcast.
0:21
We'll talk about it a little bit and it's about news and stuff like that.
0:23
So yeah, Laracon's a thing, but really,
0:25
I just wanted to have them come hang out with us.
0:27
So before I do anything else.
0:28
Guys, can you introduce yourselves on my screen?
0:31
Michael's first. That doesn't mean he's any better or anything like that,
0:33
but we'll have Michael get started and then Jay,
0:35
can you introduce yourself as well?
0:37
Hey, I am Michael Dyrynda, as Matt said,
0:39
a co-host of the Laravel News Podcast,
0:42
but also the organizer of Laracon AU because he mentioned Laracon.
0:47
That's yes. That's probably what most people,
0:49
I guess, if they know me already,
0:51
will know me for. And if not, that's what I do that's most relevant
0:54
to this audience.
0:55
And I'm Jake Bennett. I co host both of the podcasts that Michael Dyrynda hosts.
1:01
And so I will take that spot as co host.
1:03
Michael does all of the editing and all of that stuff.
1:07
So I have gladly taken the co host title rather than the host title.
1:11
And super glad to be on the show with you today,
1:13
Matt. I honestly feel like it has been so long since we've had
1:17
an opportunity to just sit and talk because every Laracon that we see each other,
1:21
it's like, hey, how's it going?
1:23
Let's let's catch up a little bit and we should catch up.
1:26
We should get you know, whatever.
1:27
And so I'm really glad that this actually worked out that we got a scheduled time
1:30
to just chat for a little bit.
1:31
So really excited to be on the show and talk about Laracon.
1:35
Okay, so I'm very grateful for you guys being here.
1:38
But the intro you just gave, I should have given because actually what
1:41
I want is there's a lot of people who people know in the community because
1:45
of the roles they play in the community,
1:47
right? That person organizes that thing,
1:49
that person maintains that thing,
1:50
but people don't actually know a lot about them outside of the the role that they
1:54
play in the community. So you guys play these roles in the community,
1:56
your podcasters, your educators,
1:58
your organizers, and like that.
1:59
But I don't know if people always know who you are outside of that context.
2:03
So I
2:04
I
2:04
actually
2:04
Would
2:04
like to ask you guys to tell me first from a business perspective,
2:08
but then also just from an outside of business perspective,
2:10
who are you? What do you do? What are your hobbies?
2:12
What's your day job? If you're comfortable sharing your day job.
2:14
Absolutely. What sort of work do you do?
2:16
Your day job. So we're gonna flip it this time.
2:17
Jake, you're first on this one.
2:19
boy, okay. So I'll start with the work stuff.
2:21
So I work at a company called Wilbur.
2:23
We do insurance subrogation. I love that Laravel is
2:27
so wonderfully capable of filling so many different niche things,
2:32
right? It's what's so great about it is you can kind of do anything with it.
2:36
And so while I work in the super niche industry in the insurance space,
2:40
which is highly regulated and all that stuff,
2:42
Laravel fits a lot of our needs and we use it for 99% of the things that we do.
2:46
So
2:46
I've been working there for about 13 years there.
2:49
Now I'm the director of IT and innovation there.
2:52
And so handle a lot of the software development team stuff,
2:56
IT side of things, a little bit of marketing,
2:58
and really love getting to work with Laravel every day.
3:02
That's my primary focus. I do the IT stuff when I have to,
3:05
but software development is for sure my passion.
3:08
And so that's that's the day job stuff.
3:10
I've got a family of four kids.
3:13
And my wonderful wife Laura, and they keep us very busy.
3:16
Matt and I were just sharing stories of our oldest.
3:19
And my oldest is turning 15, gonna be getting his driver's license soon.
3:22
I mean, that's going on. We got kids entering junior high.
3:25
I've got one still in elementary.
3:26
They all play sports, all that fun stuff.
3:28
So we're in a very fun stage of life,
3:30
but very, very busy. And so that's been wonderful.
3:33
The summer has been great. Lots of family time together.
3:36
And then hobbies. I've recently been getting,
3:38
I I could say up of like
3:40
To a year ago. I don't really think I had any hobbies.
3:43
My hobbies were chatting with Michael on Monday nights.
3:45
Like literally, I just honestly didn't have I feel like I didn't have time for him,
3:50
right? And so recently it's been golf.
3:53
So a year ago, I was just thinking through like,
3:57
what is something that I can do with my kids until my old age,
3:59
right? Uh-huh. My son was starting to beat me in the driveway in basketball.
4:03
I'm like, this cannot, this cannot be happening,
4:05
right? And so we also do a foot race every fourth of July.
4:09
And he beat me last year. And I'm like,
4:10
I've got to change something up.
4:11
So golf was the thing that I decided,
4:14
let's get into this. This is something I can do even into my old age.
4:17
And so my oldest has been golfing with me.
4:19
And so we've been doing that a lot.
4:20
He just started on the golf team this year and had his first meet today,
4:24
his first golf match today. So that's been a lot of fun.
4:27
And me and Caleb Porzio have been talking a lot about golf recently
4:30
on Telegram because this is a recent obsession of his as well.
4:32
And so ~ it's very fun.
4:35
It's an obsession more than a hobby,
4:37
I think. You know, you kind of watching videos all the time,
4:40
adjusting your swing and learning new things.
4:42
And so that's me. That's my quick intro.
4:44
But yeah, if anybody wants to talk golf or I'm trying to we we gotta
4:48
put together some sort of Laracon golf thing again.
4:50
That was really last year when they had that,
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I was so I was disappointed I didn't get to go on it.
4:55
But it didn't look like it was actually golf.
4:57
It was more like fun golf. Right.
4:58
So yeah.
5:00
All all good. But anyway, anybody interested at that,
5:02
please hit me up on Extra Telegram.
5:04
I'd love to love to chat about golf.
5:05
Yes, Eric Barnes. All right, Michael,
5:07
over to you.
5:08
Mm-hmm. ~ you you sound a lot like me in that regard,
5:11
where when you find a new thing,
5:13
it doesn't just become like a background hobby.
5:15
It becomes as as my darling wife Rhiannon puts it,
5:18
becomes ~ I make it my whole personality
5:21
Ha ha ha ha!
5:22
for a period of time. And like when I came back from Boston this year and
5:27
I was I was talking about, you know,
5:28
the golfing and that kind of stuff,
5:29
and she's like, No, like it will become your whole personality.
5:32
It takes too much time. You can't like
5:35
'Cause I was l I was watching and I started getting,
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you know, you know how Instagram knows.
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Like it started feeding me golf videos and she's laying in bed next to
5:42
me and she's like, no, absolutely not.
5:45
So yeah, much much like I don't I don't have a brood.
5:49
~ I've just got the two. I've got an eight year old boy and a she'll be
5:53
six in like three weeks. Girl.
5:55
So two kids and my wife are holding down the fort.
5:58
Soccer has overrun our life in the last year and a half.
6:02
~ Eli, my eldest, has kind of picked it up.
6:04
And so it was just school soccer last year to see if if he would,
6:08
you know, this is the first thing that he's kind of done.
6:11
So we wanted to know like, is he gonna stick with it?
6:13
And so school soccer last year,
6:15
that all finished up around this time last year,
6:17
probably a a month from now, ~ into September.
6:20
And he he was like really disappointed.
6:22
He's like, I I wanna keep playing.
6:24
It's you know, when do I get to play again?
6:26
Like, well, buddy, soccer doesn't start again until March next year.
6:30
So we found out one of his
6:32
schoolmates they played for a local club so we went got in into the trials
6:37
for that and he he tried out and he made the team.
6:39
So he's he's been playing club soccer this year,
6:42
which he's been excelling at and he's getting better and better.
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Has the ups and downs, you know,
6:46
if he if he gets like knocked over,
6:48
it's not it's not just that it was an accident that he's been targeted.
