How a Friday LinkedIn Post Became Artisan Weekly: 80 Weeks of Curating the Laravel Community.

81 Fridays ago, I posted a list on LinkedIn. Ten Laravel and PHP things I'd been reading that week - it was a mix of blog posts, packages, videos, tips I'd found useful. No real strategy. No real plan. Just a list.

I didn't call it anything. I didn't schedule the next one. I just hit post on a Friday afternoon and got on with my weekend.

81 weeks later, that list has a name Artisan Weekly, a website artisanweekly.com, a YouTube channel with a video every Friday, and a newsletter that lands in people's inboxes at the end of the week. None of that was in the plan, because there was no plan. This is the story of how each piece came about - and why, 81 weeks in, we're still doing it.

The reading habit that started it all

Here's the honest truth about where Artisan Weekly came from: I was already doing the reading and had been for a long time.

If you're a Laravel developer, you probably know the feeling. There are more blog posts, more packages, more videos, more Twitter threads about Laravel and PHP than any one person can keep up with. Laravel News drops a fresh batch of links every few days. Taylor ships something new. Someone you've never heard of publishes a package that solves exactly the thing you were wrestling with on Monday. There's a screencast, a talk from Laracon, an RFC on wiki.php.net, a Rector recipe, a Filament plugin. It's a lot.

I'd been bookmarking things, skimming things, opening tabs and leaving them open for a fortnight. At some point - one Friday afternoon with a backlog of good stuff I'd found that week - it clicked. If I'm already doing the reading, I might as well tell ten people about the ten best things.

That was the whole idea. Not a content strategy. Not a funnel. A reading habit, shared.

The bit that makes Artisan Weekly different

Here's the editorial decision that quietly shaped everything after it.

I could fill a ten-item list every single Friday with posts from Taylor, Jeffrey Way, the Laravel News team, the Spatie team, and the usual household names. Their work is excellent, and I read all of it. But it's also work that already has plenty of eyes on it - it doesn't need me to send it ten more readers.

So from very early on, I made a deliberate call: Artisan Weekly leans toward lesser-known voices. The dev who wrote a sharp post about a specific edge case. The package author with 40 GitHub stars who's solved something genuinely useful. The screencaster who just started their channel and is producing better content than people with 50× the subscriber count.

This isn't a rule I follow rigidly - if a Taylor post is the single most useful thing I read this week, it's going in. But the tiebreaker is always: who needs the eyes more?

That editorial stance lines up with how we think about the Laravel community at Jump24 more broadly. We run BrumPHP and Laravel London, we go to StokePHP. We've been sponsoring Laracon EU for years. Our view is that this ecosystem runs on the people quietly doing good work in the background.

Artisan Weekly is just that idea turned into a Friday ritual.

How it grew: four phases, four different reasons

Here's the thing I didn't appreciate until I sat down to write this post. Every phase of Artisan Weekly happened for a completely different reason. There was no unified strategy - it just kept finding new pressures and responding to them.

Phase 1: A Friday Linkedin post. For the first year or so, that's all it was. Ten links. Posted on a Friday. No banner, no branding, no archive, no CTA. Just the list.

Then something happened that shifted my thinking.

The turning point: one post hit 11k impressions. Somewhere in the first year, one of the Friday lists landed properly. Around 11,000 impressions on LinkedIn - comments, saves, DMs from people I'd never spoken to. It wasn't Laracon-keynote numbers, but for a list I'd knocked together on a Friday afternoon, it was the moment I stopped thinking "I quite enjoy doing this" and started thinking "hang on - people actually care about this."

That's the moment that made everything that followed feel worth building.

Phase 2: Video. The video thing, I'll be straight with you, was partly self-serving.

I'd like to do more talks. Conference talks, meetup talks, whatever the opportunity looks like. But "I'd like to do more talks" is a sentence that doesn't turn into reality unless you're actually comfortable on camera, and I wasn't. Artisan Weekly gave me a perfect pretext: a weekly, low-stakes reason to sit in front of a camera, hit record, and talk about ten things I genuinely cared about. It was practice I could wrap around something I was already doing.

The videos started rough each one was a one shot and will continue to be. They're still not Aaron Francis levels of good. But 20-odd videos in, the difference between "video one" and "video twenty" is the difference between "someone reading off a teleprompter and hating it" and "someone having a conversation with the lens." If you want a cheap way to get better at being on camera, publish every week.

