Thanks to Frianbiz, I had the chance to participate in Laracon, the Laravel Conference, in Chicago with my friend Vincent Le Gallic.
This was my first travel to the US and my first dev conference too. The conference was awesome and well organized by Taylor Otwell, the creator of Laravel.
There were 15 speakers, but here are my favorites :
Adam Wathan, the inspiring talk
Adam is really inspiring when it comes to developing.
Last year at Laracon US 2017, he made a presentation called Cruddy by Design. It was about writing applications using only REST/CRUD methods in the controllers.
This time, the talk was about a simple concept he described in his article: Methods Are Affordances, Not Abilities.
Again, his presentation changed my way of thinking when developing.
He took a simple example of a gardener watering a plant. In your code, you would by default call something like $gardener->water($plant) which could be translated to “A gardener can water a plant”. Instead, you could use something like $plant->water() or $plant->water($gardener), which could be translated to “A plant can be watered using a gardener”.
In the first case, the method is a thing that an object can do. In the second, the method is a thing we can do with the object.
Adam is also a teacher with its video course Test Driven Laravel and a podcaster with Full Stack Radio. He recently created a Utility-First CSS Framework called Tailwind CSS.
Caleb Porzio, the funny talk
Caleb is a developer at Tighten and also a podcaster on TwentyPercentTime. His talk was called Embrace the backend. It was a really funny talk where he demonstrated how we could move the complexity of a frontend code (with Ajax, Vue and components) to the backend.
Bob Martin, the uncle talk
What a character! I discovered him thanks to Vincent who advised me to read Clean Code. Awesome book, amazing talk.
TJ Miller, the tip talk
I discovered TJ at the Laracon. His talk was about developing APIs with Laravel, which we do a lot at Frianbiz. TJ gave some interesting packages to upgrade our APIs development: Laravel CSP, Laravel CORS, Laravel Query Builder, Bouncer, JSON Schema Assertions :)
Taylor Otwell, the surprising talk
Each year, Taylor make a big announcement in the Laravel ecosystem. He tweeted a lot on it so we were very excited to discover what he would release.
Honestly, we were disappointed when we saw that Laravel Nova was an admin panel. This is what we develop at Frianbiz so the magic was not here at the beginning.
Then, he started the demo, and I must say that each feature he presented was better than the previous. His admin is so cleverly thought that we were, at the end, clearly impressed! You can read the medium article to have an introduction of the features.
This conference was amazing. I discovered a great dev community! It made me want to do more conference like that :)
The Laravel ecosystem never stops growing and there is always something new to learn. We use Laravel a lot at Frianbiz for our clients, check our references!
