Syntax - Tasty Web Development Treats - 824: Taylor Otwell's opinions on PHP, React, Laravel and Lamborghini Memes

824: Taylor Otwell's opinions on PHP, React, Laravel and Lamborghini Memes

Sep 20, 2024 - 50m 50s

In this episode of Syntax, Wes and Scott talk with Taylor Otwell, the creator of Laravel. Taylor shares insights on his journey from creating Laravel in his free time to building a strong community and user base. He discusses Laravel’s growth, including the major features and tools that were developed over the years. Taylor also shares his outlook on the PHP ecosystem, productivity tips, and plans for Laravel Cloud, a new deployment platform for PHP and Laravel applications. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 00:29 Laracon 03:13 Laravel’s inspiration and features Intertia Livewire 07:18 Why don’t we have a “Laravel for JavaScript”? 09:02 What parts of Laravel came first? 10:07 The Laravel ecosystem Forge Vapor 12:29 Laravel Cloud 14:00 What parts of Laravel are Intertia and what parts are React? 15:57 How many people are using Laravel? 16:59 Taylor’s productivity and development philosophy 24:43 Brought to you by Sentry.io 25:19 What makes a beautiful API? 29:33 Taylor’s thoughts on typing PHP 30:41 Features Taylor would like to see in PHP 33:03 What people get wrong about modern PHP 34:22 PHP stacks and CMSs Nginx FrankenPHP Statamic 37:30 Taylor’s thoughts on WordPress 38:14 Lambo memes 43:44 Taylor’s coding setup Sublime Text Vs Code 45:36 Sick Picks + Shameless Plugs Sick Picks Taylor: Tiny Glade No Man’s Sky Shameless Plugs Taylor: Laravel Cloud Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

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Key Takeaways

1
Laravel continues to thrive with a strong community and user base, focusing on features that cater to developers' needs.
2
The development journey of Laravel reflects the importance of perseverance and adapting to feedback from users.
3
Taylor's philosophy of developing APIs focuses on ease of use and keeping functionality intuitive.
4
Laravel Cloud aims to revolutionize how developers manage and deploy PHP applications, making it more user-friendly.
5
Community growth is fueled by events like Laracon, which fosters connections among developers.

Sponsors, Brands & Products

Sentry.io

You want to check out the visibility into your production application to ensure nothing is blowing up. Check out century at century.io/syntax.

Laravel Cloud

A platform for deploying and managing Laravel applications easily, targeting PHP developers to provide a seamless scaling and shipping experience.

Laravel Forge

A management dashboard for building and provisioning PHP servers on various cloud platforms.

Laravel Vapor

A deployment platform for serverless Laravel applications.

Introducing Taylor Otwell and Laravel

In this episode, Wes and Scott welcome Taylor Otwell, the creator of Laravel, a popular PHP framework known for its ease of use and robust community. The discussion starts with Taylor's journey from creating Laravel in his spare time to leading a strong ecosystem while maintaining his commitment to open source.

Directory of Laravel Features and Ecosystem

Taylor discusses the major features of Laravel, including user authentication and built-in database management. He explains the significance of community packages and other tools such as Livewire and Inertia, which help connect the backend with modern front-end frameworks like React.

The Growth and Impact of Laracon

Reflecting on the Laracon conferences, Taylor shares his surprise at the growth from just 90 attendees at the first conference in 2013 to nearly 950 attendees in the latest event. He discusses the inspiration to host such events to build community and engage Laravel users.

Laravel Cloud and Future Innovations

Taylor reveals plans for Laravel Cloud, aiming to provide a comprehensive managed solution for deploying Laravel applications, thereby facilitating better experiences comparable to platforms like Vercel for the PHP community.

Laravel's Place in the Broader Development Ecosystem

In comparing Laravel with JavaScript frameworks, Taylor discusses why PHP frameworks like Laravel find a stronger foothold in building comprehensive applications, mentioning the capabilities Laravel provides right out of the box. He also addresses misconceptions about modern PHP, reinforcing its relevance and maintainability.

Coding Philosophy and Best Practices

The conversation touches on Taylor's approach to writing code, emphasizing the importance of consistent coding standards and the significance of keeping APIs simple and intuitive. He shares insights into his productivity mindset and how he prefers to tackle the hardest features of a project first.

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You probably know what it is, but PHP framework for building applications has dare I say a cult following, gaining crazy, amazing community behind it, amazing momentum been around for quite a while. Excited to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on Taylor. Yeah.

Thanks for having me. Good to be here. Yeah. So you're just coming off Lericon, right?

Just a couple days ago you had it. Yeah. Yeah. That's right.

It was our ninth Lericon in the United States. We had it in Dallas, down in the deep Ellum neighborhood in this cool. It's actually usually a concert venue, but we turned it into a tech conference venue. And yeah, that's our ninth Lericon in the US.

We've had other events in Europe, mainly in Amsterdam, one in Portugal, a couple in Australia and then to in India so far and we'll have our third, the spring in India. Wow, so how big was the first Laircon? So the first Laircon was in 2013 and washed in DC and there was 90 people there. I actually didn't even think, like the first Laircon wasn't even my idea actually.

It was my boss's idea, Ian Lansman from Userscape. And he was like, hey, I think, you know, Lairv was kind of getting momentum. I think we could do an event around the framework and I was like, eh, like I don't know if anyone will actually show up. I don't know if it has that many interested users, but yeah, we got 90 people and this year we were like 950ish, 942, something like that.

That's massive. Yeah, it turned into a pretty big event. Oh, that's amazing. I didn't even realize that Ian was your boss at one point.

When did you make the jump to doing Laravel full-time? So I created Laravel in my free time beginning in late 2010. like I was working a .NET, sort of an enterprise environment. We had a couple hundred programmers on staff, probably publicly traded company, doing .NET and Coball.

