The Laravel Podcast

Matt Stauffer:
Hello and welcome back to Laravel podcast season seven. It's season seven B. We took a little bit of time off, but we are fully back. I'm your host, Matt Stauffer, CEO of Tighten And this season I'm joined every episode by a member of the Laravel team because I want everybody to get to know who are the folks who are actually running this organization we're so interacting with and dependent on. And today I'm talking with my old friend who I've known in many different contexts, Dave Hicking, agency partnership manager at Laravel. Dave.

you say hi and share a little bit about what you do every day at Laravel

Dave Hicking:
Yeah, thanks, Matt. Great to be here. So weird to be on the Laravel podcast. ⁓ I feel like I was somewhere along the ride when it even started way, way back. We'll get there. But yeah, my name's Dave. I run the partner program here at Laravel. Tighten ⁓ of course, has been a part of the partner program since its inception. We'll talk more about that as well. But yeah, every day I'm working with agencies around the world to spread the good word of Laravel, you know?

Matt Stauffer:
I love that. And we'll go into that like you said, but first of all, normally the first question I ask everybody is like, what's the story of you coming to Laravel? And sometimes the answer is 30 seconds and sometimes it's five minutes. But I'm gonna front the knowledge that your story goes way back. And so can you talk to me about what your first exposure was to the Laravel community?

Dave Hicking:
Yeah.

Yeah, my first exposure to Laravel was by using an app that was created, that was written in Laravel. I didn't know it was written in Laravel at the time. So I used to work at the University of Connecticut. We were customers of Help Spot, which is made by Userscape, Ian Lansman's company, friend of the podcast. I was one of those annoying power users who was like spending enough money that I could like get requests in and get things to happen, you know? Got to know Ian a little bit that way.

Matt Stauffer:
Friend of the podcast.

Yep. Yep.

Dave Hicking:
2014, which does not feel that long ago, but is very long ago at this point. ⁓ You know, because Ian also runs Larajobs He tweeted out, I followed him on Twitter. He tweeted out a Lara jobs link to a job posting at a place called Tighten And I happened to see it and I ended up stumbling into working ⁓ at Tighten way back. I think I was employee number eight.

Something like that. Sounds about right. ⁓ Worked for you and Dan for a couple years. Then I left. yeah, sorry. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
sounds about right. Yeah.

I gotta pause you there. ⁓ When you applied for the job, told me, ⁓

Jamie has been trying, Jamie's Ian's wife for those who don't know, Jamie has been trying to tell me to hire this Dave Hicking guy for ages, but there's never been a job open up for it. And so the fact that Tighten is gonna get him first, I think she said something like, it's good thing we like Tighten so much because otherwise I'd be mad at them for hiring him. So I was like, that's some pretty impressive praise. I like hearing that, so.

Dave Hicking:
You

That's a,

what's also great is ⁓ I saw that you two were connected on Twitter. So I separately messaged Ian and said, hey, what do know about this Matt Stauffer character? Is he, is he all right? ⁓ Is he okay? I mean, because, know, University of Connecticut, you know, large university, the library I was working at had over a hundred people. Going from that to a very, you know, at that time, ⁓ particularly small agency, I was like, whoa.

Matt Stauffer:
Is he okay? Yeah. Is he a good guy?

Good to you. Yeah.

Yeah, big shift. Yeah.

Dave Hicking:
Like, I going to be OK? Like, what's going on? So Ian

kind of, in a weird way, helped make that happen. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
I mean, he did it in a lot of ways. Okay, so you were at Tighten for a while and then...

Dave Hicking:
Sure, Worked

at Tighten for a couple years and then I was like, see you later. No, I left, ⁓ I don't know, was, yeah, no, it was definitely, it was a crazy opportunity to go work at Yale University. So I live in Connecticut, that's why I worked at UConn, Yale University, Yale University.

Matt Stauffer:
And then your dream job came along, which is funny, because your even dreamier job came along later. But I mean, at that time, it felt pretty dreamy.

Yale. Capital Y Yale. Like among Yale,

Harvard, all those, the Yale.

