The Laravel Podcast

Matt Stauffer:
Welcome back to the Laravel podcast season seven. I'm your host, Matt Stauffer, CEO of a Tighten. And this season I'm joined by every episode. I've joined every episode by a member of the Laravel team. And today I'm talking to Taylor Otwell, the man. You know, he is Laravel. Laravel is him. So is your, is your role CEO right now? Like what is he actually called? Okay.

Taylor Otwell:
That is my official title, yeah. Yep.

Matt Stauffer:
So founder and CEO, OG. So and normally I would start it with saying, hey, can you say hi and share a little bit about what you do at Laravel? And it's on the one hand, it's kind of funny to do that. But on the other hand, it's actually kind of fun because you what you do at Laravel today isn't the same. So I will say, Taylor, can you say hi and tell us a little bit about like, what do you do day to day at Laravel?

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah. Hey, of course, as you said, I'm Taylor Otwell. Um, I am founder CEO of Laravel. I created Laravel back in, I started working on it in 2010. I put it out there in 2011 and you know, I have kind of shepherded it ever since. I've done a lot of different things. Um, you know, for the first, uh, let's say, gosh, I guess almost 13 years, I pretty much was the only let's say executive boss at the company and it was me and a few other programmers just kind of figuring it out as we go, mainly building things that like scratched our own itch of what we thought Laravel developers needed and what made sense to us. And to be honest, that is kind of still what I do just at a bigger scale now. We're about a 60 person team. Even though I'm CEO, I still manage pull requests every day on GitHub. I still answer a lot of questions, just try to give a lot of guidance on, you know, where I think we should be heading and how we can best serve the Laravel community.

Matt Stauffer:
Well, we obviously, you know last season and on frequent seasons we had you on all the time, but you are very busy right now. So that's why kind of we're doing this thing.

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
But I still wanted to check in with you regularly and just say like, Hey, what's going on in your world? And what's your perspective on the things we're seeing? So the first one for today is Cloud. And I know we did a lot of talking about Cloud. We kind of hit pause and we talked about night watch for a little bit, but I would really like to hear from your perspective of like, what was the Cloud launch like in terms of what did, what went well, what poorly, what was different about the Cloud launch than previous launches like Forge and on and stuff and then maybe we'll talk a little bit about more Cloud after that. But first, like kind of what was the Cloud launch like for you?

Taylor Otwell:
You know, I think it went really well overall. mean, in a variety of ways. So firstly, it worked, right? Like we launched cloud and people were able to use it and it did not go down. So like that is great. had no like emergencies or like real catastrophes on a technical level. I think it also went really well in the sense that we had many, many more users on it very quickly than we expected.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Taylor Otwell:
It has grown faster than any previous product we've ever launched, which is great. The only reason I say it's maybe a little bit unexpected and we'll see how it trends over time. You know, compared to something like, I think back to when maybe like Vercell or Netlify was first launching like Next.js hosting, let's say. No one really had been self hosting it a lot because it was a very new framework compared to PHP, where people have been self hosting and managing PHP for almost 30 years, literally now. And I kind of thought, you know, it's gonna people are not going to just migrate to Laravel cloud day one, if their apps already out there and working, it's just there's not a lot of business sense to do that. So I think I thought that Laravel Cloud would be a very kind of like

Matt Stauffer:
Unmask, yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
slow but steady growing thing that eventually really pays off for us, but it's just gonna take time to get people migrated and to encourage them to do so through like our feature set.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
So there's many, many, many more people on the platform very early than we expected. You know, some things that like we've been reflecting on and thinking about is it's just a very different model than people are used to with Forge and I always saw Forge as like Cloud's biggest competitor, to be honest, and not in a bad way. It's just like there are two different paths you can take for running Laravel apps. And I think we want both of them to be really awesome. But for example, like if I could reflect on like some pain points we're going through with Cloud, it's just like educational things. Like someone has a web app with like one gig of memory, but they have attached like a 500 gigabyte cache to it that costs them $200 a month or whatever. I don't know what the price is off the top of my head.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
But just like a sort of unawareness of maybe what they need and what things are going to cost them. So we're actually trying to ship a pricing calculator by next week that lets you kind of like pick your app into different buckets.

Matt Stauffer:
That's a great idea.

Taylor Otwell:
So like maybe you have a very small app or you're a SaaS startup or you're an e-commerce platform. You can kind of like put yourself in one of these buckets and we'll give you like recommendations on like, this is probably what you need and here's kind of what it will cost if it's fully utilized all month long.

