A recent post by the Github ReadMe Project asked the following question
“Is Laravel the happiest developer community on the planet?”
The post asked a number of Laravel developers what they thought of the framework and how the framework helps them as a developer. As a Keen Laravel developer myself and also the co-founder of Jump24 an official Laravel Partner I thought it would be great to ask some of the team the same question and get their thoughts on it all.
Lee :- Laravel makes me happy because the framework and its ecosystem enable me to go from idea to usable app quickly, without compromising on security, performance or user experience. Its extensive library of first-party and third-party packages, opinionated way of developing, comprehensive support for testing and its welcoming community means I can’t imagine using any other tool.
Alex :- Laravel makes me a happy developer because it streamlines common tasks and functionality in applications. The pace in which the framework and its ecosystem moves forward thanks to the maintainers and the community means you are always supported and learning as a developer. This leads to the continual growth of the quality of code produced and the time to always adopt practices such as test driven development, the use of static analysis and writing code to a defined standard. This gives you the developer confidence that the work you produce is robust and of the highest professional quality.
Ross :- After using Laravel since 2015, and having tried other PHP frameworks since, I always find myself thinking “In Laravel this is so much easier and/or faster” and nothing makes me happier than getting the job done to a high standard without all the faff and boilerplate. Plus the community feels huge and welcoming, where if you have an idea or a suggestion you are more than welcome to contribute it via a package or even to the core which only promotes the health of the ecosystem but also gives you that “feel good factor” that you’ve done something that could benefit hundreds or even thousands of like-minded developers.
Elliot :- Laravel has all the tools and features to get me up and running within a few minutes. Its vibrant community consistently drives improvement forward whilst being friendly and welcoming. The framework promotes best practices, prioritises testing and emphasises maintainable code. Giving me the confidence to focus on building feature rich apps that can scale.
Jamie :- After writing PHP for close to 20 years, discovering Laravel 5 years ago was like a breath of fresh air, it streamlines common, tedious tasks, and learning and sticking to some of the framework conventions has made me a better developer, if it wasn’t for Laravel I think I’d still be stuck in the past writing poor code, without tests or sticking to standards and types, and I definitely wouldn’t enjoy writing code as much as I do! Mix in PHPUnit, Larastan, Inertia, Vue and Tailwind, you’ve got an unbeatable combination!
Pete :- my take is – I probably wouldn’t still be a PHP dev if it weren’t for Laravel. big pros for me:
- out of the box integrations with things like PHPUnit
- the fluent interface / method chaining syntax
- opinionated but flexible and easy to integrate your own approach if a first or third party solution is more than you need
- Laravel + Inertia + Vue is probably the nicest stack ever ever
So I guess the outstanding answer from within the team is Yes, Laravel is the happiest developer community on the planet!
Laravel has made our development lifecycle so much more enjoyable, the tools released alongside it the community and the core Laravel team make the framework a pleasure to use.