6:51
Like it's like genuinely the end of the world any time that he gets hit.
6:54
So yeah he's gotten really good and so I've
6:57
I've started to get more involved in that.
6:58
And when you're training twice a week,
7:00
he's playing on Saturday, he's playing on Sunday,
7:03
he's like always kicking a ball around the house.
7:05
You you kind of have no choice because I do not have a soccer bone in my body.
7:10
I've never followed it. I've never been interested in it.
7:12
And now that he's so into it and he's found it by himself,
7:15
it's like, Well, okay, we've got to foster this for as long as he's interested
7:19
in it. So I don't have
7:21
The knees to play the sport, but I've wherever I can,
7:24
I'll kick the ball with him. I'll get out there at soccer training,
7:27
you know, before they start. All of the kids line up and they start kicking
7:30
the ball at me while I'm in goals,
7:31
which some of them kick the ball.
7:33
They're only seven and eight, but some of them kick the ball.
7:37
Uh-huh. So yeah, that's that's a big part of it.
7:39
I run. I used to play basketball,
7:41
but again, my knees kind of dictated that that was no longer possible.
7:45
So and whilst my orthopedic surgeon has said you shouldn't run,
7:49
I have
7:50
taken that under advisement and continue to run anyway.
7:53
So those of you who saw me on on Twitter or about the place in Boston saw that
7:58
I had like mapped out my runs and I was running
7:59
yeah.
8:00
five K's along along the river there in the common and and whatever else.
8:03
So I run, I swim. The swimming was kind of do this instead of running because it's,
8:08
you know, less impact, better,
8:10
better for the body. Because I've been running for such a long time,
8:13
it's very difficult to transition into swimming because the breathing is different.
8:16
W when you run you breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth.
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When you swim, you breathe in through the mouth and out through the nose.
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And so this interesting
8:22
Yeah.
8:23
made things very difficult for me to to kind of transition.
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Cause you know, in swimming you want to get as much air in as possible,
8:29
but you want to let it out over a longer period of time.
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So I took up like adult swim lessons 'cause I hadn't been swimming for twenty years.
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So it was a matter of yeah, getting the swim coach and saying,
8:38
like, there's there's no risk of me drowning when I run.
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Like when I'm running, I can if I get tired,
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I just stop. There's no like, whoops,
8:45
I swallowed water. So
8:47
Yeah, that's that's the the the main thing.
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And then like now on the back of Laracon US,
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at the time of this recording,
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Laravel Live Denmark is happening at the end of this week.
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And then Laracon AU's the the next cab off the rank ~ in November.
9:00
So we're kind of getting into the the final stages of that,
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Matt, you'd be aware, as a speaker at this year's event as well.
9:06
So Yeah keeps keeps me very busy.
9:08
And my day job, you know, because I talk so much about soccer.
9:13
I work as a principal engineer at loan market group asset finance,
9:17
where ~ we our customers are mortgage brokers that want to diversify into asset
9:22
finance. We work with asset finance brokers.
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And so we build the platform that those brokers use to then capture data from their
9:30
customers, people that are looking like they want to buy a car
9:33
or debt consolidation or or whatever else.
9:35
~ so it's it's a platform that allows them to capture that information
9:39
and then quote against.
9:40
different lenders and then, you know,
9:41
find the right lender for that that customer and then submit the loans
9:45
~ all through like a single pane of glass effectively.
9:47
So that's what keeps me going during the day.
9:51
Yeah. I can't believe how much you description you just gave of soccer your kids.
9:56
Soccer is mine. I played soccer for like a year and you know,
10:00
when I was six years old or something like that.
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And my kids are now both in club soccer,
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which means we have between three and three and four no,
10:07
I guess total of five practices a week between the two of them.
10:10
my god. There's also goalie practice for my son.
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And once he moves up a level, it's gonna be an extra practice a week.
10:16
And like just last weekend we had
10:19
Tournaments, so there's three games for each of them spread out halfway across
10:22
the city. One of them was an hour and a half away.
10:24
Yeah. Love my children. my God.
10:28
Don't love club soccer. But like you said,
10:30
it's like they came to it independently because none of yeah,
10:32
nobody was here was pressing them into it.
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So
10:34
That's right.
10:35
Is your son tall, Matt?
10:37
Yes, he's hoping he's gonna be as tall as me.
10:39
I'm six two and he's probably five,
10:42
ten, five, eleven or something like that,
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if I had to guess.
10:45
His age, he's tall kid, so good goalie,
10:47
I'm sure.
10:47
Yeah. yeah. They they love him as goalie.
10:50
He's also been working really hard on it for a couple of years.
10:53
He just they just both switched to a new club this year because they had kind
10:57
of big fish in a small pond at their their old club.
10:59
So they moved to a new club, which means you have to start at the very bottom.
11:02
They say they'd let you try out.
11:03
They're No, everybody gets put at the bottom.
11:05
But they're they're both impressing people a lot right now.
11:08
So I'm like, That's good. That's great.
11:09
I love it.
11:10
This.
11:11
Good for them. That's great.
11:12
Okay, so while I want to just hang out with my buddies,
11:14
the justification for this being on the Laravel podcast and not just a Zoom
11:18
of the three of us is the two of you guys run,
11:21
among other podcasts, the Laravel News Podcast.
11:24
And one of the things that is distinct about the Laravel News Podcast
11:28
as compared to the Laravel Podcast is that you keep the news going.
11:31
And yes, it is the podcast officially associated with Laravel Dash News dot com,
11:35
the website, but also it is very focused on what is new and what is up and coming,
11:40
you know, in the framework.
11:41
Whereas Laravel Podcast is a bit more like kind of interviews
11:44
and long-running kind of things.
11:46
Laravel news is what is happening this week?
11:48
Packages, projects, you know, that kind of stuff.
11:50
And so that really makes me think that you guys have an approach to something like
11:55
a Laracon that's a little bit different than the one I have.
11:57
And of course, part of my approach to Laracon is being a speaker and
12:00
a sponsor and all that kind of stuff.
12:02
But also, I unfortunately don't write a ton of Laravel on a day-to-day right now.
12:06
Like I write some, right? But you guys are like looking at
12:11
releases like my my most prolific time of creating content around
12:14
the Laravel ecosystem was when I read every single line of every single commit
12:19
and every single Git repository and then wrote it on my blog,
12:22
right? And you guys are still doing a lot of that to a degree,
12:25
you know, through also together with Eric's work of and the other writers
12:28
at Laravel News, of course. So as people who are coming from that background,
12:32
but also have, you know, a decade each of of working in Laravel applications.
12:38
What was most exciting to you,
12:39
whether announced from the stage or talks or sponsors or things,
12:43
like kind of what caught your attention at Laracon US this year?
12:46
Yeah, I can jump in on this one.
12:48
Michael, you're gonna have to help me remember the girl's name,
12:50
the silly software girl.
12:51
Christina.
12:51
Christina, my gosh. Okay,
12:55
so I thought this is a different talk.
12:57
I when we got to this talk, I was like,
12:58
this is a different talk. I was I'm not really interested in this one.
13:01
I won't say what talk it was that I wasn't interested in,
13:03
but I was gonna skip out. I was gonna skip out,
13:05
and they had somehow switched the schedule.
13:07
And somebody one of my buddies was like,
13:09
no, it's gonna be this other one.
13:10
I'm like, I'll stick around for it,
13:11
I guess.
13:12
So glad I did because that was such a fun talk.
13:17
It was awesome. Number one, the throwback to the cut Tamagotchis.
13:20
Like so fun, feeding your inner Tom.
13:23
So the idea behind this was just like learning to have fun writing software again,
13:27
right? Like when you're starting to feel that burnout of like,
13:30
I just feel like I've been writing this same thing for forever.
13:34
And I'm just so tired of this.
13:35
And how do you reintroduce fun into it?