So we're working on a lot of that kind of user educational stuff and then surfacing kind of billing details in the UI because it's just a different model than Forge where you're kind of like paying for a server and you're done. But overall it's been awesome. I think you know we've continued to ship some cool new stuff on it like replicating environments. We're going to keep working on stuff like as people can probably guess things like preview environments and things like that. So I'm super pumped about what's coming down coming down the line for Cloud.

Matt Stauffer:
Nice. I'm glad to hear that those are your answers. We didn't talk about this ahead of time because the only complaints I've heard about Cloud is they didn't understand what the pricing was and whether it was that the bill was unexpected or whether they don't understand why, you know, they would switch to Cloud from Forge. And the two biggest conversations I've had were A, I just talked with a friend recently who said I had a higher bill than expected. And so we kind of dug into their bill together and it was like, yeah, there's a

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
worker that's doing work heavy work and interacting with the database every minute or so every five minutes or something like that and it was just like oh yeah, when we're working on this usage based pricing the average person isn't gonna have this so yours is a more expensive you case use case and then the other friend I talked to just said hey I work with a lot of people who are just getting started outside of the US and they are you know we've gotten them off of shared hosting and on to a $5 Digital Ocean droplet that they have 20 apps on and the idea of like each app costing more than this droplet you know, is not making sense. Therefore, Cloud doesn't make sense. And one of the things I told you about early on, and I kind of talked with the Cloud team is that I'm most interested in Cloud, not for myself, but for my clients. And I know that you guys are targeting more than just that, but we have so many clients that we have set up on Forge, set up on Digital Ocean. And now they just have a Forge account and a Digital Ocean account and don't know what to do with them. And they have to hire us when they want to make changes.

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
And I was like, I love the idea of, they're going to pay more than Forge Digital Ocean $5 box, but they're going to have a fully managed service. And there's, we've tried Heroku before. We've tried other fully managed services for, for Laravel before, and they've never been in the experience that, you know, that I'm hoping that our clients have as they move over to Cloud. So I'm excited about further transparency around that pricing and also just talking about like, well, who's Cloud for and who is it not? What projects make sense in Cloud and which don't, and that price will certainly be a part of it.

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. know, I think we want Cloud to be as great for as many products and apps as possible. I think we're still figuring out ourselves who slots into those buckets between Cloud and Forge over time and where do we see the most potential for each under which customer segment. You know, so the jury may still be out there a little bit, but I mean, I know we...

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
We want to optimize Cloud and Forge for everyone, right? And it really just comes down to how you would like your app to be managed. Do you want fully managed or do you want a server that you can SSH into and have terminal access to? But the experience really needs to be great for both. So that's what we'll keep working towards overall.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, for sure. And I just to add one extra thing, I realized that part of it, I'm just like, is the app making money? You know, because if the app's making money, then that the that difference between the five dollar box and the twenty five dollar Cloud doesn't really bother you that much. And then you can focus on the app. So I do think that like the story of Cloud for your little side project that, you know, needs to be up and running all the time, but it's not making any money. That could be a little harder story to tell, whereas like if you're a profitable business, even mildly profitable, Cloud becomes a lot easier.

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah. And we're, trying to make some changes as well. To get the happy, get people on the happy path for those kind of like side projects a little bit better on Cloud.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, cool.

Taylor Otwell:
Like for example, when you create a new environment in Cloud, previously we're not enabling hibernation by default on the app, but we're thinking we probably will do that for like sandbox accounts because we were seeing a fair number of people

Matt Stauffer:
Hmm, okay.

Taylor Otwell:
launched their like hobby project or side project on the Cloud. And it wasn't hibernating because we don't enable it by default. And they were like, wait a second. I thought, I thought I was going to hibernate and I was going to pay only a few cents or whatever.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I thought it was supposed to, yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
And that wasn't the case because it wasn't enabled. So I think we're going to ship that this week, but you know, we're trying to make these little changes and figure it out based on what we hear from the community and stuff.

Matt Stauffer:
That's great. That's awesome. Well, one other thing about Cloud we wanted to talk about was MySQL general availability. So Cloud ships with Postgres, and then you've got MySQL and beta. And I know that a lot of people who I've talked to who want to migrate existing apps, they've asked this question of like, well, what does it look like to migrate from Postgres to MySQL? And I'm like, it's not that free. Wait for MySQL to actually be fully available. So can you talk to us a little bit about that?