And I started tinkering with PHP in my free time after work, and eventually just created Laravel as like my own way to create web apps faster. And I put it out there. I wrote pretty decent docs for the 1.0 version, like pretty thorough docs, which I think was really key to people actually adopting Laravel, surprise, surprise. So anyway, Ian emails me at the very end of 2011.

Laravel had been out probably like five or six months at this time and he's like, hey, I saw Laravel it looks really cool. We build help desk software and PHP. We kind of like to modernize some stuff and we're considering using Laravel like would you be willing to come on board and work here? And of course I eventually said yes.

And you know, I started working at user escape and the cool thing was he let me work on Laravel pretty much full time for like the first between like four and six months that I was there. I probably only worked on Laravel all day long. Basically to add all of the features we needed, like we made the ORM a lot better. We wrote the Q job library during that time.

A lot of the kind of foundational features of modern Laravel were built during that time period. That's awesome. For anyone listening, so this is a fairly heavy JavaScript audience here. We do have quite a bit of Laravel listeners, But do you want to give us a quick rundown of of what it is and that sort of the ecosystem around it?

We call Laravel a full-stack web framework for building applications and That means that you can think of it almost as their batteries included so it's a web framework written in the PHP language Kind of like how next would be a web framework written in JS and it includes a lot of stuff out of the box is probably more than what people are used to if they're coming from a more JavaScript-heavy background. So it includes things like user authentication stuff, like logging people in, all of that stuff, keeping that secure. It includes a database abstraction library just right out of the box. So like you wouldn't install, for example, Prisma, like separately or whatever you wanted to use to do an act with your database.

That's just sort of included, we call it eloquent. It includes stuff all the way down to like working with file systems in a unified API, so like use one set of methods, like storage get, storage put, storage copy, and that works on a driver-based system for like local file storage, for S3 compatible storage, even for FTP, queue jobs, a lot of stuff out of the box, right? Basically, everything we think you need to build most modern web applications. And that's sort of like the goal is to sort of satisfy like for 80, 90% of web apps people are going to build LaraVal is most the stuff out of the box.

If it doesn't, there's various community packages and like things people can install using PHP's package manner to add that functionality. Now what's kind of interesting is like on the front end you have options. So probably the two most popular ways are to build front ends with a Laravel app or Laravel live wire, which is very inspired by Elixir's live view from the Phoenix framework. Or a lot of people use this tool called inertia JS, which lets you pair like a modern reactor view type script front end with a Laravel back end, but all in the same GitHub repo and using Laravel's server side routing.

So that's at inertiajs.com and livewire.lairevel.com. Nice. All of the things that Laravel includes are the things that you typically expect like a full framework to include, right? But the JavaScript ecosystem, we've had such a hard time getting people to accept a tool like that.

I'm curious about like the eloquent and the DB abstraction specifically. was that based on anything and like did you build it from scratch and also as the type of database you can use with that limited or like how many hard choices do you have to make there. So I would say Laravel as a whole is very inspired by Ruby on Rails more than anything. It's very much like in that lineage of framework.

So like Ruby on Rails, Django, even like .NET NBC which I was using at work at the time. It takes a lot of inspiration from those various places. And the database layer, which we call eloquent, is definitely inspired by both active record from Ruby on Rails in the sense that it's like an active record style of ORM, where you say like, user first name equals this, user save, and it just saves to the database. In the PHP world, there was a little, not very widely known ORM called Paris.

And eloquent was very inspired by that. But I don't think it's maintained anymore. It honestly wasn't maintained even when I wrote Larry Vell back in 2011. It was already kind of out there and whoever wrote it had sort of moved on.

It seemed like to other things. But inspired eloquent a lot actually instilled to this day the underlying foundation of it is very similar. The supported databases out of the box, Larry Vell support SQLite, MySQL, Postgres and SQL Server. You can use any of those things without really changing your active record or your eloquent syntax.

And then people have written packages for like more kind of unique databases, like really enterprisey stuff, like DB2 all the way to like, you know, more niche databases. And then for like document type databases like Mongo and other things, those are more like community maintained packages to bring support for those into Laravel. So someone who has obviously been in a successful community like this, and you look over at us in the JavaScript land. Do any thoughts as to like why we don't have that in the JavaScript land?

Like quite honestly, we're jealous and we've been saying for many years like we want rails, we want Laravel in JavaScript. I don't know like I mean it seems like people have attempted it in various and various times in various ways. Like I've definitely seen JavaScript frameworks that tried to be like Ruby on Rails for JavaScript. You know like I don't know why that just doesn't really ever seemed to gain critical mass to make it really, really popular.

I actually really like the current iteration of JavaScript frameworks, things like next and next and remix. I think those are cool. In our world, we would call those a little bit more of like a micro framework, you might say, where it has this mechanism for like, okay, here's where you can put your code that runs on the server side and it gives you a place to do that. But there's not Not a lot of opinions and structure beyond that.

If I was going to build something pretty robust app, like Larry Vell Cloud or Larry Vell Forge, where there's a lot of moving parts in the back end, a lot of background jobs, a lot of complicated things happening, I feel like if I was using something like the more popular JavaScript frameworks of today, I just wouldn't really know how I'm supposed to structure that or what I'm supposed to do because it's such a light touch. I feel like on the server side compared to Laraveler Rails. Yeah. Totally.

I feel like there's people just, they don't want to commit to the ORM that everybody else is using. I think people just really like their options and for better or for worse. And I totally agree about it being a micro framework. I mean, oftentimes people think we have a framework, but that framework doesn't include off or a connection to the database.

