A recap from my first Laracon (And my first time abroad!).

Yesterday, I got back home from my first ever Laracon (And also, my first time abroad) - LaraconEU 2026 was held at the Passenger Terminal in Amsterdam right on the River IJ, I’ve been a huge fan and enthusiast of Laravel since 2018, and have followed Laracons online every year since, and each time I sit there watching online I think to myself ‘I wish i was there’ - and to finally get that chance, I was so excited, it was everything I had hoped for, and more.

For me, the trip started late Saturday evening. I stopped in a hotel next to Birmingham airport that night to make it easier to get to the airport for 8am, as getting there via public transport from where I live on a Sunday morning just wasn’t possible. Our flight out was mid morning, and just under an hour in the air, for a first time flight was pretty easy.

After landing, and getting the train to Amsterdam Centraal, we checked into our hotel, which conveniently enough was the Mövenpick right next to the venue where the conference was being held, and after a relaxing for a bit we explored the city, before heading to the Mostly Technical Pre-Party in the rooftop bar of the DoubleTree hotel, hosted by Ian Landsman and Aaron Francis from the Mostly Technical podcast, and Laravel themselves.

The pre-party was a great place to see and catch up with friends both on the Laravel team, and in the wider community, and also meet others too, I remember looking around the room and just being in awe, there was a hundred or so people in there, and seeing people like Christoph Rumpell, Marcel Pociot, even Taylor Otwell himself, all mingling with the attendees, I was a little bit awestruck, all people I follow online, admire greatly, see regularly on videos, and they’re all there, in this tiny, intimate room with me, a friend of mine on the Laravel team briefly introduced me to Taylor, which just felt surreal to me. I left the Pre-Party a couple of hours later to head back to our hotel and settle down for the main conference the next morning.

Come the first day of the conference, we were there bright and early to set up our stand ready for the doors to open at 8:30am, the only other large scale event I’ve been to was Laravel Live London, back in 2024, but Laracon, that's a whole other level, over 1,000 attendees, and pretty soon it was time for the conference to start, with non other than Laravel’s own Nuno Maduro leading proceedings and introducing each speaker.

I didn’t get chance to watch every talk, with being at our sponsor stand, but I did watch a fair few I really wanted to see, and the first talk of the day was from Dan Harrin, one of the creators of Filament, personally, I’m a big fan of Vue, I’ve used Livewire a few times, but never really enjoyed it though, but Filament, that's on a whole other level and is really fun to use, so I was really keen to see this talk which covered what the Filament team had learned about abstracting reusable code, and keeping things simple, things in my point of view that can be applied to any code base.

The next two talks were from Laravel team members, Ryan Chandler on ‘Handling the unhappy path’ and Leah Thompson on ‘Things you didn’t know you could do in CSS’, I didn’t see much of Ryan’s unfortunately, and only bits of Leah’s, what I saw of both was definitely interesting and caught my eye, and I am planning on watching them back on the stream Laravel News did of the event. The final two talks of the morning were from Tobias Petry, one billion rows with Laravel, and Peter Suhm, from TailwindLabs, and covered using AI to help your users, such as improving forms and form usability.

The first talk after lunch was one I was looking forward to, from Simon Hamp on NativePHP, I looked into NativePHP last summer for a mobile app I was working on with a personal project, but at the time I decided against it and stuck to React Native because at the time, there was a lot of key features missing that I needed, but I think if was to make the same decision today, with everything that's changed in the months since then, it would definitely be a serious contender, NativePHP has gone from strength to strength in the year since it launched, with the core now being free and additional features consisting of both free, and paid plugins, and the ability to build native apps without having to use xCode or Android Studio, such as with Expo for React Native applications, is a huge selling point.

The next talk was from Nils Adermann, with a deep dive into Composer, unfortunately I didn't get to see much of this as I’d left the venue to have some lunch for myself and a little break, but this is another one I’m keen to watch back on the stream when I get chance. This was followed by Luke Kizmish with a talk on code reviews with some great tips on how to prepare the perfect PR, but more importantly, what not to do when preparing your PR, and if you’re reviewing a PR, definitely worth a rewatch on the stream!

The second to last talk of the afternoon was from Yannick Kupferschidt, on silent failures from AI, where the code it generates is technically valid, works, and passes tests, but can be full of issues that break your internal code style, or issues waiting to happen in the future, and what can be done to avoid these from happening.

Finally, to end day one, as with all Laracons, was the Laravel keynote from Taylor Otwell, with a Laravel update, recent updates to the framework and the ecosystem, news on Laravel 13 and when the AI SDK will have its first stable release, and demonstrating a new Laravel Cloud CLI that was released that same day.