13:37
And her suggestion was just write throwaway code,
13:40
just write fun stuff. It's like
13:42
Software for an audience of just you,
13:44
you know, just build those things and have some fun doing it.
13:47
And all of the guys on my team said the same thing.
13:49
They said that was one of their very favorite talks.
13:52
She just did such an excellent job.
13:55
She was so well prepared. It was a manuscripted talk.
13:58
You could tell just because every word,
14:00
every phrase was so concise and on point.
14:03
And so excellent job. Loved that talk.
14:06
If you didn't get a chance to watch that one,
14:08
Would highly suggest going back and and watching that.
14:11
It was inspirational for sure.
14:13
Absolutely.
14:14
I think, and not only like your favorite,
14:16
but as you said, your team's favorite.
14:18
But I don't have any silly software to contribute myself,
14:21
but I I tweeted about it the other day.
14:23
And just to see the sheer volume of people f on the back of that talk that have been
14:29
posting their things, you know,
14:31
people that have gotten started,
14:32
Sam Sappenfield at Laravel building the the photo thing for Laracon US with Abby,
14:36
~ just the number of different people that that talk resonated with that.
14:42
You know, as we're all going through this existential dread as developers,
14:45
I think with everything else that's going on ~ in the wider space,
14:50
to to be able to go, actually,
14:51
you know what, I can just build some fun stuff that that's just for me that
14:55
I can throw away that, you know,
14:57
that we can use those tools to not not even have to worry about the code,
15:01
to just build something fun. And I've done more of that kind of stuff
15:05
in the last eight months, nine months than I have in the last seven,
15:09
eight years. So
15:11
Yeah, just a again to shout out the work that Christina did in putting that talk
15:15
together.
15:16
Yeah. Yeah. ~
15:18
One of the
15:18
things we really enjoy as speakers is finding places where there's overlap between
15:21
our talks. And so we're always kind of connecting ahead of time,
15:23
being like, Let me make sure I'm not stepping on your toes.
15:26
But once you're not worried about that,
15:28
then you're excited about, you know,
15:30
this is gonna lead into that, is gonna lead into whatever else.
15:33
Yeah. But to that point, like the the overlapping stuff.
15:36
Yeah, I felt like there was a good especially on day one.
15:39
Kitsy talked about using AI well.
15:41
I feel like you talked about operating at the edge of learning,
15:44
which very much like, you know,
15:46
dovetailed in with what he was talking about.
15:48
Mateus talked immediately, you know,
15:50
really close after that to building a CLI coding agent.
15:53
So one thing that I did really appreciate this year that I didn't know
15:56
I was waiting for was how other really smart people that I respect
16:01
in the community are using AI.
16:03
Well, like how are they doing it?
16:06
I know how I'm doing it, but how are they doing it?
16:08
And I felt like the first
16:10
First.
16:10
half of day one was all about that exactly.
16:14
And I was so excited about that.
16:16
I really did enjoy your talk.
16:19
I had so many screenshots and written down notes.
16:24
And one of the one, you know, in my Notion doc,
16:26
I wrote like a, you know, the point finger up,
16:28
like rewatch this one again. But like for those who maybe didn't watch or
16:33
Haven't taken notes. Some of the things that I wrote down for here was,
16:37
you know, don't stack your unknowns,
16:39
learn one thing at a time. And so I thought it's helpful for me because
16:44
the thing that you were giving as an example was this game that you were building.
16:47
And I'm also the my silly software right now is I'm building this game called Boom
16:52
Party. So I'm actually resurrecting it.
16:54
It's a game that we used to play as a team.
16:56
It's like a bomber man clone. And the company that was hosting it,
17:00
like got
17:01
Purchased and then went defunct.
17:02
Like they just shuttered all of their stuff.
17:04
Before they did so, they announced that they were shuttering it.
17:07
And so I got on and tried to scrape all the assets and music and sprites
17:11
and stuff off this. Then I went on this hunt on GitHub to find is there
17:16
any original source code that looks like what this JavaScript that
17:19
I pulled off looks like. And I found something.
17:21
And so I've been using Claude to sort of reconstruct and rebuild this thing.
17:24
So it's currently at boom party dot party,
17:26
if you care to look at it. But
17:28
In the process of I was like literally in the middle of doing that when you're
17:32
talking about this. And so I'm like,
17:34
this is super helpful to me because as I've been doing it,
17:38
it's like I really don't have any idea what it's doing.
17:40
How do I get into a process where I'm actually using this not just for fun,
17:45
but also for my education? Right.
17:47
And that was a big part of what you were talking about.
17:50
You know, you don't just surrender your knowledge.
17:53
Like, I can't just like give up.
17:55
You you can offload some of it,
17:57
but as you do that gap between your knowledge of your system and
18:00
the actual systems like capabilities and and the complexity of it,
18:03
that that gap only grows larger.
18:04
And so how do you manage that gap?
18:06
And so that was really, really helpful for me.
18:09
And again, just one of those talks I'll for sure watch over and over again.
18:12
And one of the ones I think I'll reference far into the future for my friends,
18:16
for teammates, you know, just one of those ones like,
18:18
Hey, if you're using AI, this is the way to use it.
18:20
So really liked that talk too.
18:22
You did a great job, Matt. as always.
18:24
I really appreciate that. And it's fun that you you said those things because what
18:28
I wanted was for people to come away with the skills to work with AI in
18:32
a way that really keeps our humanity and keeps us involved and keeps
18:35
our finger on the on the mouse or whatever it would be.
18:37
But also one of the things that I was sad that I didn't get to time
18:41
get time and energy is there was a slide at the end where I had this picture
18:45
of little Minecraft guy looking out at this big beautiful world and like,
18:49
here's all the things you can do and how's other things you can create.
18:51
In the beginning, I sort of talked about how
18:53
Making video game, you know, using AI and 3JS was helping me rediscover some
18:58
of the joy of creating. And then Christina,
19:01
and I I knew she was going to,
19:02
but she goes and gives her talk about,
19:03
you know, like silly software.
19:05
And that was to me, that was one of those beautiful moments where I was just like,
19:09
You did a whole chunk that I wish had been a part of my talk.
19:13
There's no way I could have fit it in.
19:14
But in a part of my favorite part of the talk was that last slide at
19:18
the end where it's like, go out and create things.
19:20
And then it just goes, you know,
19:21
not directly, but basically
19:23
Spiritually directly into Christina's talk,
19:25
where she's able to say, ~ you know,
19:26
create these fun things. And she even reached out to me.
19:28
She's like, Hey, can I do a silly software thing in Voxicon?
19:31
So we made this little goose world where you and so it's just I love when
19:36
our hearts and minds are all kind of like moving in similar directions.
19:41
Like it's it's really great where there's there's intellectual,
19:43
you know, connections like, build on this.
19:46
But it's also just really fun where it's like spiritually,
19:48
like we're moving in the same direction and we are all.
19:51
Wanting it. And one of the things that I think that was strongest
19:53
was people just saying, I feel a lot of fear right now.
19:56
Yeah.
19:57
I feel anxiety about the future of the industry.
20:00
And so a lot of the strongest responses I saw to my talk and to hers were just like
20:06
we can re recapture like joy and recapture fun and agency.
20:11
And I was just like, That's that's a really cool thing to walk away with,
20:15
especially from multiple multiple speakers.
20:17
Yeah, 100% agree. And I think the other part of it too was the piece that
20:22
you mentioned, which was like you can use AI for more than just writing the code,
20:25
right? And so I've been doing recently too is using AI to help understand
20:30
or explain to me parts of the code base that I maybe haven't looked at
20:32
in a long time. Right. So, you know,
20:34
you had given this idea of like have it build you a curriculum to say,
20:38
hey, these are the things I want to learn.
20:40
How should I go about learning this?
20:42
You know, give me the steps, give me the curriculum,
20:44
and then let's pause at certain intervals to make sure I'm understanding.