Dave Hicking:
And they have the largest rare book and special collections library in the Western Hemisphere. It's called the Beinecke Library. And they needed somebody to run their, basically their digital and their tech side of things. So I had worked in IT at UConn. So kind of going a little bit back to my roots there, worked there for just over a year and a half. And you know.

I learned a lot working at Yale, made a lot of good friends, got a lot of things done. But the allure called me back to tell you, it was a combination of when you work remotely and then you all of a sudden you're driving 45 to 60 minutes each way and you're just like, I could do this or I could go work with my friends again and commute upstairs.

Matt Stauffer:
Peace.

from the couch. Yeah,

exactly.

Dave Hicking:
commute walk upstairs from my commute.

It's pretty, it's a pretty compelling pitch. So came back to Tighten in a similar, but slightly, you know, a slightly different role. And I was at Tighten for goodness, that must've been four and a half years that time. ⁓ Yep. And then just to bring it all full circle, I went to go work for Ian and Jamie at userscape. did, ⁓ my title was product manager, but

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

what I had my mind to. Yeah.

the actual dream job.

Dave Hicking:
I did sales, I did content, I did support, I did whatever was necessary because Userscape's always been a small, ya know scrappy crew. Ya know, Taylor worked there, Eric Barnes worked there, Chris Fidao worked there. They've got wonderful people working there now and ⁓ you know, you do a little bit of everything. I was there for two and a half years, give or take, and now I'm here at Laravel

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. So before we kind of talk about your kind of move to the world of Laravel, I'm very curious because you've worked, so you worked at Laravel, you've worked at Tighten, you've worked at Yukon, Yale, I wrote Help Spot, but Userscape There's some similarities. You know, you were doing technical stuff, you know, and at least two of them were much smaller, very Laravel focused things, but there's some very big differences. You've got public institutions, you've got private institutions, you've got, you know, private equity. What's the difference felt like?

Dave Hicking:
That's okay. Yeah.

Sure.

Matt Stauffer:
for being a piece of each of those, even Tighten twice, Tighten at eight and Tighten at what 20 or 30 is when it was when you were there. Like what's the difference felt like being a member of each of those teams? what the, know, in what ways is it, hey, the end, then it's IT and all of them. And what ways is like, no, this is drastically different.

Dave Hicking:
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, mean, I, at UConn, I did a million things. When you work for a public institution, there is never enough time, never enough people to do all the things you want to do. So when you are in your mid to late twenties and you're just like, yeah, I'll do it. Yeah, I'll do it. You they're just, you understand. I mean, I understand now in my forties, I see, but it's like, you're like, yeah, sure. Go ahead. Knock yourself out. Like go, go crazy. Right. And so it was a great environment where I could.

honestly what I really just did is I just accumulated responsibilities and just pick stuff up. But it meant that I could get into things like, ⁓ I learned how to project manage. I learned how to hire. I learned how to work with developers. I learned how to do all these things that I was then able to kind of piece together, come work at Tighten and kind of get started down that path. ⁓ The move back to Yale was, you I truly do love higher ed, you know. ⁓ I felt such a connection.

to UConn granted my alma mater, but I felt such a connection to them when I worked there and working at Yale, ⁓ you know, listen, love the people I worked with there. Didn't feel the same connection. It wasn't the same thing. It's not your alma mater, but also my job was just fundamentally different. I didn't like supervise students. I wasn't like in the day to day, you know, I could sometimes look up and be like, ⁓ I guess the kids are on break this week. I can go to lunch with no line. That's, you know, like that sort of a thing. ⁓

Matt Stauffer:
to have that connection.

Mmm. Yep.

Dave Hicking:
So ⁓ yeah, there was a little bit of a common thread there, but beyond that, I mean, think what for me, like the last, I guess, eight or so years of my career, the common thread, come back to Tighten, go into userscape, coming here is that increasingly I realize this, I'm not a developer really, I pretend to be one sometimes, ⁓ you don't want me ⁓ working on a serious project, but. ⁓

I'm not a developer, but I'm a part of the Laravel community. This is kind of where I've made my home. so finding all these ways to help draw connections between groups, help run processes, organize, keep things moving. These are all things that I enjoy doing that I'm good at doing. And I've just found different ways to kind of do that and kind of learning and picking up, hopefully picking up new skills along the way.