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah, so we have, like you said, have Postgres out now and then MySQL in beta. And one of the major reasons MySQL has been in beta is because of the backup restore story not being totally fleshed out during the beta period. And so what we're about to roll out over the next week or two is automated snapshots of your MySQL databases and the ability to restore them to a new MySQL cluster. And then further down the line,

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
in the, but still in the near term, we will have point in time restore for my SQL, just like Postgres to where you can restore to like, you know, down to the minute or second or whatever the granularity is, onto a new cluster. So that was the main, I would say the main reason we still have the beta tag on the MySQL feature in Cloud. And once we have the snapshot stuff out and a backup story more mature than I think we'll, we'll call that GA. You know, we just didn't want to call it GA without the ability to back up and restore you know, accurately that

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, so it's not like the database itself is in beta, right? Like if you're just using a database somewhere else, you can use database here. It's just you guys, you have like a higher kind of standard.

Taylor Otwell:
No, no, Yeah. And you could even you could even connect via table plus and export a backup, you know, so you're not even really prevented from getting a backup, per se. But, you know, it's just not built into Cloud right now as an affordance.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Well, I've definitely noticed that like, of course, all of the products that you've ever built before are high quality, but there is a level of expectations that you've placed on yourselves for Cloud that I think is like several levels above before. And I think there's probably lots of reasons. It's the size of the company. It's the current state of it. But I think part of it also is there's eyes on Laravel in a way there haven't been before. Because like, I think that in the past you would have

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Shipped it and then you would have later shipped it with backup restore no big deal, but now it's sort of like well are you you ship this feature and it doesn't have the industry leading best expected. What are you doing so now you guys have this kind of like higher pressure on you.

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah, definitely.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay. Well, let's talk really quickly about Forge and then I want to move over to Nightwatch. So you mentioned kind of like you want to make sure that Forge is something that people are still using. And a lot of people, when Cloud came out, said, I don't want to use Cloud. I want to stick with Forge. And I'm like, I'm going to stay using Forge for the rest of my life. I'm going use Cloud too. And, you know, like, is this something you're to keep investing in? And you mentioned that, you know, then you said, yeah, that's something we're interested in. But you said there's kind of like, and you guys have kind of leaked ideas about like there's new kind of Forge development happening. So can you tell us a little about like, you know, as much as you're able to share about Forge right now.

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah, you know, I'm a huge Forge fan. Of course, Forge will always be super important to me as like my first commercial product I ever really built that like let me go full time working on Laravel. We're doing more on Forge right now and more ambitious things than we've, I would say, ever done, or at least in the last, let's say, five to six years, way beyond anything we've ever tackled. I mean, from my perspective, at the end of the day, like the proof that Forge is a good product, is in the fact that it's managing over half a million servers and tens of thousands of customers. Like clearly this is something people want and enjoy and like. And I think it would be really silly and kind of negligent to just like say, we're, actually done with Forge. We're going all in on Cloud. So we have some super exciting new projects for Forge. I mean, you know, I can just say that part of it, you know, I put out a tweet, maybe a week or two ago of like, Hey, If you're interested in Forge, come to Laracon US because we're going to be showing all of this new Forge stuff, which is all true. if you are interested in Forge, Laracon US is definitely going to be an exciting time. But you know, a lot of people guessed a lot of stuff. A lot of it was correct. People were missing a lot of stuff as well that I don't think they would ever guess. Actually, that's just like, I think going to be kind of surprising to people. But you know, I mean, a lot of stuff that's probably top of mind for everyone. Like we know we want to improve and solidify or maybe like unify the feature set between like Envoyer and Forge.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
I think that's like a super obvious one that people have talked about for years. So I mean, I feel pretty comfortable saying that like, since 90 % of the people guessed that like, obviously, that is something we have been working on, trying to improve the deployment story to be more in line with Envoyer in terms of zero downtime, and kind of monitoring and things like that. But there's a lot more we're doing for Forage as well that people, like I said, not a single person guessed on Twitter at all.

Matt Stauffer:
Nice!

Taylor Otwell:
So I think it's going to be fun. And you know, I'm excited. You know, I wanted to get the company and Forge and Cloud to a place to where as a company and as a business, we are perfectly fine no matter which you choose, whether it's Cloud or Forge. And we've tried to do things, you know, here to make that a reality. And I think, you know, after Laracon we'll kind of finally be to that place. So I'm pumped. I think if you're a Forge fan, it's going to be a really exciting summer. And I think just like

Matt Stauffer:
Nice.

Taylor Otwell:
you know, it's big, there's a lot of big stuff coming. And it's one of the biggest Forge updates we've ever done.