It's like, okay, yeah, how much is that really doing for you? So, when you were working on Laravel, well, part of it came first. Kind of the routing library, the ability to say, hey, if the user hits this URL, run this function or this controller, that was sort of the first piece that I remember writing. And then, I spent so much time on the database side, just because it's the most complicated part, honestly, to get right, in my opinion, if you're building like a full stack web framework.

And the first 80% feels like so fast and easy to build. I guess like a lot of other projects, right? And then that last 20% is just like agonizing. And I remember rewriting both the routing and the database layer of Laravel several times like when I was first building it just to try to perfect it and get it right.

That's great. Let's talk about the business side of Laravel as well because like what I often find so cool is that you are able to obviously make this beautiful library that's open source, But, you also are able to employ people through these wicked conferences and also make things easier on the people that are using it, right? So, you have a number of products that you use for people who build Laravel applications? Yeah, so, to kind of give you the story on that.

So, I released Laravel in 2011. I don't make any money on Laravel, any substantial money on Laravel until 2014, where I released my first commercial product at LaraCon. on U.S. 2014, and that was Larrival Forge, F-O-R-G-E, dot-larrival.com. And basically, it was a dashboard or it still is, a dashboard to build servers on the cloud of your choice so it could be like a Amazon, digital ocean, Hetzner, all these different server providers.

It installs PHP, it installs my SQL or Postgres. It gives you a dashboard for configuring like your scheduled task, your cute jobs, configuring your sites, your SSL certificates, all of that stuff. and people just pay monthly for it. And when it first launched, I think we had like a $10 plan and a $20 plan per month.

And that was it. And honestly, when I first launched Larrava Forge, I remember talking to my wife and being like, I hope we can just like, I hope it pays a few bills, you know what I mean? Like if it pays like, if it makes like a thousand bucks a month or whatever, that would be great. You would pay some bills and just give us some extra money.

But within like, I wanna say like four to six weeks of launching Forge, I was making more on Larrava Forge and I was making a user'scape at my regular job. And so I was just blown away. And I was having to do customer support now, because now I've got a real business on my hands. So after that, I was just at user'scape for about six more months after that launched and then went full time on Laravel on January 1, 2015.

And then eventually went on to launch other products. So in 2015, I launched onvoyer.io. After that, I think it was 2017. I launched the Larry Vell Spark, which was like a SaaS starter kit for doing subscription billing on Larry Vell.

In 2018, we launched Larry Vell Nova, which was our admin dashboard, and then 2019, Larry Vell Vapor, which is our serverless deployment platform. All of those things were basically written by me, except for Larry Vell Nova, which I co-authored with a guy named David Hempill, and then the latest commercial product we just announced will be Larry Vell Cloud, which we hoped to have people in early access by the end of the year. And Larraval Cloud is really an evolution of everything we learned on Larraval Forge and Vapor about how to deploy and run Larraval Apps. Wow, so that's like a whole cloud solution where you just you hook up your GitHub, you can get a database, and you push to get, commit the whole thing builds and deploys.

Exactly. And that's kind of what we have with Forge and Vapor, but the difference is with our current tools, you have to link your own AWS account and your own digital ocean account or whatever. Yeah, so you're still really responsible for like those servers. You know what I mean?

They're not fully managed like in the Versel since where your infrastructure is like totally managed by Versel Larravo cloud will bring that sort of like I guess you could say Versel like experience to PHP and Larravo That's awesome and what's the stack for building that like obviously probably built it in Larravo? Yeah, so I mean a mix of things and that's part of why we've hired a lot of people this year So at the beginning of this year, it was just me and nine other people, I think eight or nine other people mainly devs and one customer support tech Now we're a team of 34 So we've added a lot of people just this year Mainly in engineering I would say so we have three full-time infrastructure people and Larva cloud We've been building it's a Kubernetes-based infrastructure on AWS us that we manage and then the front end, the app that people interact with of course is like a Laravel app with inertia and react on the front end. So yeah, we're using obviously a lot of our own tools on that side, but a lot of the Kubernetes work is way out of my wheelhouse and why we had to add finely dedicated infrastructure engineers to the team. And what parts I'm curious are inertia and what parts are react?

So the way inertia works is like you write a controller, kind of like a Rails controller, and then you return, instead of returning like a PHP, template you return a React page, and the array of data you give to the page is hydrated into the props of the React component. And from then on, it's like you're in React land. So you can use whatever you want, you can use frame or motion, you can use ShadCin, like whatever you want to use in React to build your React front and you can use. It's really just the routing and data hydration that's a little bit different.

So it's not client side routing, it's server side routing. So the whole dashboard and front end is written and react. But when you click like a link, for example, it hits the layer I've held back in, which then returns the new React page you're supposed to be on. And Nersha takes care of managing the transitions between those two pages, the history, state, all of that.

So it's actually really slick. It lets you build, react applications in a manner that feels reminiscent of building traditional, like, Rails apps or LARFL apps. It's kind of cool. And I think it's a good middle ground for people that are used to building apps in the traditional way, but they want to start using JavaScript on the front end to tap into all of the awesome JavaScript libraries for building front end experiences.

and it's a good way to get into that ecosystem without going full on SPA or with a separate API on the back end or something like that. Yeah, yeah. And do you see that as well? People just build a full GraphQL or API server in Laravel and then just.

Oh yeah, totally. All right, we're going to the front end. Yeah, that's big, big use. Yeah, I don't know how, I don't have like day don't how big it is, but like anytime I'm at Laracon, I talk to you all the time that have like, either a Nux front end or a next front end and it calls just to an API that's running Laravel in the back end and returning either GraphQL or just JSON or whatever they're doing.

