Laracon US 2025.

What an event!

Sadly I couldn't be there in person this year but the livestream that the Laravel team put together allowed me and many other developers to still see the talks.

I thought i'd just quickly put pen to paper so to speak and highlight 2 or 3 of the talks that I found the most interesting and that I'm personally most interested about and how these changes/releases will improve development at Jump24.

First off...

Nuno Maduro - Pest 4

At Jump24 we're big fans of Pest here at Jump24, so seeing Nuno announce V4 and some of its new features was exciting for me. The first big standout thing was Browser testing!

Browser Testing in Pest 4

I mean just take a look at that, how easy is it to start putting together browser test with Pest! In the past we've been using Cypress for our browser testing and we've always found it a bit of a pain and quite slow.

The other alternative for us has been Laravel Dusk but again this would end up getting slower and slower overtime the more tests we added to it.

But looking at this it's just super simple to get up and running and to start writing tests that cover the frontend interactions which is superb and something I know were really looking forward to using.

Sharding - Blazing Fast

So sharding is something that the team have been waiting on. We actually implemented our own version of sharding in our PHPUnit projects so our CI Pipelines have been running faster with sharding but we had not managed to get it running with our setup on our Pest projects, so it's great to have this natively working now within Pest.

The example that Nuno highlighted showed the big difference in speed when using sharding vs not using it, again another great feature that we're looking forward to using in our day to day dev watch the full talk here.

Next Up....

Caleb Porzio - Livewire 4

Livewire is one of those tools that I'm seen being used more and more in projects. Over the last 2 years Jump24 ha've had their fair share of clients reach out asking for help with their currently Livewire project for various reasons with one of the main ones being speed.

Blaze

This is something that Caleb has addressed in V4 with Blaze which speeds up the rendering of components, the level of research that he's gone into to look at bottlenecks and find out how he can help fix those bottle necks is something else just look at the numbers.

Blaze Off

Blaze On

In the example here Caleb is showing how with blade turned off how much time it took to render the basic component, he's shown different ways of doing this such as a blade component, or an include a require or just a direct inline html. He then runs the same examples with Blade turned on and you can see the difference in speed its just astonishing.

Islands

Another interesting looking feature and one that tackles another big problem we've seen. Slow page loads and render blocking until actions have been completed.

Islands are a new blade helper that allows you to define a block of components that allow put these items out of the "flow" of other components to not block the page.

In his example Caleb has a Revenue component that he has put a sleep in for a second that when he clicks generate or the download action on the page re-generates the page which of course thanks to the sleep takes over a second to complete, but as soon as he wraps the revenue component inside an island as shown below.

Now when he clicks the generate button now its pretty much instant as the revenue component has been put on an island and it no longer interferes with the rest of the component. You can still regenerate the component on its own via the refresh action its just been extracted out to its own thing.

This is such a huge feature win and one that I can see a lot of the projects that we've been given will massively benefit from utilising I recommend giving the full talk a watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM0glP77tsA&t=10521s.

Ashley Hindle - Laravel Boost

We've really started to utilise AI more and more in our business from helping us with social media content to helping us with our coding. Tools like Claude Code, Junie and Cursor have been in regular use with the team for the last few months and I must admit against my better judgment it has really helped the team become more productive.

One thing we've been missing though (up until now) is a good instruction set that we can give to our tool of choice to tell it how to write code to be more like how we as a team would write code. But no more.

The Laravel team are about to release a new composer package called Laravel Boost this package has 3 core features.

1. Laravel Specific MCP Server

This gives your AI Agent 15 new tools to help you be more efficient, such as searching documentation, running database queries, using tinker.

2. Version specific documentation

The team have ingested, vectorised and made available each version of the documentation for all of the Laravel ecosystem through an API so you get the exact documentation for the package version you're using.

3.Laravel Maintained AI Guidelines

Boost will create your cursor, Claude, Github Co-Pilot guidelines. They nudge the AI agent to develop the code how you would like it.

Bringing it all home.

While we couldn't be there in person this year, the livestream proved that the Laravel community's spirit of innovation transcends physical boundaries. This was the biggest Laracon yet, and the quality of talks - from fresh voices and familiar favourites alike - was exceptional.

For us at Jump24, these aren't just exciting announcements; they're game-changers for our daily workflow. Pest 4's browser testing will finally let us retire our clunky Cypress setup. Livewire's Islands will be the solution we've been searching for on those client projects struggling with performance. And Laravel Boost? It's exactly what we've been missing to make our AI tools truly understand how we write Laravel code.

The best part about conferences like this isn't just learning about new features - it's the renewed energy and ideas they bring to our work. We're already planning which projects will be first to benefit from these updates, and we can't wait to share our experiences with the community.

Next year, we'll definitely be booking those flights to experience it all in person. Until then, we'll be putting these new tools to work and showing our clients just how powerful the Laravel ecosystem continues to be.