Matt Stauffer:
I love that as a priority because I think a lot of people say, well, you know, money comes in and then the things that we want are going to go away in the favor of us going to things that they want or whatever. And so I know that that was kind of like a, that was a concern underlying the Cloud is coming is Forge going away mindset. So I know that there's people who are going to be very happy to hear you saying we want it, you know, and you're doing the work on your side. You're not just saying it as a nicety. You know, we want to do the work ourselves to make sure that our offerings are equally valuable to you and to us so that we're not bummed if you all choose Forge or all choose Cloud or either way. So that's really nice. Okay, well we did just have an episode about Nightwatch where we kind of dug deep not into what Nightwatch is but more kind of like the origin story and kind of like what building Nightwatch was like with Jess.

So it's totally fine if you don't have anything really huge to say about it, but I'm curious. First of all, do you have anything to say? But second of all, do you get to use Nightwatch in a day to day? Do you get to be a part of like the, hey, I'm going to install in the server, I'm going to play with, I'm going to give my notes, even if you're not there every day, right? Because you're not the lead, but like it's still your baby, right? Everything Laravel does is still yours. So what's your kind of day to day interaction with Nightwatch like?

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah. So I mean, the way I actually interact with Nightwatch the most in a real way is actually via Forge's Nightwatch installation. So, Jess, may I mention this if she was on with you, but. You know, we've been running Nightwatch on Forge and production for feels like forever now. I mean, it's been a couple of months, I think at least. And so like I log into that and I see the real Forge data into Nightwatch. to me, it feels like kind of a finished Nightwatch because I'm seeing everything real.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
It's not any dummy data or anything. And it's just really like, it's such a beautifully designed product and it's such a step above like, man, just like, I've never even really set up true log monitoring for any of my Laravel projects because it was just like, I just knew it was gonna be nasty and it was gonna be ugly and I didn't wanna do it. And with Nightwatch, it's just like, boom, I pop in the Nightwatch agent into my composer file and I'm done and everything works and it looks good and I can search and I can.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
You know what, what's actually super cool for me is like being able to go to a user in Nightwatch, like a user of my app, a Forge user, I can see the requests they're making, but then on any of those requests, I can see the logs that were written just for that request. And you know, that's like, that's just such a pain to dig into. Like if you were going into like the Cloud watch dashboard on AWS, just being able to quickly do that, it'd just be nasty. It'd be slow. so it's just,

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
I don't know. It's just an awesome product. I the team's done a really good job on it. You know, and it's just crazy how like, it's funny how these products kind of come into being sometimes, which, you know, I kind of had the idea for Nightwatch before we raised money with Excel. And I remember kind of, kind of pitching this idea a little bit of like a Pulse Pro while we were talking about like, should we, should we raise money and try to build some of these ambitious things and Cloud was kind of an obvious one, but like Pulse Pro

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah, we talked about that. Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
which is what we were calling at the time was another one that was like very top of mind. And you know, the fact that I was kind of all born out of just like frustration running Forge and not being able to identify problems really quickly in the system or like, Hey, which users clogging up our queues with tons of jobs and being able to know that in five seconds, you know, and here we are about to launch an entire product out of like some frustration, some, you know, relatively mild frustrations we were having on Forge, but

Matt Stauffer:
that frustration.

Taylor Otwell:
It was really annoying, you know, over time when it's happening again and again, and just being able to have this awesome tool to solve that and give it to the community is going to be really fun. And I think, you know, in contrast to Cloud and something that I'm super excited about about on Nightwatch is, know, when we launched Cloud, like I said earlier, everyone could kind of get in and play with it on day one, but most people weren't moving their production apps to Laravel Cloud in the first 24 hours of Cloud's launched, especially if they were non-trivial applications.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
But with Nightwatch, even if your site's doing millions and millions of hits a day, you really can launch Nightwatch into production on that app on launch day. And we're ready for it in terms of scale and the ability to handle that. And there's no migration needed on your end. It's really just a composer package you install and a little process you run just like you'd run a Que worker or anything else. So I'm really curious to see. I think it's going to be a kind of bananas launch.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
for Nightwatch because of that. so I'm very, it's gonna be a fun day. Launching on, man, I almost leaked the launch date for Nightwatch. I did announce today it's launching next month, but I didn't say the exact day we have in mind just in case we needed to shift it a few days, know.

Matt Stauffer:
I can't imagine, because I mean, Cloud is huge, right? And you're doing all that stuff. like each user of cloud is sending just their one set of requests. Whereas Nightwatch, you know, we signed up for Nightwatch and instantly we're sending thousands of requests over to Nightwatch. I don't know if it's a Minix. I don't remember the size of the project we sent over. And we did not put our biggest projects on it because we're still beta testing, right? But some of our clients get you know millions hits a day and they would probably on day one sign up install. So like the the load that you guys are going to have on your servers like and the nothing to billions, trillions of requests per whatever you know like that's going to be a wild day from a server ops perspective.