Matt Stauffer:
Well, yeah, and you're not a developer, but you are a technical project manager. I mean, that's one of the things we always say at Tighten is like, I can't have somebody managing a project who doesn't understand what GitHub is and why we would choose to use, ya know keep it simple, stupid. And you gotta be able to talk to the clients about that, which means you have to understand it. So it's funny because, you know, you might not be without Claude, you know, with Claude, who knows what you can do, but without Claude, you might not be someone who's like writing code in the day to day. But there's also elements of the higher level, like important.

Dave Hicking:
Sure.

Right.

Right.

Ha

Matt Stauffer:
functionality and features and processes and everything like that that you might understand better than a lot of developers, right?

Dave Hicking:
sure. mean, a lot of that is just experience. I mean, I remember my first full day on the job at Tighten got thrown in the deep end. I'm helping PM this massive project that we had, and I'm keeping two sets of notes. One, like, hey, I'm the PM. I'm keeping some notes for this meeting. I'm helping to facilitate. The second set of notes is for myself. It's like, what is a controller?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Dave Hicking:
like looking these, because this was a very technical call. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, great. Because up until that point, was like, sure, can like, I can, you know, I actually did some WordPress development at Yukon and I could do things like that, but like, you know, not on, not on this level. So now over time, increasingly, you know, I go to a lot of Laracons and I can watch technical talks and I'm like, yeah, okay. I understand what's happening here, right? I get it. I understand, yeah. No, no, but I understand. I understand why this is happening. I understand why you might.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Get it? Yeah. I'm not saying I could write this, but I understand what's actually happening. Yeah.

Dave Hicking:
why this pattern matters. I understand why you would do this instead of this. Yeah, I definitely understand. I mean before I got into the world of Laravel, I was in environments where I was the technical person, right? I mean, I ran IT shops. Ya know it's like, I was doing that sort of a thing. And then I come into the world of Laravel and it's like, nope, Dave's not technical. Keep him out. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.

It's not the same. That's awesome. Okay,

so I want to talk about your work in Laravel, but I have to tell everybody, and Dave knows this is coming, but nobody else does. So real quick pause, Dave, for thank you for being my guinea pig here. So real quick interjection, I have been running the Laravel podcast for I don't know how many years at this point. ⁓ I didn't start it, but I've been the host for quite a while. And it's been a labor of love. ya know Tighten has contributed financially whenever there have been any financial needs. But outside of that, it's been my time and energy. And the downside of that is when I can't make time for it, we just don't have the Laravel podcast. And that's a bummer. So what I want to do is make it so it turns from being something where I'm trying to make time for to something that I always have time for. And the things you always have time for are

jobs, things that pay you. So we're going to try out ads on Laravel podcast. Hopefully friendly, caring, people in the community, that kind of stuff. ⁓ Stuff that's not super disruptive that makes it more possible for this to be more sustainable for me to be doing on a more regular basis. So, fingers crossed you love it. ⁓ If you're interested in sponsoring, check out sponsor.mattstauffer.com If you have thoughts, hit me up on Twitter or Blue Sky or whatever to let me know what your thoughts are. So getting started, our first sponsor is Honey Badger.

move fast and fix things with Honey Badger's intelligent error tracking and application monitoring for Laravel. It's everything you need to keep production healthy and users happy. So go get your free developer account at honeybadger.io. And I actually have known the folks at Honey Badger since before I even wrote Laravel, because they started in Rails. And so I used Honey Badger as one of the exception trackers I was using while I was in Rails and have continued my love for them. So it's wonderful to see them paying special attention to the Laravel community. And our second sponsor is Mailtrap.

MailTrap is modern email delivery for developers. They make it simple to send transactional and promotional emails with native SDKs and API and SMTP access. They've got 4,000 emails per month in their free tier. They're security compliant and 24 seven support from real people, not just chat bots. So check them out at mailtrap.io today. I've also been using MailTrap for ages. A big fan of the service. I can't even tell you. It's probably not over a decade, but it feels like it over a decade of using MailTrap.