20:47
Give me a quiz, you know, help me under make sure I get what's going on here
20:50
and to correct me if I'm wrong.
20:51
So using the AI for ~ as a mentor almost,
20:55
right? As like an educator for you,
20:57
specific to your code base, right?
20:59
You don't have time to come and you know sit down and look at my code base with
21:02
me every every week, but AI can do that with me every day.
21:06
And so just those concepts. I really,
21:08
really liked that and have been using a lot of the stuff that you talked about.
21:12
In our daily workflow over the last couple of weeks.
21:14
So it's been great.
21:15
you all I did not bring Jake on here just to say nice things about my talk,
21:18
but I'm I'm I'm
21:20
It's been great. It's been great.
21:22
Yeah, we've loved it. Yeah. I love to hear that.
21:25
Are there any new releases, features,
21:28
framework level things or tools or practices where you're like this this very
21:34
technically is something that I'm walking away from Laravel,
21:36
either using on day one or you know,
21:39
really looking forward to trying as soon as possible.
21:42
Yeah, I would say the image manipulation thing is massive.
21:44
it's cool. The fact that there's this image manipulation first party built into
21:49
Laravel now is a massive benefit that anyone who has
21:55
to do this now doesn't have to offload this to third parties.
21:59
So, you know, we've used Cloudinary,
22:00
which is a wonderful service and it's it's great,
22:03
but I have to store my assets over there.
22:05
It because it just gives me auto transforms and it's really,
22:08
really simple to work with. But now I can just do all of this on my app,
22:11
right?
22:12
And especially in the environment that we're in,
22:13
a lot of times the things that we're dealing with are quite sensitive.
22:16
We're not allowed to ship these things off to third parties because of the the,
22:21
you know, contracts that we have with our clients.
22:23
And so being able to now just handle these image manipulations internally,
22:27
convert things from one, you know,
22:29
one to another, you know, format or scale things down,
22:32
scale things up. It's been really cool to see that I have not yet actually used
22:37
it myself yet, but that is a big,
22:39
big one that I thought was.
22:41
hugely beneficial, will be hugely beneficial for a lot of people in the community.
22:45
Michael, I want to give you a chance to talk because I feel like I've been talking
22:48
a lot. So it was, you know, for your for your side of things,
22:51
any items that were coming out in releases that you were expecting?
22:53
In releases, like not specifically the framework necessarily,
22:57
the the image manipulation stuff.
22:58
Anything that can I mean, it's never nice to be Sherlocked if you have built some
23:02
of these tools in in the community,
23:04
but from a a whole of community perspective,
23:07
anything that can kind of be pulled into the framework that's that
23:10
one less dependency that you know is gonna be supported over an extended period
23:14
of time by what is now the commercial entity of Laravel Holdings Incorporated
23:19
is is always a good thing.
23:20
That's really good. I don't do a lot of image manipulation.
23:22
Most of our stuff is just, you know,
23:24
capturing documents and crud stuff,
23:27
really. But the LSP, when they announced the VS Code extension in Denver last year,
23:32
I think, the first thing I did was message Jess Archer.
23:35
I So when you turning this into a Vim extension?
23:37
Like when can I use this in Vim?
23:39
So it's nice to see that it's here twelve months later.
23:41
I installed it. I opened up a file and like made sure it worked.
23:45
And then I realized, like, I'm not in the editor as much as I was twelve months ago.
23:49
So
23:50
The fact that that this kind of stuff is can be exposed into your agents though,
23:55
that Claude can use LSPs to infer this different thing.
23:58
It doesn't have to go and read a config file.
24:01
It can get the config variables out of the LSP is really useful.
24:05
So that was I thought was gonna be more exciting longer term than than what it was,
24:10
but it's just it's difficult. So but like blade support that has been you know,
24:14
it's been asked for for I
24:16
Yeah, that was we're gonna.
24:17
don't care what it what it looks like.
24:19
I don't mind that it's using, I think,
24:20
Prettier or some variant of Prettier under the hood.
24:23
Like I it doesn't matter. What I want is for someone to make the decisions
24:26
for me and for everything to just look the same.
24:28
The thing that I fight now is because I've done a composer update and I've
24:31
got the newest version of Pint,
24:32
every time I go into change like a little bit of a of a blade template,
24:36
it's now saving on right. And so the whole thing gets rewritten.
24:40
I'm like, well, I didn't really want
24:41
The whole thing is nuked, yeah.
24:43
even just like the cloud stuff.
24:45
The the the team over there is cooking constantly.
24:48
I think managed cues was sort of talked about a little bit before Laracon,
24:51
but that that it announced and it was launched,
24:54
like having managed cues, having all of this scale to zero stuff is really cool
24:58
as well. For those of us who have got either heavily cached applications
25:02
or just applications that don't get that much traffic,
25:04
to be able to just like not pay for the time that the compute is
25:08
not running is really cool. And then sharing cloud secrets.
25:11
I cheated. I'm running through the the blog post.
25:13
Like there's just so much stuff.
25:16
And like I think the the most recent episode before us,
25:18
or maybe two before us, by the time this this one comes out,
25:21
you sat down with Taylor and went through all of this stuff.
25:23
So you've probably done the laundry list already.
25:25
But it's just the amount of stuff that Taylor gets through and that the team builds.
25:29
And I think the image manipulation thing is something that we kind
25:34
of we discovered because, you know,
25:37
the the editorial team at Laravel News
25:39
Paul, Yannick, and Eric and Harris that they're like always going through what's
25:45
out in the community. They're always looking at pull requests going in and commits,
25:50
you know, these things that kind of just might slip under the radar.
25:53
They always see this. And we found this image manipulation thing.
25:56
And we like we were talking about it before it sort of even quote unquote came out.
25:59
Like it was in the tagged release of of Laravel 13.
26:03
These things, for a few years now,
26:05
Laravel has worked really hard to introduce.
26:09
Cool new features, some of them,
26:10
you know, bigger than others, some of them more impactful than others,
26:13
but doing it in a backwards compatible way,
26:16
that they can just release it in a point release,
26:18
that it doesn't have to wait until you know version fourteen.
26:22
It's not a big breaking change.
26:23
That, you know, organizations that are building on Laravel,
26:28
they don't have to have this big,
26:29
no, every twelve months we need to do like this big month long process
26:34
of upgrading the application and testing it.
26:36
And there's all these breaking changes.
26:37
It just doesn't happen anymore.
26:39
You know, eleven to twelve, twelve to thirteen,
26:41
there was like no known breaking changes,
26:43
which is always a fun thing to hear because there's you can't account
26:46
for everything in every application that's deployed across I guess millions
26:51
of applications at this point.
26:52
But broadly speaking, they've done a phenomenal job of staying on
26:56
top of that backwards compatibility promise for a number of years now.
26:59
To the point that, like, yeah,
27:01
most of the time you can just compose or update and stay up to date
27:04
and get the latest features. You know,
27:05
you don't have to worry about something.
27:07
obscure breaking in some part of your application.
27:10
So I think that over, as I said,
27:13
a number of years, like an extended period of time,
27:16
has made the upgrade path and staying up to date.
27:19
And we saw the, you know, the long term support releases come and go.
27:22
We we had two of them, you know,
27:24
version six and version nine. And it was like,
27:26
no, this is not actually the way that that we want to do things
27:29
in the Laravel community. We just want to stay up to date.
27:31
And I think by and large, most people do.
27:36
Stay up to date with their applications.
27:39
I'm curious, Matt. Do you so you obviously you run Tighten,
27:42
right? What is sort of the default for you guys as far as how you update things?
27:48
Do you try and keep, you know,
27:50
is like a maintenance contract where you're trying to keep people
27:52
or encouraging people to stay up to date with the re most recent versions
27:55
of Laravel?
27:57
Yeah, we would recommend annual at minimal.