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah, I think in the 30 days that we ran the first 30 days, we Nightwatch on forge. think just for database queries, we collected 3 billion database queries tracked by Forge alone.

Matt Stauffer:
My gosh, is that just Forge alone? my gosh.

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah. And that's, that's just queries. That's not, you know, requests or exceptions or anything. But you know, people will also be able to just sample down. So one thing we're working on is

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.

Taylor Otwell:
That's assuming you capture like 100% of everything that happens in your app. You don't have to do that. So like, if your app gets billions of requests, you literally might only sample 0.1 % of the data coming in, but it's enough to still let you know like what your slowest queries and slowest routes are. So people will be able to do that as well.

Matt Stauffer:
Wow.

Yeah, I mean, we just got beta access and installed it on an app and I've gotten to play around with it a little bit. And I have tried paper trail, like when I was writing my book and when I was writing blog posts about Forge, I tried paper trail a couple of times. I tried a couple of other logging services. And just like you said, it's so difficult to get useful information out of logs. And those services make it better than just tailing a log in your local system or whatever. But it is so difficult to get useful, structured information that is the exact information you're looking for in that moment. Let alone the fact that outside of the logs, you're also getting access to a lot more kind of like request data and user data and everything like that. Like there was a screen where I think it just said, here's your users, know, here's your last 40 users to log in and here's the issues they're running into or something. And I was like, oh my gosh, like this feels magical to be able to say like that user right there had an error on that page. That user right there had three, you know, 300 type errors and know, 400 type errors.

And we want to ding these or there's, you know, here's the routes that have the most 500 type errors. And I'm just like, this is an insane and it, shouldn't be that magical.

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah, it's super useful to be able to see stuff like that, especially even like your P95 values in Nightwatch. So these are like what you might think of as the outliers in your app in terms of performance, but in many cases, they're actually your most valuable customer. They may be your biggest spenders because they have the most resources on your system. Like take for example, Forge itself. If we had a user with a thousand servers,they're one of potentially our biggest potential customers. And, you know, even though the dashboard might be really slow for them and we're not really seeing that you might discount it.

Matt Stauffer:
They're also really important. Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
Cause like, P95 it's rare, but it could be like a really valuable customer and being able to visualize that kind of stuff really easily and not watch is super, super useful.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I was just saying it feels very magical and I don't want to say that in like a sales hype way, but it feels very magical in that we have been working on this logging, tracking, analytics, you know, debugging world for so long and never been able to get anything like this. It really feels like a, cause what I thought we were going to get was like a, Laravel branded error management platform. Okay, cool. Error management is error management, your exception tracking platform. And then I thought we were going to get some APM, which is great because getting good APM, there are good APM platforms, but they're hard to find and there's sales heavy stuff like that. But this logging integration together with all these different pieces and how they all play together was something I never could have even asked for. It's just sort of like now I see it. I'm like, yeah, this is amazing, right? But it wouldn't have even known to like imagine we could do this so.

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, when we first started building Nightwatch, we actually did not set out with like, error monitoring or exception tracking being like, the focus, you know, that was just like, that ended up being kind of a part of it, a part of the story. But it was not, we didn't set out to build like an error tracking platform, for sure. It was much more like, holistic than that.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, okay. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, for some reason at first I was just like, yeah, Nightwatches, you know, and I guess when I first talked to Jess at Laracon Australia, she said there's the three pieces. But even then I was like, well it's, you know, I just didn't understand how holistic it could be until I started seeing it. And then I was like, the holistic is the magic. It's not that it has three individual pieces done well, which is great, but it is fact that having all three allows you to gather information in structured ways you never could have with one or the other. So that's very cool.

OK. Last big thing I want to talk to you about is Laracon. The Laracon hype is definitely starting. We got the new site that launched, think, just today. You know, I know that as a sponsor, we're starting to get kind of sponsor communications. I just listen to Mostly Technical and they're talking about a pre-party the day beforehand. And I know there's a lot of other stuff going on.

Once again, I have to ask you because I'm most curious about your perspective of things you've run Laracon solo You've want run their cons with Ian you've learned their cons with Jess, you know You've had all these different experiences in last year. You had the burgeoning kind of like team, you know helping run their con with you. How hands-on are you? What's your experience been like, you know? What's yeah?

Taylor Otwell:
I have tried to be pretty hands off this year because I mean, oh gosh, hopefully the team's not mad at me, but I wanted to see how they did without me guiding every step of what they do, you know what I mean?