Do you have any information on how many people are using Laravel beyond GitHub stars or downloads, or is that the best way to track for you? I mean, we've tried to kind of get at this number in various ways. We know that on the PHP package manager, Laravel Framework gets a quarter million installs a day. Some of those are the same person, right?

So I would put the real number probably somewhere between 50 and 100,000 people or something like that if I had to guess But it could be more I don't know, you know like right now a layer of a forge. We have about 600,000 sites being managed On vapor we have tens of thousands so it's hard to say like it's this is always a challenge for me It's something that's always bugged me is I wish I had this more firm data on how many developers are actually using It seems like such a basic stat that I've you got to use that fancy word tell what's the word telemetrics that's always the fancy word for We're tracking how many people are using it. We're adding telemetry to the app. Oh, that's good.

So I'm curious now you went from nine people to 30 30 something People running this massive conference that everybody's jealous of and you're get up is solid green I think part of the success of Laravel is because like you are obviously coding every single day and you're in there, you're making API design choices, but you're also like running a business. Do you have any like outlook on on that? How do you do that? Yeah, so every day when I start my day up until today, literally this morning, first thing I do is always go to GitHub.

So I have a bookmark right at the top of my, you know, bookmark bar that takes me to a get hub view that shows every PR across the whole Laravel organization. I'm still the only person that really merges PRs on the open source side of Laravel. People merge PRs all the time on the commercial products that don't necessarily go through me because they're maybe peer reviewed by a team member or whatever. But when it comes to all of our open source libraries, and I think we have like over 30 now, I still am the only person that clicks the merge button on any of those PRs. And I look at the code for every one of those PRs, which means that usually like every day, I have to end up reviewing, I would say, between like 15 and 20 PRs, just like if I wanna stay on top of it, you know, and not let it go crazy.

And a lot of those are really fast, right? Like a typo or a one line change or whatever. And you'll get a couple maybe that are more substantial. But I actually see that as one of the most valuable things that I bring to Laravel still is just ensuring a consistency of like taste across the framework and a cohesiveness of how the features all work together because a lot of times when people submit a PR to Laravel or one of the libraries, they only see it with like blinders on, you know, of like their particular need at this particular time.

Whereas I have, you know, like 13 years, kind of 30,000 foot overview of like everything that's going on and oh, if we do this here, then it makes it inconsistent with how we do things over here and that would be weird. So that's sort of what I bring to the table is like I kind of see myself. I tell people, I'm kind of like the wall on Game of Thrones, you know, like keeping protecting civilization from like madness, that's basically what I serve as on GitHub, it's sort of a great filter. So, when you do these code reviews, do you have any like special tips or tools for getting through that many?

I mean, that feels like a lot. I don't have any tips other than just like doing it, sadly. I wish I did. Like I said, most are very quick and usually I would say in any given week I might have three or four that are like a little bit more substantial for the entire week and by substantial I mean it might take me 20 minutes or something to to review it It's very rare that I would get something that requires a lot more than that.

Yeah Do you have like automated like code style and everything like that that is strictly enforced? Yeah Yeah, we have a pretty big test suite of thousands of tests we have code style automated. Usually what I'm looking at is stuff that can't really be captured by code style, linters, like almost like things that would be just like preference or how I would write the code if I was going to write it. And the other thing is just that consistency element of does this align with how we do things in all other parts of the framework and does it make sense with the rest of the ecosystem?

Or does it feel too niche? A lot of people submit PRs that are just like way too niche for there. It's like their specific thing that no one else is ever gonna encounter and it doesn't make sense for us to merge this in and maintain it forever. Cause that's another big thing is I always have to assume that once I click the merge button, like it's fully my code, you know?

And even though people may say like, hey yeah, I'm happy to help out. No fault of their own, like you never know, like six months from now they are at a different company and now they write Rust for a living and they have no interest in like coming back to fix this thing that they only added because I needed it at their job where they were writing PHP six months ago. And it's just so I have to assume like we have to maintain it forever. Scott and I call that the now responsible for this water bottle, which is the Scott name last tweet, yeah.

Now I'm responsible for the water bottle. I relate to it tweet a lot. Yeah, yeah, you're in charge. So I'm curious about your productivity mindset or or like if you have any tricks or anything there because I'll tell, I'll give the audience an example.

I spoke at Lericon 2018. One was Nova released. Yeah, 2018 in Chicago. 2018 in Chicago.

And Taylor just emails me and he's like, hey, you wanna speak? Sure, all right, book your flight. How much was it? PayPal's you immediately.

You know, there's no Senate invoice and all this BSC stuff around it. It's just like bam, bam, bam. It's all just done. and I was like, man, this guy is operating on another level.

And I curious what that is, is it just do it? It's funny you mentioned that. Other people have said that kind of thing to me before. I operated the business in this very low touch way.

I guess you could say where. Even for our employees, I would give them like a high level picture of what I think we needed to do for that given month. And that's usually how it would work is kind of like monthly cycles. And I would write like one paragraph for like, hey, I think we should add this to layer about forage.

And I think this person should do it. and they would just go do it. And if they have any questions, like they're free to ping me or whatever, but I never did calls, I never did meetings. It was like very low touch.

Like there was employees I didn't talk to on the phone for like years or more. You know what I mean? It was just crazy. Things are a little bit different now.

Actually, we actually do have a couple weekly standing meetings on like Laravel Cloud and another product we're working on as well. But yeah, I was just always sort of like no BS, very low touch, not into like wasting time with a bunch of ceremony. That's just sort of how I always ran the business. Has that ever burned you?

I mean, it's hard to say, like, hard to say what we could have got done if we would have had calls, you know, maybe we would have been even more productive like I don't know. It hasn't really burned me like a super bad way that I can remember. Like even this year at LeraCon, we had, you know, like the whole basketball game, the terminal guys came and brought their coffee and stuff. And even that was so low touch.

