Well, where do I start firstly Dallas Texas IS HOT!!! As soon as we arrived and stepped out of the airport it was like being hit in the face by a wall of heat. I’ve only ever experienced this kind of heat in one other place and that was Bangkok. This kind of heat warmed you through to the bone it was lovely in small doses but lethal when going for walks in, I’m really glad that everywhere seemed to have AirCon.
Null Star 2024 Basketball Game
The day before the event the Terminal team had set up a basketball between themselves and the Laracon Core team. The basketball game was good fun sadly team Laravel lost but there were some really good plays from the team. I loved the outfits both Matt Stauffer and Joe Dixon had on a proper throwback to the early days of basketball. After the game there was a free throw competition where you could win a SyntaxFM basketball and of course some free food and plenty of good chats amongst the people present.
This was the first time a game like this had been put on before a Laracon and I felt like it was a great way to start the event, watching Aaron Francis talk the Laravel team through his game plan and then of course things not going 100% to plan. NinjaParade took some great photos that you can see here https://app.50sq.com/g/01j6j6kqkr0zcywa46c17jm08b
Happiest Hour Meetup
After the basketball game there was a gathering at the Happiest Hour this was a nice end to the day and it was a great place to chat with some of the Laracon attendees, speakers and the Laravel Core team. On the way in we took an Uber and the driver we had played us his spoken word poetry and tried to sell us a book he’d self-published his poetry wasn’t for me but well done to him for getting out there and doing it.
Tuesday Day 1
The event itself where do I start, I guess I should start with the venue. It had such a cool vibe to it, the aircon was spot on perhaps a little too cold but still really helped when coming in from the outside heat. The sponsors all had booths at the back of the space and it was great to be able to meet a number of these sponsors particularly the Laravel Partners there as it was the first time meeting some of them in person and it was really enjoyable speaking to them and finding out how they are doing and some of the things they’ve been up to recently. I’m a big believer that we’re all in this together and even though we are all Partners we can all help each other out.
The opening talk by Nuno Maduro introducing Pest 3 was a perfect start to the event, we’ve been using Pest on projects now for a while so it’s always great to see new releases and the new features that come with it. Mutation testing is something we’ve used in the past so seeing this come to the framework is great for more info on the release you can check the full talk here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNhbgcNJyAk
Another talk from the day that caught my attention was Daniel Couldbourne’s talk on Verbs for Laravel. We’ve looked at event sourcing in the past but never found the right project to use it on and more importantly the right package to use for it. Verbs (https://verbs.thunk.dev/) on the other hand make event sourcing simple and easy to understand so I’m starting to think about our next project that we believe Event sourcing is good for we will take a look at using this.
Then we had the Keynote from Taylor himself, this was a big one with plenty of goodies being announced, the big ones for me in no particular order were Inertia 2.0, Laravel Cloud and some of the new features coming into the framework. There was so much good stuff here that you need to go check the video to find out more https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwWepVU5uWM
Community Event
We were lucky enough to be invited to a small community event by the Laravel team, we got some great free Swag and some lovely Tacos from Velvet Tacos. Taylor then gave us more info on Laravel Cloud and allowed us to ask more questions about the product and also to talk to the team who have been working on it over the last six months. There were some great questions asked from the participants and it was great to speak to the designer David who had been working on the product but also to Joe Dixon who had been leading the development, you can tell by talking to him how much he’s enjoyed working on this project and how excited he is about it and its eventual release. It’s always nice to see a developer so enthused by the work he’s doing. It was a real privilege to have been invited along to this event to find out more about Laravel Cloud we’ve added ourselves to the wait list so hopefully we might be lucky enough to get early access sometime soon 🙂
Laracon Afterdark
What a way to end the first day the after-dark party was a right blast, Laravel had booked out Dot’s Hop House & Cocktail Courtyard, and there was a live band who I have to say played some great songs, there was food and plenty of drinks everyone was in high spirits after the first day there was loads of talk about the keynote particularly the announcement of Laravel cloud everyone was interested in finding out more about it. I managed to chat with a good friend of mine Simon Hamp who I have not seen for several years I also got to meet Ryan Chandler, Jason McCreary of Laravel Shift Fame and of course continued chatting to a number of the core team.
It was a great evening and it set up the next day perfectly.
Wednesday
There were a few sore heads at the start of the event, I heard tales of people calling it a night at around 1 am! The big talk for me today was the Livewire Keynote, we’ve started to see a lot more projects come in that are Livewire so being on hand to see the latest reveals from Caleb himself was perfect. He announced a project he’s been working on now for a while called Flux. Flux is a UI Library for Livewire check out the video to find out more about the cool things that are coming in Flux https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31pBMi0UdYE
Next up we had Jack McDade Dressed as Willy Wonka talking to us about design, this is something I know very little about being a backend developer but Jack had a great way of putting things across so that everyone could understand not just designers you can watch his full talk here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xh2i6SahNOY
Joe Dixons talk on using reverb and the things you can do with it was another well-thought-out and delivered, he used reverb to control a drone live on stage it was brilliant seeing how interacting with a webpage (a switch controller built with HTML and CSS) and hitting the buttons etc he could control the drone, turn off the camera and make it do flips!
Joe Tannenbaum’s talk on the things you can do with the terminal was mind-blowing, watching him demonstrate pong or take photos and show the ASCII representation in real time of the crowd being shown in the terminal was impressive. Over the last 12 months, he’s done so many great experiments showing what can be done it was a no-brainer that he was perfect for the Core Team check out the full talk here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJu48qlJANM
The final talk by Primeagen was a short one but boy did it hit the mark it was a very honest and emotional talk and I did lift weights during it (You had to be there to understand the reference). I’ve watched a few of his streams in the past but listening to him in person and seeing how open he was and how vulnerable it was a great end to the event.
Final Thoughts
As this was my first LaraconUS I wasn’t 100% sure what I was expecting, I knew that it was the biggest one so far so I knew it would be big, but I didn’t realise how big! it was like LaraconEU on steroids!
The speakers were approachable and easy to talk to and they spent time speaking to people which I thought was great. The core Laravel team were accessible and they spoke to so many people again this was great to see, and then finally the community there was superb I had so many conversations with people, I met some great new friends and caught up with some I haven’t seen for a while I honestly can’t wait for the next one now I’ve come away from the event refocussed, I have ideas and things to build so I best get building!