Matt Stauffer:
Uh-huh. Micromanaging? Yeah, guiding is a good word.

Taylor Otwell:
Because it's true, especially years like 2016, 17, 18, 19, we ran those with no event management company at all. It was usually me and one other person.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
or two other people maybe, and we just kind of made it happen. The last couple of years we've used an event management company, but there's still a lot you have to do and a lot to figure out. So where like I have contributed my general feedback and kind of opinions on venue and where we do it. And a lot of that ends up coming down to just sort of like cost and what date stuff is available. And some of it's a little bit out of your control to be honest, depending on what's kind of booked up at the time. And so I contributed there and I also contributed

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
to helping select the speakers, right? Because I just can give a lot of context on, you know, what topics we might want and how to kind of balance it all out and stuff like that. But other than that, I have not really contributed to like, even like for example, last week I pinged Hank who's on our team working on this and said, hey, like what does the stage look like at Laracon?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. You actually just don't know. Yeah. Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
You know, because I normally that's something I would be like super heavily involved in. And I just hadn't looked and he sent me up a mock-up and like it looked. Okay, that looks great. So good. We're like on the right track. You know, like, hey, what's the catering looking like, but I'm honestly not I'm trying not to micromanage it because, you know, but it's really part of a broader effort across Laravel where I'm trying to find a balance between like, really steering everyone in this very micromanagery way versus trying to get Laval to a place to where it can function without

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Nice.

Taylor Otwell:
me doing that because it hasn't for so long because I was kind of running like every decision because you know I want to be able to eventually like take a vacay and not log log in like let's say if that's the benchmark you know and

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, don't even take your laptop. Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
we're not we're not there yet but we're getting close to that you know what mean but it's and I want other people to be able to find to to have fun and flourish too right like if you're working somewhere, you want to be able to contribute and like make an impact on what actually happens. You know, you don't want to just be like, sort of carrying out the wishes of like a ruler and you have no creative input on the whole process. So I'm trying to let them have fun with it too, cause it is fun running an event, you know, and kind of seeing it all come together and then you're there in person. It's like, wow, we spent many months kind of dreaming this up. And now it's like this real tangible thing, which we don't get to do often in software, right? It's like,

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
see these tangible results of projects we've worked on with cool staging and lighting and so you know I think it's going to be it's going to be fun.

Matt Stauffer:
That's cool. I mean, it's always been fun watching your team.

You know when they get to be involved with it just kind of like the giddiness and the high they have because as a sponsor we get to show up early so I'm seeing your whole team and you know like we're an empty warehouse people are starting to set up chairs or whatever and your team is there and they're in their shirts and they're like they are so freaking excited to be there and be helping to be a part of it especially when it's people's first year and they're just kind of like I am in person as like team Laravel with a little badge or a little shirt or whatever and it's so I love that you're giving people more opportunities more space to be a part of

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
creating. And one of the challenges of owning a company and growing is learning how, you know, what to let go of and what not to. How do you ensure that it's up to the quality level that you want to attach to your name and your baby while also kind of letting it go a little bit. And you got to learn that, like, let somebody take those steps and then you come in and say, OK, you know, you did great or oh, OK, you know, next time I'm going to have to give you more structure or whatever. Like that's that's the leadership skills that you're obviously, you know, exhibiting and developing. So.

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah, yeah, trying to.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, well, it's it's I talk to your employees enough that I think I think you're doing a great job so. So when it comes to Laracon this year, we're in Denver. Do you have a sense for what the vibes of the locale are like? I mean, I've looked it up before, but I just want to kind of get like what's your read?

Taylor Otwell:
So I mean, the space itself is a little bit similar to last year, except bigger. We have a separate kind of a vendor hall, you might say, which has been like, as you know, this has been sort of a problem the last couple of years of like all the sponsors, which we love, were in the same place as all the talks. And it's like a noise issue.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
I people are, I mean, I guess it's good that people are excited to talk to the sponsors. Anyway, well, so we'll have a separate space for vendors. We're gonna have just more stuff going on in general. So like, like you said, there's gonna be stuff the day before there's gonna, I've heard rumors of like rooftop events. I've, you know, I know sponsors are doing things. heard about

Matt Stauffer:
Nice.

Taylor Otwell:
I think there's just gonna be more happening than previous years to where it was basically like conference during the day, maybe one after party the first day. And that's kind of it. You know, that's, that's the, the gist of the whole thing. And there's, yeah, there's just a lot more going on, which I think is, going to be fun. You know, I've

Matt Stauffer:
That's cool.

