Taylor Otwell — The man behind Laravel : An Intervew

We all know Taylor Otwell.Creator of Laravel. Developer par excellence.

The man who made all our lives 10 times easier.

Seriously.

Laravel is something extraordinary, not a word to be used casually.

It provides a level of ease of use and yet maintains a level of flexibility and awesome power that lets you focus on the matter at hand than at PHP’s numerous quirks.

A few days ago(Before Laracon EU 2014), I asked him for an interview and

Today we get up close to the man, who at the recent Laracon EU made some pretty controversial changes to the Framework in Version 4.3. amazingly, he accepted.

Transcript included:

1. Who is your Role model , as a developer?

I find I’m often inspired more by designers than by developers. That applies to any creative field such as art, music, architecture, etc. Those things give me just as much inspiration for Laravel as other programmers do.Even If can’t really think of anyone in particular. I appreciate Apple’s design efforts, so that would be Jonathan Ive.

2. Favourite Programming Languages , Top 5 ?

I’ve probably only used 5 languages or so in total, but my favorites (so far) would be PHP, any .NET language like VB.NET or C#, and JavaScript.

3. Opposed to other Frameworks, even Ruby on Rails. Laravel has very good branding and an amazing community , What do you think , caused this?

That was very intentional. I felt very early on that good documentation, a passionate community, and attractive branding would drastically improve the framework’s chance of succeeding.

4. Can you tell me about your Development Environment?

For laptop I have a Macbook Pro Retina 13" and for desktop I have a 27" iMac with an additional 27" Thunderbolt display for dual monitors. For software I use Sublime Text, Vagrant (with Laravel Homestead), HipChat, Textual IRC, Telegram, Airmail, and Wunderlist.

5.Have you thought about having a Laracon(Conference) in other Countries like India, China or Japan?

I think it would be very cool to have a Laracon in a non-western country, but it’s of course very hard for me to do something like that. Since Laracon’s typically have a very high quality of venue, etc. it would take someone very dedicated to run such a conference. It’s a lot of work.

6. What is your guideline or Roadmap for Laravel begginers/Apprentices hoping to become Artisans/Advanced?Best resources, etc

Laracasts by Jeffrey Way is obviously a great starting point, as well as Dayle‘s Code Bright book .If you use both of those resources, you shouldn’t have problem learning Laravel. Once past the basics, almost any generic programming book will help you, and there are a lot of classic books. Code Complete, Head First Design Patterns, etc.

7.Who is your Web Host? and opinions on Fortrabbit vs Generic Host + Laravel Forge …

I use Linode to host both the laravel.com and Laravel Forge websites. I used Forge to create the Forge servers. I use Laravel Envoy to manage Forge deployments across multiple servers.

FortRabbit is more expensive because it is more managed, etc. Forge obviously is much cheaper. I personally prefer to have more powerful servers at a cheaper price using Forge. But, I can understand some people preferring to have totally managed servers. I prefer Linode because it has a built-in Node Balancer solution that is very easy to use.

8. What should we expect in Laravel 4.3?

I’ll be talking about some of the bigger changes at Laracon EU, but we will have a new and improved default folder structure, and a variety of other upgrades.I’d like to wait until after Laracon EU to talk more about them .