I remember DAX was like, wow, this was like the easiest business transaction I've ever made. because it was like, hey, yeah, we'll do the coffee as this much, probably when I was like, in Slack, great, sounds good, let's do it, the end, you know. Nice. Yeah, just let her rip.

I love that approach to things. And obviously there are, like, my wife hates that about me that I'm just like, I don't know, we'll just do it. And she's like, no, we need to sit here and play. Oh, yeah.

And then think about things that could go wrong and account for that. And it's just like, just let her rip. That's my personality. And obviously there's downsides of that type of thing.

but I think you come up with some really neat things. When building products, I would say a tip I have in that regard is if I was going to do something like build layer of a vapor, one thing I always try to do is build the hardest thing first, like the scariest part first. Since I wasn't doing a lot of formal planning like that, I just had an idea of the product I wanted to build. If there was a particular feature that scared me, that one feature, I'm not sure if that's even doable or that's even achievable, I wouldn't waste a lot of time like building all these like simple screens first I would just do that hardest thing immediately, you know, because if I'm gonna fail I would rather fail like this week rather than three months from now after I burned a lot of time doing the easy stuff So that's how I always approached building products personally.

I love that mentality Yeah, I always found from me personally to it if it scares me There's probably a reason that it would be good for me to have that exposure to that right? It's like here's a big gap and something I don't understand and you're better off filling those gaps sooner rather than later, right? Yeah, and if you want to see all of the errors in your application You'll want to check out century at century dot I.O. Forward slash syntax You don't want a production application out there that well you have no visibility into in case something is blowing up And you might not even know it so head on over to century dot I.O. Forward slash syntax again We've been using this tool for a long time and it totally rules all right. You want to think I think that Larry Vell is often praised for is just the general ease of use and design and I know you said a lot of that just comes from like the product that you want to build but do you have any like rules or outlooks on what makes like a beautiful API or an API that people want to interact with?

I would spend a lot of time when I was building new features for Laravel just sort of in a basically blank editor with one route on the screen and just typing in sort of pseudo code of what I wanted, how I wanted the feature to work. And there was no code really behind the scenes. I was just typing, what if it looked like this or what if it looked like that? Does that look good?

Does that feel good? A lot of the major things I did were written in that way. What I used to have a word for that was like, I don't know. But it was just maybe like if I could just write the ideal code, what would that be from the API perspective?

I always tried to keep a lot of the method names really short, memorable sort of expressive and like a prosy kind of I think that's very rails inspired personally like a very plain English kind of way of writing the APIs I had only a few like I would try to never like make users pass a bully and flag to a method for example Keep all the methods really clean and short. I don't know So there was a few simple rules that I think kind of paid off, but I think starting with writing the actual API that I wanted to use was a big piece of that. And it sounds obvious, but surprisingly, I feel like a lot of people don't do that. I feel like they don't.

They start implementing things, you know, and they haven't really thought about how this is actually going to, how do we want the user to use this? Yeah. It shows. I think a lot of projects could use that attitude of, how does it feel to use this?

because a lot of people are really focused on the utility, but not about the touch. The comments in Laravel, I think every single comment in Laravel is three or four lines, every line being three characters less. What the hell? That's right.

Yeah, that's gotten a lot of attention over the years. And it's not automated, like everyone is sort of hand done that way. I've just gotten really fast at doing it. But it just like, I committed to the bit at some point and then it just like, I just kept going with it.

And now, of course, it's way too late to stop. I think it started at first with the skeleton config file, so the config files that the user sees and the config directory of the framework. There's like a database config file, a file system config file, blah, blah, blah. Each option has a comment that sort of explains what it does.

And I think when I first started doing those, before I started form out of the comments that way, I was just really unhappy when I opened the config files and scroll, it didn't have this sort of like nice aesthetic appeal to it, like visually. And so I remember I had one comment that was like, you know, three lines, three characters, let's sort of add this nice like slope to as it like sloped in. And I was like, that looks kind of nice. Like if every comment looked like that, that would be pretty sick in the config files.

and then I just kept rolling with it and it became like a Laravel meme of sorts. It's inviting, yeah, I get it. That is so funny that you do that. It's, I think it's even more impressive that you can do that.

I've seen people try to get AI to do that recently and it's hard, like I haven't seen anyone actually be able to get it to do it consistently so that it works. Getting AI to output something of a exact length is very hard because of how organization works. So it's it's one of those last things that will the robot will never do is maybe that's the test for AGI, you know. And comments in general, like a lot of people say, oh, if you have to write comments, your code is too complex.

Obviously, you're probably not in that camp. Yeah, I'm a weirdo. So like I'll add comments for purely visual purposes. If I feel like, hmm, this method's kind of going along and it's a little unclear what's happening.

I think a comment would look good here. I'll have one there. But yeah, I mean, a lot of the comments in Laravel, some of them are more useful than others. Some stuff is genuinely complicated and I think needs a comment, especially in an open source framework where there's a lot of other people looking at the code.

Besides yourself, it can be useful to have some decent comments in there. I definitely think you can overcome a comment code to where it's just sort of useless. What are your thoughts on typing PHP? PHP.

I like it. PHP has changed a lot, even since I first wrote Laravel in 2011, and a lot of the changes have been in that area. So when I first wrote Laravel, you couldn't even type-pint a string in PHP. There was not a primitive string type-pint.

You could type-pint objects and classes, but not every primitive even had a type-pint. There was no return types. There was no union types. So there was just a lot of type features missing when I first wrote Laravel.

And so we've been trying to like add them as we go over the years as they're introduced and as we can without like breaking things. But now I think probably the vast majority of Laravel and PHP developers use types as much as they can. And we have tools like PHP Stan, which is like a static analysis tool for PHP that analyzes the code and shows you any type of problems. And most of the stuff is built into like PHP IDEs, like PHP Storm and even VS Code and stuff these days.