Taylor Otwell:
I've heard about golf, heard about rooftops, like I said, you know, it's going to be a good time.

Matt Stauffer:
Nice.

That's very cool. And as a sponsor, I am actively, I know that there can be like a little bit of a bummer of the sponsors, like being away from the main event. I'm really excited about that change because we would sometimes be wanting to talk to people and we shouldn't and people, you know, like would want to come back and be like, sorry, you got to come back in an hour. So while, you know, like having the sponsors a little bit further away, I mean, someone could complain about it. I, I vote for it. I'm a big fan of that. I think it's going to allow the sponsor space to be as raucous as we need it to be the whole time. It's going to allow people to hear the talks without having to worry if they sit too far in the back. So I'm very excited about it. I think it's a great choice.

I'm trying to of this. Anything else I wanted to ask you about Laracon this year? Talk selection. So you guys have been slowly kind of rolling out the people it's going to be. Are they all selected and you're just rolling them or are you guys still in the selection process?

Taylor Otwell:
I actually don't, think there actually are a couple final decisions to be made, but they're definitely mostly selected. And there's going to be some like exciting stuff going on, you know? So I think similar like last year during my keynote, you know, I brought a few other members of the team up during the keynote. I think it will be kind of similar to that this year to where, you know, you get, you could imagine a Cloud update, a Nightwatch update, a Forge update, which is going to be pretty sizable.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, decisions being made.

Taylor Otwell:
But then I'm excited about some of the other stuff going on stage. It's gonna be pretty cool. Like we're gonna have a panel discussion with myself, Adam Wathen from Tailwind, Evan from Vue.js and VEAT and Jeffrey Way from Laracast, which we, yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
I didn't know Jeffrey was coming too? That's awesome!

Taylor Otwell:
So Jeffrey has not been announced publicly that he's gonna be joining. Cause I just pinged him on Telegram last week. I was like, I knew he was coming, but I knew he didn't wanna talk. Talk prep is like, it takes a lot, you know? So I kind of never fault anyone for like, saying, you know, I'm good, actually, I don't want to talk.

Matt Stauffer:
Choosing not too. Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
But yeah, so I pinged him and I was like, Hey, I know you don't want to talk, but we're going to do this, this kind of casual q&a, it's not going to take, you know, a lot of prep, we'll send you the questions, let's say like a week before, so you can think about them. And it's going to be me, Adam and Evan, like if you want to join, like that'd be awesome. So he was he was on board for that. But I haven't announced that publicly yet. So I think that's going to be cool. It's been a couple years since Jeffrey was on the Laracon stage. So I think that'd be fun for people to see us all up there. So we'll have a PHP, CSS, JS and sort of educational representation.

Matt Stauffer:
Education, yeah. Yeah, and Jeffrey is a fantastic speaker, which is interesting because I know he's very, very introverted. So sometimes people who are introverted are like great video speakers. But then when they get on stage, they get nervous. I'm like, you put him on stage and he's just as good as he is behind the camera.

Taylor Otwell:
It's pretty much the same, yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
But just so you all are prepared, when Jeffrey gets off that stage, he's not coming out and schmoozing. And it's fine to be an introvert. Jeffrey is someone from whom I've learned a lot about how to like

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
take care of yourself in the midst of trying to be social and interactive. He's just like, look, when I'm burnt out, I'm burnt out. I need to go back to my hotel room. And that's true at conferences, but it's also true with how he does his life. He said, I think he told me that he said something like, if it's not an enthusiastic yes, then it's a no, right? He's like, it's not a hell yes, then it's a no. And he's just really kind of trying to protect his peace. I'm like, cool, man, you you deserve the ability to do that just because we are all big fans, you know.

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah, I get it. I think at core, like I still consider myself an introvert, you know, at my core, I think I've gotten a little bit more extroverted over the years and a little bit more like loosened up. But yeah, so I can definitely relate to that. I conferences can be overwhelming, you know, you kind of come away energized, but also kind of worn out. And especially if you're an introvert. But yeah, it'd be fun.

Matt Stauffer:
So I was talking to one of our prospective clients recently and he has he's like look I've I've followed along with you guys for you know decades, you know, I've been with Tighten since beginning with Laravel since you know version 3 blah blah blah and he's never been to a conference and I've just kind of realized that there are some people who haven't yet been able to see the value of going to these conferences. And so I just want to kind of like tell everybody since I'm I'm not invested, I get no dollars from Laracon or anything like that. When we lost those physical conferences for a few years, I and several others begged Taylor to put it on in person again. I was just like, please, you know, like whatever it takes, there's so much value because the conferences aren't about the talks. And I'm sorry to speakers as a speaker, you know, like, you know,the talks are great and the conference wouldn't happen without the talks. So they are there and they're wonderful. But a lot of people say, I can watch the talks on YouTube. Therefore, I don't need to go. And I'm like, the talks are the organizing concept and reason for it to exist. And yet the reason to go in person is the social interactions. It is meeting people. It's even just being there with those conference speakers and asking questions about their talk afterwards. It's about the people you sit next to, the people you go to a meal with, the people you play foosball with, whatever.