So, thank you so much sponsors for ⁓ making it possible for me to hopefully be more consistent and sustained with these things. So we don't just disappear for six months at a time.

⁓ Tiny little side note on that. Have you ever watched a guy on YouTube called Cory Kenshin? Okay, so I've never been the sort to watch video gamers just play video games on the Internet. I know it's a thing that youngs do, but my wife during the pandemic watching this guy Cory Kenshin play video games was like one of the things that got her through it. So she has gotten me hooked and I love this man. like I feel like and he's he's from Michigan. He's wears University of Michigan gear all the time for those who don't know that's where my family is.

⁓ And so I'm just like I just feel like that's my dude like we hang out all the time He I'm not talking but I'm like, that's my guy and he His entire livelihood is on YouTube and he'll just disappear for months at a time and he'll come back and be like I'm so sorry and Everyone gives him so much crap, but I'm like, that's me in the podcast I'm just like there's times in my life where I can be steady with them and there's times where I'm just like Yeah, life is life thing. So ⁓ anyway

Dave Hicking:
The life is lifeing, the cycle of owning an agency and running an agency and ups, you know, like there's just, there's just times where, you know.

got this phrase from somebody, ⁓ you know, we have seasons in our life, right? And sometimes it's like, this is the time where I've got time for this and sometimes life gets in the way. That's right.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Sometimes you don't, yeah. Well,

hopefully I'm gonna have more time for it so I can have wonderful conversations like this. Dave, thank you for being my therapist. Let's get back to you. ⁓ So we made it the whole way up to the point where you were working for Userscape. You were there for a few years. You were wearing all the hats. You were doing product ownership and stuff like that. And then what's the story of how you came to work at Laravel?

Dave Hicking:
Yeah, of course. Sure.

⁓ I started speaking at a couple of conferences. I spoke at Laracon Australia. I spoke at Laracon India. Last year when I was at Laravel, I spoke at Laracon US, but I'd already been ⁓ selected to speak at Laracon US before I joined. And while I'm going to these conferences, you you start talking with people, you make connections, you get to know people. And, you know, honestly, just kind of

got to a point, and I said this earlier, but it was actually was on the flight back from Laracon, Australia, where I just looked at, I was lucky to go there with my wife, Marissa. I just looked at her and I was like, yeah, Laravel is my community, you know? And so like the combination of like getting to know people at Laravel and actually understanding, okay, so you took funding, what kind of, what's going on over there and how's that working? And you know, and then talking to people about what they're doing and just.

It was the right time. They were looking for somebody to run the partner program. And I was like, yeah, OK. I think I could do that. I think that's right. I think that's where I want to be. ⁓ yeah, working for Ian at userscape was great. ⁓ There are definitely things that it's like, wow, man, remember half day Fridays? ⁓ Boy. Those are the days. There were times at Tighten we'd have summer Fridays. And it's like, you know. ⁓

Matt Stauffer:
Those were the days.

Dave Hicking:
Some things were great, but no, was just like right place, right time, truly.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, okay. So you applied through the formal channels. You went through multiple rounds of interviews. You mentioned they had already kind of taken funding at this time. So this was not the Taylor show, right? You didn't go just have a DM with Taylor and then he's go, right, you got a job. There was a team, there was multiple people.

Dave Hicking:
Nope.

Yeah, there was a couple of steps.

I've talked with Charles, who was here last year. He's still kind of here. He's on hiatus getting his MBA, basically. He'll be back. I think he might even be like a quasi-unofficial summer intern, which is going to be hilarious. ⁓ Because he's getting his MBA, you know? ⁓ No, I'd met Charles at Laracon India, talked with him a little bit. And I actually did, ⁓ I kind of took some inspiration from.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Hicking:
of the show, Aaron Francis, the whole like, you know, you can just, you can just do things, you can try things. So I sent this like, after talking with them a bit, I sent this like, unsolicited, like nine minute video. That was like, here's what I think you should be doing with partners. And you know, you send that out.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

huh. Yeah.