28:00
It depends a little bit on how much custom stuff they have going on.
28:04
It depends a little bit on how much traffic they have,
28:07
how high the security requirements are.
28:10
But we tell every client you should at least once a year either do
28:14
it yourselves or hire us to come in for a little bit to just basically update every
28:17
dependency. And usually that takes our we our our minimum bill is usually
28:21
a week and that usually that's less than a week of work.
28:23
So we're like, hey, while we're at it,
28:25
we will, you know.
28:26
Kick the tires, write up some documentation,
28:29
look at your tests, add an extra feature there if you want.
28:32
But yeah, I I don't think there's ever any reason not to just stay
28:35
in the latest version of Laravel.
28:36
And it I've always been a big fan of supporting out of date applications because
28:41
not everybody has that luxury.
28:42
So I'm not a big fan of people whose packages only work with the latest version.
28:46
But I think that the opinion I absolutely share with clients is keep it up to date.
28:51
And it's especially easy to do.
28:53
If you start up to date and just keep keeping it.
28:56
Like the further out of date you get,
28:57
the harder it is to get it out of date.
28:59
But I think the other thing that makes it really difficult is if
29:02
you write unique hand rolled esoteric things that could just be handled
29:06
at the system level. We've all said it a hundred times,
29:08
right? Like if you stick with the way the framework does things,
29:10
then it's gonna be easier for you to update.
29:11
So most people who are listening to our advice don't have that problem.
29:15
But most rescues do have that problem because they're not listening
29:19
to people like us. Like there's
29:20
The vast majority of Laravel apps in the internet are written by people who've never
29:23
heard a episode of either of our podcasts,
29:25
never been to a Laravel Most
29:26
On the layer, kind of yeah, exactly.
29:27
of them have never even read the docs,
29:28
right? They just kind of installed the thing and they cherry picked
29:31
a couple pieces of the docs that were enough to learn the basic things they need.
29:34
And so that is what ends up to our to the situation where people are
29:37
in really rough shape. If you're writing it like the idiomatic Laravel way,
29:41
keeping up to date once a year is not painful and it saves you from a
29:44
lot of pain down the road. So
29:45
Do you ever you ever run into like Laravel 4 apps?
29:48
You ever run into like
29:50
I ~ we we run in Laravel five apps all the time.
29:54
Really?
29:54
Yeah.
29:55
Yeah. my gosh. Really? Tighten
29:58
Surprising.
29:59
I would say at least fifty percent of the work we do is rescue.
30:02
So because there's quite a few of the agencies that say Greenfield or nothing,
30:06
which is fine. I get it. And we like Greenfield apps,
30:08
but we do an unbelievable amount of rescue work.
30:11
And it was it's both something that we're really interested in.
30:14
I love legacy applications because that means it's been
30:17
working for years, despite whatever shortcomings it has,
30:20
it's earned people money. And if they're coming to us,
30:23
that means it's valuable enough to us that it's worth spending even more money
30:27
and time and effort getting this thing.
30:29
You know, so I'm just like, yeah,
30:30
huge fan.
30:31
that's a great point.
30:32
So yeah, so we do tons of Laravel 5 apps.
30:36
I I I wanna I wish Keith so Keith is usually involved.
30:40
The the older the app is the more likely that Keith,
30:42
our director of engineering, is doing an audit.
30:45
And so Keith can answer more specifically,
30:46
but I there's this part of me that thinks that sometime within the last year we've
30:50
seen a Laravel four dot something happen.
30:52
Yeah. So I they're out there. I feel like
30:54
I feel we have to be unclear.
30:57
that that 4.0 to 4.3 kind of cycle went very quickly.
31:02
And then most people I think would have gone from was it 4.2 that went
31:06
to five or four three that whichever like I think most people went
31:09
to five and that's where they kind of stopped because five to six was a
31:12
bit of a journey. Six to seven,
31:14
seven to eight. There were kind of like bigger you know structural changes
31:18
and lots of things move. So yeah I I feel like
31:21
It makes sense to me at least that five is where if anyone's stuck,
31:25
like that's where they're stuck,
31:25
or they're stuck on six or nine.
31:28
Well, a lot of the people in the past,
31:30
'cause we would get people in the past who are on on four,
31:32
th if they were on four, it's not even that they were stuck,
31:35
it's that they they didn't even know where to start on the upgrade process.
31:37
So basically they were at whatever they wrote it at,
31:40
right? And I think that's to your to your point,
31:42
I think if somebody's tried an upgrade then,
31:44
you know, they've they've tried and they've gotten stuck somewhere in the fives,
31:47
that's definitely the most common.
31:49
That was yeah, 'cause there was a lot of like tailor riffing through four,
31:53
five and six of, you know, very large changes that like I said before,
31:58
we don't we don't see that stuff.
31:59
Everything is pretty stable now.
32:01
The folder structure's fairly stable,
32:02
backwards compatibility is like firmly in everyone's mind when these features
32:07
are being built. So
32:08
Yeah. Laravel Shift Claude and I have done quite a few upgrades from either six,
32:13
seven, or eight on up to where we are today.
32:15
And it's it's usually really smooth operating.
32:17
So
32:18
Yeah.
32:19
when I was asking you guys about the upgrades,
32:20
neither of you mentioned head.
32:22
And I dug the new head tag thing where you can manage your
32:28
~
32:28
we just we just implemented that today.
32:30
We just used it today in an application.
32:32
I'm in love with this freaking feature because I am the one on every project
32:37
I'm ever on that goes, wait a minute,
32:39
or we've launched this thing a prod and somebody never turned on
32:42
the open and thankfully it doesn't happen to our client projects because we've
32:46
got checklists and stuff like that.
32:47
But every open source project,
32:48
every side thing I've been on,
32:49
I'm like, wait a minute, our open graph is not good.
32:51
And it literally happened today,
32:53
two hours before this call. I sent a a project that Eric Barnes and
32:57
I are working on, and I sent a link to somebody else,
32:59
and I was like, that's not the right preview image.
33:02
But we've got open we've got the Laravel tool,
33:04
so I'm just gonna go, you know,
33:05
it's gonna rather than hunting things down and where did I put it in this
33:09
one and how am I passing the properties back from the controllers or whatever,
33:12
I'm like, I just get to use this one.
33:13
So next time.
33:21
Mm-hmm. I actually had a blog post about this like forever ago about about
33:26
OG tags and whatever. And like there was,
33:28
you know, I had a linked up site and all this stuff.
33:30
This was back when you had what was it called?
33:32
It was a blog platform. Gist blog.
33:35
Gistlog
33:35
Yeah.
33:37
user for sure. I love just log.
33:39
It was great back in the day. But I had a whole blog post written up on that.
33:42
The one other thing I was gonna say mentioned before we jump off this
33:45
was when Taylor's talking about the AISDK.
33:48
was the fact that they now have open AI compatible provider for the Laravel AI SDK.
33:53
So now we can hook this up to our internal VLLM internal models.
33:57
Like so we have we have our own internal open source weight models running
34:02
on these DGX spark boxes inside our ~
34:05
yeah.
34:06
inside our our sort of network,
34:08
right? So we've got four of these things burning through tokens.
34:11
But now we can hook up the Laravel AI SDK,
34:14
whereas previously we had to use Prism
34:16
Shout out TJ Miller. We had to use Prism to do it,
34:17
which was great. But now you can use just the the Laravel stuff.
34:21
And the other part about that that was really nice is you now have these human
34:24
in the loop approvals, which is great too,
34:27
because that was also something that we had to,
34:29
you know, if you want to build that yourself,
34:31
good luck. Have fun with that.
34:32
But ~ of course the Laravel team does such a good job with those sorts of things.
34:36
So excited about that portion too.
34:38
If you want to be using that for with your local,
34:40
your own models, you can do that,
34:42
which is pretty, pretty sweet.