So I think that's that's probably how most people write PHP this days is kind of as a strongly type language as much as they can That's good. Is there any features of PHP that you you wish would be added or or maybe anything that has been added recently that you love? Oh gosh, I mean, I think the big one that always comes up if you talk to PHP developers and it's around types is the ability for a Generics and PHP so you cannot say that you have I mean you can't even say that you have like an array of users You have to use PHP doc, which I guess is kind of like JS doc where the type info is actually in Basically a comment, but the static analysis tools can read it that supports generics and all of that stuff But it's not actually built into the PHP language typing system Directly at this time. So that always comes up as a big one I always think like just make it anytime you can make the language faster that's like a great improvement.

So PHP seven, like double the speed of PHP from the old era to sort of like the new modern era of PHP. That was a pretty big jump. But overall, I would say PHP's up feels kind of feature complete to me. I mean, I'm sure there's things they could do.

But I don't find myself every day thinking, oh, I wish I had this feature. I wish I had that feature. Most things feel, feel pretty solid. And runtime, you ever mess with any of the like Facebook?

What as hip hop and now maybe it's called hack, hackling or something. So that is what inspired PHP 7. So Facebook came up with hip hop VM, which made PHP much, much faster for their use case, which sort of lit a fire under the PHP internal team, which resulted in PHP 7, which introduced something called the PHP op cache, which is sort of a technical thing, but it caches is the opcode of the compiled PHP in memory, so it doesn't have to sort of interpret the PHP scripts on every request. That sort of was their response to hip hop VM.

And I've never seen one of those alternative PHPs like really take off. It just hasn't been something that is traditionally gained a lot of ground for whatever reason. I think probably just because most of us simply don't need that level of speed, like PHP. If you have a couple PHP servers behind a web balancer, or you can serve millions and millions and millions of requests per day.

So most of us are not a Facebook scale and have never really needed that. Yeah, it's one of the amount of people that feel like they have to be at Facebook scales from the jump, right? It's pretty crazy. Yeah.

What's something that people get wrong about modern PHP? Gosh, I don't know. I mean, I think there still is somewhat of a idea that most PHP is like spaghetti code or just really nasty and hard to maintain, like you've got SQL queries mixed into HTML and like it's just a mess of stuff everywhere. I'm sure there's still a lot of legacy PHP out there that's written in that way.

But you know, I think most of the PHP written in the last five to seven to 10 years maybe is much more probably maintainable and organized than what people remember if they haven't written PHP and say 10 or 15 years and they moved on to other ecosystems. It looks a lot different. It may not even really look how they remember at all. But it's hard to kind of lose that stigma being sort of just like a very messy, error prone, bug prone language.

Yeah, it doesn't help peer levels going on like treatment and running as mouth about single file apps and stuff like that. Yeah, I mean, I would say he writes PHP in the old school way still to this day. you know where it's like index.php file and you're doing SQL queries at the top of the file like that's like that's probably how they are people remember PHP honestly. That's funny.

What about like server? So like I'm thinking back to my my WordPress days, you know, the lamp stack is what everyone that's just still the best acronym for a stack. Are you using Nginax or Apache still? What are most people use?

I think most people are using Nginax or they're using even something newer like Caddy. So forge, if you provision a server on Forge, we use IngenX, Larovov Cloud eventually boils down to IngenX under the hood. There's some new PHP application servers, one is called Franken PHP, which is built on top of Caddy and lets you run your Larovov app without IngenX or Apache at all. You know, it just sort of uses Caddy under the hood.

I think we'll probably use that a little bit in Larovov Cloud as well. Well, it's pretty dang fast. It has some cool stuff where a lot of times if people need a little bit of extra performance out of their PHP app these days, instead of jumping to something like hack or hip hop VM, there's actually been ways developed to boot the PHP app and sort of keep it in memory and feed it requests as they come in. So we're not having to rebuild the world on every request, which is traditionally how PHP has worked in the past.

And that gives you, like, at least double their performance and sometimes triple or quadruple their performance Because most of what makes PHP apps slower is that we have to reboot the entire framework and read every file like starting at index.php from scratch on every request. And that has benefits because like you don't leak state between requests, you don't leak memory between requests because you're not really keeping the app up and in memory. But newer tools like Frank and PHP allow you to actually keep the app booted up and just feed it request really quickly, which is kind of cool as well. Oh, that's cool.

I remember that being my, as someone who initially learned how to program in PHP, you know, and I learned Codic Knighter, and then when I moved to JavaScript, I was just like, I just wanna go to the file and for it to run, you know, I wanna go to the, whatever.php, or like, I made a change. I have to go and reboot the server, and at the time there wasn't these like tools that would restart as a control C and restart it. I'm like, PHP was just like stateless. You just visit the website and the whole thing runs and that was beautiful.

Did you have a favorite CMS in the past? This is funny, but I've never used a CMS. Nice. This always blows other PHP members' mind when they're like, have you ever built a CMS or would Laravel ever build a CMS as a company, as a paid thing?

I just sort of miss that. When I graduated from college, I immediately started writing enterprise.net, like custom Windows desktop applications and stuff. And then I jumped into Laravel and I just never had a CMS era in my career. So I always tell people I wouldn't have the first idea how to build a CMS once CMS users would find important any of that stuff.

But there are some cool CMSs in the Laravel world. So like Statomic comes to mind as sort of a kind of fun CMS in the Laravel world. Has Statomic always been Laravel based? As far as I know, yeah, I think so.

I've used this before. Yeah. Have you ever, this might be a crazy question, baby. Have you ever written any WordPress or do you have any thoughts on that whole ecosystem?

