Laravel Live UK 2026 Talks Recap.

Laravel is renowned for its excellent ecosytem focussed on reducing friction whilst delivering high quality product; perhaps more importantly backed by a warm and welcoming community. Laravel Live is an extension of this with the added bonus of incredible catering

DAY ONE

Ryan Chandler - Optimising Workflows & Shipping to Production

A technical talk looking at different ways to reduce friction through writing your own Fakes to reduce mocking boilerplate; using seeders to put your app into different states; the automated use of standards scripts both locally and in CI. Something I'd not considered before was having really small PRs (akin to atomic commits) to make releases that much safer and robust. From Ryan’s questions to the crowd, feels like lots of people are using static analysis and standards tooling but maybe not so much testing and in particular testing against prod sized datasets. Great tip.

Harris Raftopoulos - Bulletproofing Your Laravel Code with Value Objects

I’m fond of Data Transfer Objects but don't reach for Value Objects maybe as much as I should - I was surprised of the number of hands raised when Harris asked how many people use them. This talk made clear the benefits: Value Objects are immutable, the data they encapsulate is guaranteed to be what it says it is and they play well with enums and state machines. Some people might be put off by the boilerplate needed to set them up but Harris has us covered with his own Value Object package: Aegis. Value Objects can also be combined with Eloquent casting making your application code all the more robust. Fully validated types ftw!

Yannick Chenot - Escaping the Code Maze

This talk was a nice refresher of the history of improvements to PHP since 5.0 that make it less permissive / error prone following what Yannick calls the Closed by Default principle. He then covered the latest and greatest of PHP static analysis and standard toolings. At Jump24 we have used Rector and PHPStan for some time but it’s great to see them being pushed as the standard to the community at large. Yannick also highlighted a couple of additional packages to consider: https://github.com/driftingly/rector-laravel and GitHub - TomasVotruba/type-coverage: PHPStan extension to require minimal type-coverage.

Wendell Adriel - Meta-programming in Laravel

So although not many people put their hands up when Wendell asked “who knows what metaprogramming is?” they definitely got a great immersion here. He showed us how Laravel is maybe not quite so magical as it seems leveraging language level functionality like magic methods and reflection to power staples like Facades and Macros and the newer addition of Attributes to the framework.

Liam Hammett - 50 Laravel Tips

A stripped down version of his 101 Tips talks to just 50 tips. I’m happy to say we use a lot of these at Jump24 already but the whole list was engaging enough to keep me awake after the delicious lunch… have I mentioned the food? Liam kindly provided a repo where you can see the tips in action and use it as the starting point for your own new application: GitHub - imliam/smarter-kit

Naomi Gotts - Event-Driven Evolution with AI as My Partner in Design

This talk was a fascinating case study of adding an event sourcing system to the critical business paths of a legacy high value system. What I liked in particular was that it wasn’t a showcase of a spectacular success in terms of system performance improvements but rather how it was hard work to understand a new approach and integrate it with a light touch approach to avoid any disruption. Additionally nice to hear about using AI for research and development to build domain knowledge and fill knowledge gaps - with the caveat of validating the findings with human experts!

Ollie Reardon - Teams That Scale

A career focused talk that gave helpful advice on how to be in the first six months of a new role (listen, learn, absorb) and then for the rest of your time there! This talk really highlighted the importance of communication and keeping that communication positive, or rather, constructive, even in more difficult times.

Aaron Francis - What do we do now?

Day one closed out with a brilliant talk from Aaron on where developers still bring value in an AI led development world. This included a showcase of the development of his latest Solo product, a very chunky Rust and Typescript based desktop application. Key takeaways for me were that developers still need to care about the code and some great advice to box your AI, don’t let it touch anything you don’t want it too.

The best line though was ‘if it can be deterministically enforced, enforce it deterministically’. This should be every devs mantra in this brave new world. Use arch tests, use standards packages, build out robust CI pipelines to ensure AI’s are writing production quality code and never drifting into guessing what you want from them.

DAY TWO

Povilas Korop - Laravel Starter Kits: Past, Present and Future

This talk was part history of starter kits and also reminder that simple doesn't mean easy with Povilas showing that although it rolling your own starter kit is possible, you should think carefully about all the options you need to provide and the maintenance burden if you make it public and need to keep it aligned with the new features and options being added to first party kits.

He also highlighted that although many consider Laravel an opinionated framework compared to others the reality is that a core design philosophy is choice. If you include the older (but still maintained) there are over a dozen starter kits now so you can use what ever FE / auth you choose! Great observation!

Leah Thompson - Building Modern Laravel Frontends with Inertia v3 + React

For me this was a nice overview of the v3 features, having worked on Filament based applications for awhile nice to have a refresher and reminder of how great a tool Inertia is and how much friction it reduces. The Q&A provided insight into why a lot of newer official Laravel projects are using React rather than Vue which has been favoured previously - this is mainly that the React ecosystem is generally more popular so has broader animation library support and a deeper pool of developers to potentially hire from.

Wim Godden - Stepping Away From the Code… But Not Quite

Another interesting career chat. This talk highlighted how its not helpful to think of linear career progression and better to reflect every six months on where you're at and how its making you feel. If you're happy stick with it and if not, look to change it. Not everyone enjoys the stress of management and no longer touching the code so if that’s you, maybe going back to the code is better for a more contented life even if that might mean less cash!

Emma De Silva - OPSEC for Laravel Developers

A lot packed into this one! Emma blazed through all the things a company and developers should be thinking about when it comes to securing not just your applications but the organisation around them! She provided the slide deck with further details to tips and exercises to undertake to improve your security thinking.

https://emma.desilva.se/talks/opsec/

Shane Rosenthal - Deep Dive Into NativePHP

Really, really impressive to get an under the hood look at Nativephp and see how the friciton is being reduced to build mobile apps using familiar Laravel approaches - using what looks like Livewire, tailwind and custom blade components that actually map into android and ios native UI. Lots of oo and ah moments! Will be exciting to add mobile development to our wheelhouse in future projects.

Unfortunately I had to exit early and missed the last two talks but what a great couple of days, learning new things, having some great conversations and the food… so good!

In summary then, although the last six months have seen an explosion of AI related packages and a paradigm shift in the way we code it was a relief the talks were not saturated with AI. More there’s a strong message that developers are still really important and part of our job now is making sure our Laravel applications are utilising the tools in the ecosystem that will make them easier to build. Whether this be by hand or with LLM assistance, with stronger standards, types and testing we can be confident we are continuing to ship quality products crafted with care.