34:43
You got me distracted on the DGX part 'cause I had seen one of those.
34:46
Somebody in the internet posted one of those and I'm like,
34:48
that's a cute little box. And then someone was like,
34:50
You have four of those? Like that and they were like sh absolutely shocked.
34:54
And I was like, Okay,
34:55
Yeah.
34:55
four little boxes, not realizing four of those is equivalent to basically buying
34:58
a brand new car.
35:00
Yeah, they're we're trying to get we've been on the wait list for like their
35:04
the DGX, I think it's I can't remember what we have the Spark,
35:07
but there's like a DGX studio,
35:08
I think is what it is, something like that.
35:10
Okay. And so it's supposed to be this really massive base,
35:13
you know. Yeah, it's with it's a very,
35:15
very nice car. Yeah. And so ~ but yeah,
35:19
it's been working really well for us.
35:21
And and like I said a little bit earlier,
35:23
the contracts we have with our clients don't really allow us to send anything
35:26
out to these third party
35:27
You know, AI providers. And so if we want to do anything AI related,
35:30
we kinda have to do this. And it's been good.
35:33
It's been really good. But we haven't been able to use the layer of
35:35
AI SDK because it didn't have a provider that was compatible with this
35:39
VLM structure. So anyway, now we do.
35:41
So pretty cool stuff. Excited about that one.
35:43
I want stop real quick to thank our sponsors.
35:46
And our first sponsor is Spatie.
35:47
And Flare by Spatie is all in one error tracking and performance monitoring
35:51
for your Laravel application. You can find them at flareapp.io.
35:55
And if you want to check out their performance monitoring,
35:57
check it out at flareapp.io slash performance hyphen monitoring.
36:01
And our other sponsor is Laracon Australia,
36:04
run by Michael Dyrynda, today's guest.
36:07
Laracon AU returns November 4th to 6th in Brisbane with deeper learning.
36:11
Practical insights and ideas that will stretch how you think about building with
36:15
Laravel. Get your tickets now.
36:16
And really, get your tickets now at Laracon.au.
36:20
I do remember where I was going.
36:23
I was going to say, speaking of Laracon,
36:24
Michael, you organize an entire conference on top of being a loving
36:30
and present dad and you know, having a day job and everything and several podcasts.
36:35
I want you to tell us about the conference,
36:37
but first I want to ask you actually how do you do it?
36:41
Because Laracon AU is among the either two or three best
36:47
run conferences I've ever been to my entire life.
36:49
Not only best run in terms of it's smooth,
36:53
I'm a as a speaker, as a sponsor,
36:57
as an attendee, it's just easy and clear and everything's just going
37:01
the way you want it to. But also it's just lovely people with incredible vibes
37:06
in a great venue and a wonderful location.
37:09
I really honestly mean the question of how do you pull it off?
37:13
How do you do it?
37:13
It's been refined over a number of years.
37:16
You know, the first year we did it was like,
37:17
just can we do it? Like, can we get people to come to this thing and who
37:21
can we get to speak at it? And like it's a journey.
37:24
So people will say to me, can you get Taylor to come?
37:27
I'm like, Yeah, I'll just I'll just force Taylor from Arkansas to jump
37:31
on a plane and fly twenty-eight hours across like I it's you know,
37:35
so there's there's definitely a lot that has to go into it to make it happen.
37:39
And so I think what I've tried to do
37:43
Mindful of the fact that the whole reason that I started it was because
37:46
I went to Laracon in Louisville in 2016.
37:49
I went, man, this is a long way to go for two days.
37:51
And I was fortunate enough to be in a position to be able to go,
37:55
but not everyone can. You know,
37:57
some people cannot make the journey from one side of Australia to Brisbane
38:00
to attend Laracon. So we had to become very comfortable with the fact that like this
38:06
is Laracon for Australia. And by and large,
38:09
it's Australian speakers.
38:11
it by and large it's an it's Australian attendees and we just had
38:14
to be comfortable with that and make it an event that fits that demographic.
38:19
~ you know, you're you're coming to speak this year.
38:22
We we try and bring in people,
38:24
but like we try and bring in people that wouldn't otherwise have
38:28
the opportunity to speak at Laracon.
38:31
You know, it's it's very difficult to get into Laracon US.
38:34
It's de difficult to get into Laracon EU to say nothing of the travel requirements.
38:39
It's like
38:40
Those are the flagship events for our community.
38:44
And so the speakers are at at the top echelon.
38:46
And so we we want people to be discovered.
38:49
And so we've had a number of people that we've presented with
38:53
an opportunity and they've taken that bull by the horns and they have ended
38:56
up going to speak in Europe and they've spoken at Laracon US and like you know,
39:01
not not to I always bring her up,
39:03
but like the Jess Archers of the world.
39:04
There's not many of them, but like discovered at our little little event,
39:08
you know. So
39:09
But yeah, it's a matter of of finding the venue where,
39:12
you know, it's not too big, it's not too small.
39:14
But one thing that I'd I'd spoke to a few people about in ~ Boston is that
39:20
the venue there was fantastic.
39:22
But I think in Australia, for whatever reason,
39:25
as as geographically dispersed as we all are as a nation,
39:29
people won't walk 20 minutes from their hotel to the conference venue.
39:33
I don't I don't know what it is.
39:34
But if people can't find something that's like very close by,
39:38
they won't do it. So
39:39
Trying to find this Goldilocks situation of a venue where the hotels are close,
39:43
where it's easy to get to those hotels where you don't have to go far to
39:46
get to the venue, where you don't have to get far to the,
39:49
you know, the networking events.
39:51
~ networking events are difficult.
39:53
Where do you take 400 people? Where do you take 900 people?
39:57
You know, in in the instance of Boston.
39:59
And it's like, what do you do with 900 people?
40:01
That by and large, you know, developers are not the most social of creatures.
40:06
So, like, what do you do?
40:08
For us it's bowling because, you know,
40:10
lots of us like playing games.
40:11
Many of us will make a fool of ourselves bowling.
40:14
It's it's just a a a good fun activity.
40:16
So it's, you know, all of those things kind of factor into it.
40:19
And then this year, la last year,
40:22
we got to this dinner with a few people and I like go to say,
40:27
you know, we're here and they're like,
40:28
We don't have a booking for you.
40:29
I said, What do you mean you don't have like it's and for for five,
40:32
six months that I thought I had this booking,
40:35
I had the wrong day.
40:37
So it was a day early. And and fortunately,
40:40
like we've been to this location a couple of times before.
40:43
And so they were like, look, just give us ten minutes,
40:45
go and have a drink, we'll sort something out for you.
40:47
And they they got us a table. We ended up in a in a nicer spot than
40:50
we would have been on our actual booking a day later.
40:53
So it but it was at that point that Rees said to me,
40:57
like, I think you need to start sharing the load of some of this stuff.
41:01
So Rhiannon has taken over all of the social aspects this year.
41:05
So so Ree
41:07
Is organizing all of the after dark,
41:09
all of the like speaker sponsor dinner,
41:12
all of the bits and pieces, ancillary. She's done all of the accommodation stuff
41:15
for me this year. So Ree is doing that.
41:17
Historically, I had always like I was responsible for the speakers.
41:22
I would pick all of the speakers,
41:23
I would liaise with all of the speakers,
41:25
I would make sure that all of the speakers spoke to each other,
41:29
that that there was like I I've always had this firm belief that
41:32
a conf the conference is better when there is some
41:36
Whether loose or otherwise connective thread from start to finish.
41:40
That, you know, in your example with your talk and Christina's talk,
41:45
that like there is a a connected point between the end of your talk and
41:49
the start of her talk, or that someone speaking on day two can say,
41:52
by the way, such and such said something the day before.
41:55
Now that can happen organically at the event.
41:57
Don't get me wrong. ~ those things can happen organically through the event.