The connection, the sponsored people that you meet in person. I mean, like there's so many developers who came up to our booth and I was like, I kind of vaguely know your face or name from Twitter. But then we sit and have an in-person conversation. It just changes our connection. And I'm like, it I know not everybody can afford it, but if it is within the realm of what you can handle financially, don't look at these conferences as sitting in a seat, walking and watching a talk because you're right. You can just sit in your seat at home for a lot cheaper and a lot more comfortable and watch, you know, talks on YouTube.

Taylor Otwell:
Hmm.

Matt Stauffer:
Think of it as a social experience that happens to be centered around talks. And it is just, it is a transformative experience. The relationships I've built, the connections I've made, the things I've kind of gotten excited about, that energy you come home with from a conference, you don't get after you go watch all those talks on YouTube. You know, there's just, there's some experiences you're gonna have outside of watching a talk, and I want everybody to consider, consider it if you have it, so.

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah, Laracon is very energizing. know, it's energizing even for us as a team to go hear the stories of the developers to see what they're excited about to sort of hang out with them. And I agree with you, like the talks are almost this convenient excuse for everyone to get together and hang out for a couple of days and just sort of network and learn from each other and get excited and hear what we're all building. And I think Laracon, I mean, I know we run it, but I think it's just a very well done tech conference in terms of just the quality of it and where it is and you know, the vibe of it is always really good and positive and like the Laravel people are hanging out with the conference attendees, you know, like you go to some tech conferences and it's like all of the people you really want to meet they're just like never around or they like pop in for their talk and they're flying out and they're gone and... That would I remember like there's been times I've gone to conferences where I like wanted to meet like a programming hero, right? And they're like on stage, then they're just not around. And one thing I appreciate about Laracon and rail shout out to Rails, where I was kind of like this too, with like, David Hunter, was just hanging out like out in the lobby. And at Laracon, it's the very same way like you're gonna see like people you see online like new know or James Brooks from the Forge team, or me I was trying to hang out like in the crowd the whole conference I'm eating lunch.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
I'm there to standing around for anyone to talk to. So it's a good opportunity to come meet and talk with the Laravel team as well.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah, that's a really good point. And I don't listen to podcasts very much these days. And I just I was planning some tree this morning, so I got to listen to podcasts. I keep quoting mostly technical because that was what I listen to. But they were talking about React Miami as being this very kind of like hype, very like energy party, whatever. And they reflected on the fact that Laracon is chill. But I think it's interesting to me that it's chill in that you don't have to be a very hype person to go to and enjoy a Laracon, but it also is not just sitting around doing nothing because like there's always people who are doing fun and exciting things. So I think one of things I like very much about a Laracon is it is both

Taylor Otwell:
Mm-hmm.

Matt Stauffer:
energizing and exciting all those things and it's also extremely accessible because you don't have to get into it like there are some wonderful delightful conferences that are run by people with so much energy I go there and I'm like I can't do this, you know and I think Laracon gives you a lot of options for what your level of energy and what your level of social interaction what you want it to be so.

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah, definitely.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, well, that is it for the questions I had. Is there anything going on at Laravel, Laracon or in your life you want to chat about it? Do feel like we covered everything pretty well for now?

Taylor Otwell:
I mean, I think we covered most things, you know, I'm super anxious for people to give Cloud a shot if they haven't already. And of course, stay tuned for Nightwatch next month. Cool thing about Nightwatch is like you can use Nightwatch wherever you are. So if you're on Cloud or Forge your own server running in your closet, like you can run that as long as you can run the Nightwatch, you run some PHP on it, then you can use Nightwatch. So I'm pumped about that. And then, know, Laracon, if you don't already have a ticket, consider getting one and hanging out with us for a couple of days and seeing

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. If it runs PHP. Yeah. Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
new stuff we've been working on on Cloud, Nightwatch and Forge. It's gonna be a fun time.

Matt Stauffer:
Awesome. Well, again, I know you are busier than ever before, so thanks for taking a little bit of time to come hang out with us.

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah, thanks for having me.

Matt Stauffer:
And the rest of y'all, we'll see y'all next time.