Phase 3: The website (artisanweekly.com). Shortly after the 11k post, I hit a practical wall. Trying to find a list from six weeks ago on LinkedIn is a nightmare - the feed isn't built for archives, search is hopeless, and the posts slowly sink into the void. If people cared enough to read these, the content deserved somewhere it could actually be found.

So I built the website. It's a FilamentPHP build - I'd been wanting an excuse to use Filament for a side project anyway, and the admin-panel-as-a-starting-point approach had me up and running in about an evening instead of the usual weekend-of-faff. It's hosted on Laravel Cloud, which has been brilliantly boring - exactly what you want from hosting.

And then - the part you do not want in your life - I imported every existing Friday post from LinkedIn into the new site. All of them. One by one. That part was fun.

Phase 4: The newsletter. This one wasn't my idea. Someone commented on a post one week - "why isn't there a newsletter?" - and I thought, yeah, why isn't there a newsletter?

So I thought ok lets build one. Same content, delivered to your inbox on a Friday, no LinkedIn scroll required. That's where we are today.

Four phases, four different reasons: a reading habit, a validation spike, a personal growth goal, a practical archive problem, and a reader suggestion. I can see the pattern with hindsight - but at the time, each step was just the obvious next thing to say yes to.

The honest bit: the streak on the rubbish weeks

There's a question people ask when they find out about the 81-week streak. How do you keep it going?

The unglamorous answer is: every Friday for 81 weeks means every Friday, including the ones where I really don't feel like it, the bank holidays, the times I've been i'll (just the one).

It means the Friday during the project that went sideways and ate the whole week. The Friday after a rough night's sleep where writing feels like wading through setting concrete. The Fridays where the reading hasn't been great and I've had to dig for a decent tenth pick.

Keeping the streak alive on the good weeks is easy. Anyone can post on the good weeks. The streak is really made on the weeks where the easier thing to do is skip, and the number of times I've come close to just … not publishing is higher than I'd like to admit.

If I'd known at the start how much of the project would be keeping my word to myself on the rubbish weeks, I'm not sure I'd have committed. But I'm glad I did, because the streak is the point. People don't subscribe to "I'll publish when I'm in the mood." They subscribe to "Friday." And once you've signed up to be the Friday person, you don't really get to take Fridays off.

Three finds worth your time

Rather than just telling you what Artisan Weekly is, it's fairer to show you. Here are three finds from previous editions - all from community members whose work I think deserves more eyes than it currently gets.

Ashley Allen (https://artisanweekly.com/authors/ashley-allen) - https://laravel-news.com/laravel-sessions, this was Ashleys first appearance in Artisan Weekly. Ashley has a wonderful writing style and his articles are always well researched, thought out and on point. It's always a pleasure to read one when its released.

Simon Hamp (https://artisanweekly.com/authors/simon-hamp) - https://laracasts.com/series/build-native-apps-with-php, Simon is doing such a great job building NativePHP and has done some great talks at a number of Laracon's.

Bert De Swaef (https://artisanweekly.com/authors/bert-de-swaef) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBOSeHvmshQ Bert has been around the Laravel scene for a while now and its great to see him doing more video content

These three aren't the ten we'd pick as our all-time favourites. They're a Tuesday-evening snapshot of the kind of thing Artisan Weekly exists to surface. If they resonate, there are 80 more Fridays' worth in the archive.

Why we keep doing this

At Jump24, we've always held that the Laravel ecosystem is special because of the people in it. Not just the people building the framework, but the people writing about it, teaching it, packaging it up, and quietly making everyone else's job easier. Artisan Weekly is our small, weekly way of pointing at those people.

If you're a Laravel or PHP developer who's struggling to keep up with the firehose - or just looking for a curated Friday read - we'd love to have you along.

Come and join us

Three ways in, in order of what we'd love you to do most:

1. Subscribe to the newsletter. One Friday email, ten picks, never any filler. Sign up at artisanweekly.com

2. Browse the archive. If you'd rather see what it looks like before committing to an inbox, the full archive is on the site https://artisanweekly.com. 81 Fridays' worth of Laravel and PHP finds.

3. Watch a recent video. If you'd rather watch than read, there's a video version every Friday too. Same finds, slightly more teleprompter-sweat.

And if you've got thoughts on the format - or, more usefully, a shout for someone in the community whose work deserves more eyes - drop their name in the comments below. That's how half the best finds end up in the list. The community recommends the community, and we pass it on.

Here's to Friday 82.