42:02
Like if the speakers are paying attention,
42:04
but it's difficult.
42:05
Because a speaker on day two is usually anxious.
42:08
They're in their hotel room hiding,
42:10
they're preparing, they're rehearsing,
42:12
there's like getting ready to give that talk still.
42:14
So they don't see that something that Matt said on day one could apply to day.
42:18
So we get all the speakers together.
42:19
We just did the first one last year.
42:21
Like we try and connect the speakers so that they kind of land.
42:25
And it's not like, you know, an awkward hello.
42:28
It's like I know, I feel like I know you because I've spoken to you three
42:31
or four times in the lead up. We've got a few speakers that are like,
42:34
cross-pollinating ideas because there's there's elements of one talk that
42:38
fit with another talk or there's Dr.
42:41
Jasmine McDonald, Tim McDonald's partner,
42:43
is the honorable. She's ~ she has a PhD in psychology.
42:48
So there's there's connected threads between what her specific talk
42:52
is and some anecdotal discussion in some of the other talks.
42:56
And so the the speakers go off on their own and they start connecting these threads
43:01
together of their own accord. So
43:03
You over the years we've gone,
43:04
okay, we need to get the attendee experience right.
43:06
And then we need to look ~ I spent a bunch of time with like what do I have
43:09
to do with sponsors? Because I don't like it's that's a very hands
43:12
on thing that that we're connecting with sponsors,
43:14
that we're doing all of these things.
43:15
So how do I improve that experience?
43:17
That was a focus for one year.
43:18
Then the focus was on attendees.
43:20
Okay, we've moved from Sydney to Brisbane.
43:22
What do they need for this to be a good experience coming to a new city with like
43:27
a bigger scope of attendance? You know,
43:29
we've got to figure out where it
43:31
accommodation is with doing cater like the first time we did a catering,
43:34
the the cost of the ticket basically doubled because catering was everyone says
43:39
it it'd be nice to have catering.
43:40
It's like, okay, you need to understand that you have to pay for the catering now.
43:43
And it's and it's very difficult.
43:45
Like we saw in in Boston that like there was all this vegetarian food left over.
43:49
It's like, okay, what happened there?
43:50
Because either the caterer sent too much or there was,
43:53
you know, not not to say that anyone did anything wrong ~ in in preparing,
43:57
but it's like these kinds of things will happen.
44:00
And and sometimes you learn this through experience.
44:02
Anyone that went to Laraprom would know that there was a weight.
44:06
We had the same weight at our networking event because we let people
44:10
do beer off tap. Well, the next year we went back and said,
44:13
No, don't do beer off tap. It takes too long to pour.
44:15
People will line up. We don't want them to be standing in a line for
44:17
an hour waiting for a drink or whatever it is.
44:20
Just hand them whatever you've got in bottles and cans that is in your standard men,
44:24
you're like, that's what it is.
44:25
Just open it, give it to them and and move them on.
44:27
You know? So
44:28
It's sitting down and and looking at the feedback,
44:30
you know, and understanding where where you have gaps.
44:34
And there will always be things.
44:35
I I said to Abby, there there are things that you will have seen,
44:38
you will have observed, you will have written down that like will ire you,
44:42
that will upset you, that nobody,
44:44
none, out of nine hundred odd people that came to Boston,
44:48
no one would have seen that except for Abby.
44:50
But she's gonna want to fix that for next time.
44:52
And the next time people come to the conference,
44:54
they won't even know, but they'll be like,
44:56
~
44:57
You know, that was different. That was a pleasant change,
44:59
you know, th these tiny little things.
45:01
Yep. ~ it's just like having your finger on the pulse for these kinds
45:05
of things year on year, to understand that there is feedback out there,
45:08
to solicit that feedback, to look through some of the people can
45:12
be very honest online, particularly when their their names are not visible.
45:16
But we solicited feedback last year.
45:18
I emailed people and I said, This is my email address.
45:21
If you reply to this email, I will get the feedback and I will reply to it.
45:24
And we had
45:25
probably forty or fifty people that I went through over the course of four
45:28
or five weeks getting back to them and saying,
45:30
you know, thank you for the feedback.
45:32
We and I and I think we tried very hard to kind of address lots of feedback
45:36
and and like just just tweak things.
45:38
No and there was nothing like beyond some things that like you it's like that's
45:45
a very specifically you thing.
45:46
Like I can't do anything about that.
45:47
But to to look through and and see like what what is there and and just,
45:52
you know, tweaks, tweaking some dials and
45:55
And pulling some levers here and there to just do it.
45:59
So and the other thing, the speakers this year,
46:01
the historically it was me. I would pick I got very distracted from I did
46:06
all of the speaker selection for a long period of time too.
46:08
So so this year I I
46:11
So cool
46:11
approached ~ some former speakers.
46:14
So I spoke to Kath, who has spoken previously.
46:17
I spoke to Dave as like a member of Laravel.
46:22
Not because he's a member of Laravel,
46:23
but because he's kind of on the fringe of technical and has been in
46:28
in the product space for a long time.
46:29
I reached out to, you know, members of the audience that had provided some feedback.
46:34
I said, I think, you know, you would have a very useful contribution
46:37
to helping us put together a different program this year.
46:41
And so we put together a a panel of of four people that we all reviewed every
46:45
one of the 150 talks that came in this year.
46:48
We all came and then collaborated on that.
46:50
And the
46:50
The program this year was the result of literal like probably a day's worth
46:55
of work of discussions, but you know,
46:57
hours and hours of of everyone pouring over all of the submissions
47:01
and and figuring out how we piece together a thing.
47:03
So yeah, it's just delegation has been this year's theme,
47:08
you know.
47:09
I was gonna say it was really funny sort of hanging out with Michael this year after
47:12
listening to him talk about all this,
47:13
because there would be things where he'd be like,
47:15
I don't know, those lines, it's like whatever,
47:17
whatever. And I'm like, I literally didn't even think about it at all.
47:21
And it's like Michael's brain is constantly on like host mode.
47:25
You know what I mean? Organizer mode.
47:27
And so you'd see him like sort of like working through a problem,
47:30
like, ~ this, you know, or he'd be like,
47:32
Wow, like the check-in lines really went fast this year.
47:35
And I'm like
47:36
Yeah, I guess so. Like I like it's just not even on my radar.
47:39
And like Michael is constantly like evaluating,
47:41
analyzing. So looking back on it,
47:43
like, that's what that is. Michael's thinking through like his brain,
47:46
sort of how does this work for their stuff?
47:48
And so yeah, that's pretty cool.
47:49
I th you're right though, Michael.
47:51
There's all these invisible things.
47:52
~ I felt like this year's Laracon was absolutely one of my favorite,
47:56
like one of my absolute favorite.
47:59
And I'm sure
48:00
It's just all those little tweaks.
48:01
It wasn't even anything material I could put my finger on that was like this
48:04
is why it was so good. It just was.
48:06
And so I'm sure it's a lot of work from the team and Abby just making sure
48:11
all the I's are dotted, all the T's are crossed,
48:13
and it it paid off. It really
48:15
Yeah,
48:15
it was it was the vibes were immaculate across the board.
48:17
Like day zero that you know, whether people were participating or they were just
48:23
watching, like the fact that they could could come in and just watch and
48:26
be part of that was amazing. The Lara Prom was great.
48:29
After dark was you know, that that first night was really,
48:32
really good. That venue was perfect.
48:33
The fact that it didn't rain, considering that we were expecting rain all day,
48:37
like food was very good. Everyone I think got,
48:40
you know, and the I didn't see or hear anyone complaining there wasn't enough food,
48:43
like it just kept coming.
48:45
And and having the networking
48:47
No, there was plenty, yeah.
48:48
after day two as well, 'cause like day two is always a really weird one.
48:51
It's a weird one for us. We kind of like you get to the end of the
48:53
day and it's like, Yep, I guess that's it.