He then went into a portion of the talk that I think blew a lot of people’s mind and seems to have taken Twitter by storm, using a combination of Laravel Nightwatch, Laravel Cloud, AI Coding Agents and OpenClaw he pushed broken code to his demo application, which triggered an error into Nightwatch, which then sent a webhook to his application, which then started a queued job to trigger an AI Agent to fix that bug, the AI agent fixed it, pushed it up in a branch, which got deployed to Cloud in a preview environment, and then opened a PR to the main branch, OpenClaw then as a result of the open PR called his phone, live on stage, about the PR and asking if he wanted to merge the PR, he said yes, the PR was merged, and deployed, all in just a couple of minutes of the bug happening. Mind. Blowing. What a way to wrap up day one of my first Laracon!

Day two started in much the same way as day one, the first talk of the day was from Laravel member Joe Tannenbaum on InertiaJS V3 - I’m personally a huge fan of InertiaJS with Vue, and for me, is the best way to build web apps, so I was very excited to hear about IntertiaV3, and it has some amazing features coming, including massively simplified configuration, literally just one line of code in your app.ts file, with convention of configuration being the focus, and SSR built in, that just works, and works locally without any configuration or extra processes.  Other new features include a built in Http Client, the ability to make non Inertia request direct from your inertia code (Something that's burnt me a few times in the past), optimistic updates, instant requests, where you can send some base props to the next component to load the page, rather than waiting for the props from the server, and the ability to pass props from the child page to the layout, to customise page headings etc, and type support for the new Inertia form component.

The second talk of the day came from yet another Laravel team member, this time Wendell Ardiel, after some technical difficulties, he spoke about building applications like puzzles, where each piece of your application is a different puzzle piece, with its own single responsibility, from backend, to front end, to even infrastructure, and how they all fit together into the wider picture.

After the morning break, the next talk of the day was from Shane Rosenthal, and followed on from yesterday's talk from Simon Hamp on NativePHP, but this was more of a deep dive into how it works behind the scenes and how your PHP app can talk to the native functionality on your phone, his talk was titled “This shouldn’t work” - but it evidently does, and as I mentioned before, if I ever need to make a mobile app again, NativePHP is definitely something to consider.

This was followed by a talk by Pete Heslop, on how to look at real world user experiences, and how problems have already been solved elsewhere, to help your own project thrive, and the last talk of the morning was by John Drexler, about how you should always aim to ship to production, even as early as day one, use feature flags, make your local and dev environments as close to production as possible, using anonymised production data.

After a very long lunch, there were just two talks left, the first was from Daniel Coulbourne, sharing a data import horror story, like yesterday's after lunch talk I didn't see a lot of this one as after the lunch madness in the sponsors area, I’d gone out the venue for a break and to eat some food. 

I came back to the venue to see the majority of the final talk of the day, from Marcel Pociot and refactoring to parallel AI agents, Marcel is the CTO of Beyond Code, who are well known for tools such as Laravel Herd and Tinkerwell, he shared his experiences in having multiple Claude Code agents running together, but the pitfalls of the common approach of Git Worktrees, and used the opportunity to launch their new software, Polyscope, a tool you can use to orchestrate AI agents locally on your Mac, without the common pitfalls or struggles of using worktrees, or other options.

After one final break, there was one thing left to close the conference, a Laravel panel Q&A hosted by Nuno Maduro, with Taylor Otwell, Joe Dixon, Jess Archer and Joe Tannenbaum, I missed a lot of this due to it being the end of the conference and packing our stand up, I overheard a lot, and it is one I will be watching back on the stream, there was some chats about the Laravel team growth, how Taylor typically starts his day, insights into Cloud, Nightwatch and the Open Source team.

Then, it was the end of the conference, an early night in the hotel, and then yesterday, the day after the conference, a flight back to the UK, and a train back home and back to normality.

I’ve only been home barely 24 hours and still processing everything that happened mentally, my first flight, my first Laracon, seeing all those people I admire and follow online in person, the thing from the conference I’m most excited to is Inertia V3, at the time of writing, the beta is due to be tagged at anytime today (5th March) and I have some WIP personal projects I’m keen to use it with, but it was great seeing the atmosphere in the room, being around literally over a thousand people that are as passionate about Laravel as I am.

Laracon US is in a few months, and while I won't be attending, like always I will be watching from home, and I’ll be really excited about the talks and any announcements.

Now I’ve been to my first Laracon I’m definitely excited to hopefully attend more in the future!