I've never written any WordPress like a custom plugin or anything. I have used a WordPress system like for helping like a family member set up a blog or something. What WordPress was able to achieve on PHP is kind of crazy and cool. This kind of self-updating, installable plug-in marketplace thing, all written in PHP.

Like, it's a pretty impressive piece of software, I guess, for better or worse. But I don't have any experience actually doing WordPress development. And most of the stories I hear from that don't usually tend to be positive, I'm saying. That's good.

I want to know how you feel about the Lambo memes. So for for the audience listening Taylor has a orange Lamborghini many times There's been many jokes on Twitter about like man. I'm writing the wrong language and like honestly like PHP O's Taylor a lot for I think Yeah, cool. I've had my fair share of Lambo memes and curious how you feel about those types of things You're not a very flashy guy.

I think it's pretty funny. I mean like I've had people tell me Aaron Francis was actually telling me Recently he feels like that that car has done more for marketing PHP than like basically anything in the last 20 years Yeah, and it wasn't intentional at all It has sort of became that way, but no, it's funny like I don't know. I think it's cool. It's like very Yeah, not what I expected but I Enjoy it is a funny time this year at Laracan would gave away a Lamborghini Lego set to sort of Go along with that meme the terminal guys rented a Lambo that wasn't yours was it?

Yeah, that wasn't mine. That actually looks a lot like mine. I won't say exact same, except it was a convertible and mine is not. Other than that, it was like basically the same car.

Yeah, so they rented that at LairCon, made a bunch of funny bits with it. So yeah, good stuff. That's good. Do you ever get kids asking what do you do at like a gas station?

Oh, yeah. That's actually the people that come up to me the most. So like, if I go to a gas station, I live in a really small town actually in Arkansas where you would never see like a car like that around here. So it's like obviously very unique.

But any time I take it to get ice cream or the gash is in the kids like freak out. And that's honestly like the funnest part of even having the car is like I remember when I was a kid if I would have seen, you know, an exotic car in my town, that would have like made my entire year basically of being able to see like that. So I think that's actually the most rewarding part is just like taking it out and some kid gets to take a picture with it or like I'll let him sit in the car for a bit. And it's just like they are so like just like so happy just to like get to hang out and see it.

And yeah, but people do usually ask what I do. And I just tell them like I started this kind of web tech company where we help people, you know, build websites faster. And that's about as far as I go into it. Yeah.

It's good. And you have a custom plate for it, right? Yeah, facade. So yeah, facades are a feature in Laravel that, when I first released them, were not well received at all, and I thought they were really cool.

So it's basically a way to access services in the Laravel dependency injection container in this very easy way that sounds like very complicated. But it's basically what keeps Laravel syntax very short and easy and not verbose and cumbersome to use. Yeah, it was a very controversial feature at the time in Laravel, but now I think pretty widely accepted and adopted and used and stuff So when I got the plate it was kind of like a dunk on all the all the facade haters back in 2015 2016 that gave me such a hard time about the facade so just had to put it on the plate It had a deeper meaning as well. So I know this is gonna sound hopefully it's gonna sound too corny No, I was I was trying to get that out of you So I'd like to hear yeah I wrestled with getting this car, like I talked with Adam Wathen from Teowent about getting this car for probably like five or six years before it happened, I was like.

For those who don't, me and Adam are basically, he's like kind of like my best real life friend, I guess you would say, but also tech friend. And we talk pretty much every day about tech and about other stuff and we play games together like Fortnite and Rocket League and stuff. And so every summer, every year, I would mention that, I was like, I kind of want to get a Lambo, like it's always been my dream car since I was a kid. And I was like, maybe if revenue is this number, or I have this much in savings next year, I'll get it.

Or like when I can buy it and have this much left in cash and savings, I'll get it. And so I said all these financial milestones for when I might be able to get this car, right? And every year, I would kick the can down the road. I would hit the milestone, but then I'd be like, and just like, I don't know, like maybe when I'm this, or maybe when I'm that.

Yeah. So eventually the car pops up on the website a couple of summers ago in Lamborghini Dallas and I called them and I'm like, hey, I'm kind of interested in the orange hurricane that just came up on the website. At that time it was very hard to find any sort of like vibrant color, Lambo. Cars in general is like post-COVID era, where cars in general were like very hard to find.

And so the guys like, yep, we sold it to the original owner. It's only got a couple thousand miles on it. If you want it, we can have it to you by this weekend. And the way he put me on the spot about the weekend thing, I was almost too embarrassed to back out at that point.

So I was just like, okay, like, yeah, sure. Cause I didn't want to be like, oh, no, never mind. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I would, cause I would feel so stupid. And then it just like, it all happened so fast and next thing, you know, there's like a Lambo in my house within a period of a few days. But I guess I got the facade plate as kind of like a reminder of the fact that it's just a car, you know what I mean? Like, it's got nuts and bolts and it will rust And the cool exterior is really like a facade for this very like temporary possession that will eventually break down and be in a junkyard somewhere.

You know what I mean? So it was almost just like this constant reminder of like, hey, this is cool, but it's like not that important and not that big of a deal, which I feel stupid saying it because easy for you to say you're the one with the Lambo. You know what I mean? But like, it was still just like supposed to be a personal reminder of the important things in life which are not Lambo's, you know?

No, that's great, yeah. Can we ask you about your coding setup? I know you have a beautiful office. What do you sit down in front and what editor are you using?

Yeah, oh man. So like kind of my whole setup would be my put pro 16 inch. I've got the Apple XDR display, probably major overkill in hindsight. I have, other than that, just like standard Apple keyboard, standard Apple trackpad, people always ask me like, do you have like some mechanical keyboard or whatever, but I've said pretty much like standard stuff.