48:55
See ya later And then, you know,
48:56
everyone gets ~
48:58
We've
48:58
just been together nonstop for yes.
49:00
From an organizer perspective,
49:02
it's like a very difficult thing to to capture.
49:05
And like with the lens of an organizer as opposed to just the the attendee,
49:10
I think Laracon US had the vibes right this year across the board.
49:16
Yeah, I'm very hopeful. I'm very hopeful that they keep the day zero thing.
49:20
That was hugely beneficial. Like everybody lands and usually that first night
49:25
is everybody making a mad dash to sort of figure out who can I connect with before
49:28
the night is over. I wanna see people,
49:29
I wanna see my friends, like where can we go to dinner?
49:31
But it's like if you have too big of a group,
49:33
there's not a place you can go.
49:34
So LeraProm was great, but also the day zero dodgeball thing.
49:37
Like you said, like a couple of years ago it was the basketball,
49:40
but it really wasn't able to be participated.
49:42
By everybody. And so this year it was.
49:45
Plus our team won. That was awesome.
49:47
That's what you're excited about,
49:48
really. Yeah, that's really what was actually excited about.
49:51
So but yeah, no, I I hope that they take what they did this year and you know,
49:56
not not exactly like clone it for next year,
49:58
but man, it was so good. I really hope that next year's is very similar as
50:01
as far as the events, the days of,
50:03
you know, the days before the days leading up to the actual conference.
50:06
It was great.
50:06
Lots to be proud of, I think, for the Abby in particular this year.
50:11
Yeah. Guys, I just looked up and I normally cut this thing at 45 minutes
50:15
and I was it was going so smoothly I didn't even think to check the time.
50:19
I was like, yeah, we're 20 minutes in.
50:21
~
50:22
Like a
50:22
Yeah. Convinced we hadn't even hit the half hour mark.
50:25
Okay, so that means I need to start wrapping it up.
50:28
So from the two of you, is there anything else going on,
50:32
whether it's Laracon related or technology related or projects you're working
50:36
on or anything else?
50:37
That you just think is really fun and exciting you wanna talk about real quick.
50:40
Anything you wanna share, anything you wanna link to,
50:42
anything you wanna shout out, any way that,
50:44
you know, anything you wanna brag on?
50:46
And the answer could be no. I didn't prepare you for this.
50:48
But is there anything just you're like,
50:49
you know what? Like, I gotta get this in before you do.
50:51
Before we go. Michael, you want to go?
50:52
You have anything on top of your head?
50:54
I don't I don't have anything specifically other than ~ Laracon AU?
50:58
Tickets, early bird tickets are still available.
51:00
If you are thinking about coming,
51:01
if you're listening to this and whether you're in Australia or or beyond,
51:04
I discovered, I think I knew this before,
51:07
but it occurred to me that the Foo Fighters are playing on the night of
51:11
day one of Laracon, which is amazing.
51:12
Nice.
51:14
It's a great coin. It's really also very frustrating because
51:17
it means that accommodation is a real problem.
51:20
pain because everyone like comes in and the hotels get booked up.
51:23
So if you haven't you're still thinking about it,
51:25
please like book your accommodation.
51:28
We've got discounts available.
51:30
Last year it was Metallica. This year we went a week earlier and this year it's
51:35
the Foo Fighters. So I mean and when we
51:37
Something two years ago when I was there last as well,
51:39
I don't remember what it was. There was a concert on our second time.
51:40
There was something on
51:42
the Friday night. Yeah, at the at the Riverside ~ stage that's directly next
51:46
to where we were. So yeah, it's ~ like we picked the dates in December,
51:50
we had them locked away, and then we were not planning on announcing
51:54
our dates until March, and then the Foo Fighters come in in February.
51:56
And we're like, Well and okay,
51:58
great. Well, it's the Foo Fighters.
52:00
So ~ we we planned as best we could anyway,
52:04
if you if you're still thinking about it,
52:05
Laracon.au
52:07
The all the speakers up, the full schedule,
52:09
all of the talk details, everything is there.
52:11
So check that out. And also check out the Laravel News Podcast
52:15
if you haven't already. ~ we we stay on top of that stuff thanks
52:19
to the amazing editorial work of Paul and Yannick and Harris and Eric as well.
52:24
He's doing tons of work on the site.
52:26
And you mentioned him before, but also just shout out to TJ Miller.
52:29
Like just follow him because he's a great person.
52:32
What a good
52:34
Person. Yeah.
52:35
Called Prism. He's working on some like markdown note taking apps.
52:38
He's working on a transcription
52:39
And
52:40
tool at the moment. Like he just if you want to look at and not even silly software,
52:44
but like the kind of stuff that is you would probably want to look at these days,
52:48
he's he's building all of it. So shout out to T J.
52:51
All right, I got a couple things here.
52:52
Number one, I wanted to give a quick like shout out to some of the talks that
52:58
I didn't go into any sort of detail about,
53:00
but I really liked it's I think it's Mateus.
53:03
He talked about building a CLI coding agent.
53:05
That was really good because it was talking about how you can take outputs that
53:10
are typically non-deterministic and how you can sort of make them deterministic,
53:14
how you can use an AI to still get deterministic outputs.
53:17
That was really good talk.
53:18
Will King, best slides ever. That dude is a rock star.
53:22
my gosh, his slides were so good.
53:24
And then Kent Dodds, who I think broke my freaking toe during dodgeball.
53:29
But that dude had a great talk about durable skills in the age of AI.
53:34
And so that was a really good talk.
53:36
So shout out to all those speakers.
53:37
They did a really, really great job as well.
53:39
The only thing I have to talk about is just this little game I've been working on,
53:41
which is really fun, Boom Party dot party.
53:43
So we've been doing this as a team.
53:45
We do this every morning during our stand-up.
53:46
We play this game and it's really fun.
53:48
So you should check it out, play it with your team.
53:50
It's really enjoyable. And if you have any tweaks or anything you want
53:55
to make to it, I'm probably just gonna throw it out on open source,
53:58
honestly. Just you know, throw Claude at it.
54:00
It's actually very well structured and so really easy to make changes and stuff.
54:03
So feel free to have a play around with that.
54:05
And then something I discovered recently that has nothing to do with Laravel.
54:09
Any of that stuff, but it's just really fun,
54:10
is this thing? I think it's called itch.io.
54:13
And so there's a lot of these little games on there.
54:16
There's one called like lock picking today.
54:18
I don't know. There's like really,
54:19
really creative people out there making these fun games.
54:22
And I think if you're looking to sort of make a game,
54:25
there's some really clever ideas on here that could maybe give you some inspiration.
54:30
I know a lot of people have been looking for like,
54:32
how can I get my kids into coding?
54:33
And man, games are a great way to do that,
54:35
right? Just have them build something simple.
54:36
And so
54:37
There's a lot of fun little web games on this itch.io that you could check
54:40
out if you're if you're sort of w looking for some inspiration
54:43
or something like that. So amazing.
54:45
That's it. That's all from me.
54:47
Guys,
54:48
you're the best. Thank you so much for hanging out with me.
54:50
And for those who don't know, these guys didn't say,
54:53
What are we talking about? They didn't say,
54:55
You got to give me an agenda. We need to pre they're like,
54:57
you know what? We'll be there.
54:58
We'll be ready to hang. I don't know if I've ever given any guests
55:03
as little preparation information as I gave them to you.
55:07
And we we could have gone for another hour here.
55:09
So thank you guys so much. Thank you for your continued service to the community.
55:13
Thank you for being such wonderful friends.
55:15
I'm so glad to call you guys friends.
55:17
And yeah, I really appreciate you guys.
55:20
Thanks for having us on, Matt.
55:20
It was wonderful talking with you.
55:22
Appreciate you.
55:22
Two.
55:23
And for the rest of you all, we will see you all next time.