I'm still using sublime text until the day I die pretty much. Wow. So I still use sublime text a lot. I like VS Code.

We actually are releasing our own first party Laravel VS Code extension to really make that Laravel experience really good in VS Code. So maybe once that comes out this fall, I'll try to make the jump over to VS Code because it seems like that's what a lot of people are using these days. What's keeping you on sublime? What do you like about sublime?

You just know it? I just know it. It's super fast. It's just such a fast feeling editor.

VS code feels actually pretty fast too, I would say. But I think I just know it. Last time I set up VS code and really configured it to how I liked it, it actually was very, very close to my experience in sublime in terms of speed and key mappings and everything. But I just always kinda just end up finding myself back in sublime for one reason or another.

So we'll see. If sublime disappeared tomorrow, I'd be perfectly happy using VS code. That'd be totally fine. Yeah.

And you don't use any get up copilot or anything like that, do you? not really. I have used AI occasionally for code like for regular expressions for figuring out how to do something in a tool I'm not super familiar with or a language I'm not super familiar with. Like if I needed to write something really simple and go, for example, I would probably just ask AI for help.

I've used it in those kinds of situations but no, it's not really, I don't use it in my editor. That's cool. Yeah, rejects. Definitely a good use case for that for sure.

Yeah. All right, let's get in the last section of a show here where we go over two things. First one is a sick pick and the second one is a shameless plug. Did you come with any either of those?

I do have a couple sick pick candidates. One of the coolest things I've seen recently, it's a game called Tiny Glade. Have y'all seen this? No. Okay, y'all got to check this out.

I think it's built by one person. The beta is out on Steam right now. It's this super chill, there's not really any objective, but you drag and click and draw to build these little kind of like whimsical castles or like medieval looking buildings. And it's got this like very peaceful vibe.

There's no like money or resources or anything, but just the animations and the way everything snaps together and how smooth it all is. It's just like super impressive to me from I think actually a first time game developer building this game. Yeah, so that is something I found really impressive lately and would be my sick pick. I follow this Devon Twitter They're great follow.

I didn't know the game, but it is funny looking at the way these things all snap and adjust It's like kind of responsive web design on steroids. Yeah 3d context. It's crazy. Yeah.

Yeah, I found it really impressive Yeah, I can see my kids loving this my kids are super into Minecraft right now. They love building their own This is cool and what what else did we ask for are we on the are we going to plug a section Yeah, we do we saw more picks. We have as many as many sip picks as you want. Yeah, our record I think is about six Well, that's the main one other than that I've always been a big no man sky fan staying on the game steam Mainly because I mean I like the game game, but also I found this story behind the development of the game really kind of inspiring.

People may remember if they followed this game that when it launched, I don't even know how many years ago, it's been several. It had just a terrible reception. And before it launched, it was very hyped, it was kind of this open world space sandbox with literally like billions and trillions of procedurally generated planets. And so obviously everyone was very excited before launch.

the trailers look awesome and it comes out and it just like gets trashed. It doesn't have the scope that we thought from the trailer, it's buggy, it's boring. And instead of like throwing up their hands and giving up on it and just sort of like, okay, whatever, riding off into the sunset to the next project, they've basically released like, I don't even know, like maybe 15 expansions to this game for free to the point where now it's like mostly positively reviewed on Steam and I think a really well-liked game. But I just find it very inspiring as a story of sticking with what you're working on and grinding it out You know to like make something really awesome even though it wasn't really well received at the time And I really relate to that for Laravel because you know I've been grinding on her for like 13 years at this point Which is a long time in like web development time plans.

Yeah, yeah, but just sticking to it every day and and grinding on it every day, bit by bit, I think, we'll just pay off in the long run. So that'd be a second sick pick. Yeah, that whole thing. I mean, I followed that from the start, considering I was super interested when the trailers came out.

And as somebody who likes meditative type of games, I always, on the Reddit's defending that game, I'm launched just because I was like, that's supposed to be meditative. People are getting boring. Yeah. Yeah, so definitely inspiring story for sure.

Do you have any shameless plugs or do you want to keep going on sick picks? Those are my two sick picks, so my shameless plug, I mean, the most recent thing in Larraval World would be Larraval Cloud, cloud.larraval.com, we're basically building the easiest way to ship and scale and deploy PHP and Larraval applications, because I think Larraval has always been a framework that's just about getting things done and shipping web apps with kind of no BS and no red tape. So we're trying to build a cloud platform that really captures that as well. We felt like Laravel developers, we have a really great ecosystem for building web apps, but we have a little bit of catching up to do as far as like shipping and scaling them really easily, especially with how the great work people like for sale or Netlify have done in terms of how easy they've made it to deploy JavaScript-based applications primarily, and we want to do that for Laravel.

So you can get on the waiting list for that at cloud.laravel.com. Like I said earlier, we hope to have kind of like beta testing early access type of users in there later this year, and yeah So that's that's the main thing we've been working on here at Laravel for the past six months Okay, all right on well Thank you so much for for coming on and imparting all your wisdom on this was you've been on our Goat list for a while we have this list inside of our notion, which is the goat list and you've been on that list for a while So really stoked to finally get you on and this was really fun Oh, well, I'm honored to be on the goat list. Thanks for having me. Cool.

All right. Thanks again, Taylor. Thanks, Taylor.","created_at":"2024-09-20T12:01:25.000000Z","updated_at":"2025-07-15T06:26:23.000000Z","requested_by":[2],"status":"completed","delay_time":null,"worker_id":null,"job_id":null,"execution_time":null,"runpod_job_id":null,"error_message":null,"completed_at":null,"word_level_timestamps":null,"claimed_at":null,"retry_count":0}

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