See

Uh-huh.

Dave Hicking:
Charles was like, yeah, this is great. This is great. And I was like, all right, we're getting somewhere. But you know, there's motion, things have to move. You can't see what's happening behind the scenes. And so I was like, you know, kind of didn't hear anything, but I was like, all right, well, you know, swing and a miss that's okay. And then finally got the, hey, hey, okay, let's come talk. And I was like, all right, all right, we're getting somewhere. So I talked with Hank. I talked with Tom Crary, our president. then, yeah, that all moved fairly quickly, all things considered. And I mean,

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah.

Dave Hicking:
I'm used to working with higher ed where it's like, you know, it takes like eight weeks just to do anything, you know, sometimes in terms of hiring. from my, you know, from those standards work fairly quickly, I guess. And, ⁓ and yeah, now I'm here.

Matt Stauffer:
Yep. Yep.

And there you

were. And that was, was that May of this, of this past year?

Dave Hicking:
Yeah, I started

just after Memorial Day last year.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Yep. So what was your initial round of work? You know, what was the first whatever first week, first month, first year, you know, I mean, it hasn't been quite a year, but like, what was the first thing that you were set to do?

Dave Hicking:
No, no, yeah.

I'm a longtime reader of, are you familiar with Rands Do you know who that is? OK. Sure. OK, there you go. I was going to say, there's no way I could have worked for you and not told you about Rands So ⁓ the website is randsinrepose.com He's written several books about engineering management, just leadership in general. And ⁓ when I started sort of working my way up at UConn a little bit, because I started at UConn.

Matt Stauffer:
Yes, I know about rants because of you when you worked at Tighten. But not every, yeah, not everyone's familiar, so.

Dave Hicking:
Truthfully when I was 17, but I even started working not as a student when I was 21. And I was there for 10 years after that. And so as I was working my way up, was like, there's no playbook. There's no like, here's how you do this. And so I'm like, OK, I need to learn how to work with these devs. need all the sort of steroids. I had to understand that. And so I was just like a sponge reading his blog posts. And he has one blog post talks about sort of like 30, 60, 90, right?

your first 30 days or this or for 60 days or this first 90 days or this. like initially it was just like, I need to listen. Go meet every single existing partner, go talk to people who have just recently left the partner program. There's some good info there. And I'm just like, I'm talking to people internally. I'm talking to people externally because I had worked at Userscaped, worked at Tighten. There were some partners who I knew, obviously I knew you, but other folks who I'd seen at Laracons other folks I was like,

Matt Stauffer:
that's really smart.

Dave Hicking:
I'm just meeting them for the first time, even though they had been Laravel partners for a very long time. So it's like this initial thing is trying to understand what are the dynamics? What do people even want out of a partner program? Like just all that kind of like trying to get up to speed as quickly as possible, as voraciously as possible, trying to understand and consume all this information before I really go and do anything major. But in the meantime, it's a lot of like, okay, working with each partner.

What's something I can help you with? It just is a good intro. First of all, it's great relationship building, but it's also very tangible in terms of it helps me discover, oh, when I try to do this with a partner, it's either really easy or, oh, there's some friction. do I? It's like a really easy way of just picking the slow hanging fruit. And it's like, let me map the territory. Let me understand what's going on. And you're just going bit by bit by bit, trying to build that trust, build that relationship over and over again. And we got to, I'd say,

towards the end of last year where it was like, okay, I've gotten tons of feedback. I have a sense of what I think is working well. I have a sense of what I think we need to change. So we took a little pause in terms of taking it. I don't even know if I officially announced it. Took a little pause in terms of officially bringing in or considering new partners. Cause I was like, let's make sure we know what we want to do. ⁓ Got lots of input from partners, had a call with you where I was like, here's what I'm thinking about doing. What do you think? Am I crazy? this, you know, is this a bad idea? Had that with tons of our partners. ⁓

wanted to hear them out. I didn't want if I'm making changes to something like this because partner is a label, but it's also it's a word that means something. And it's like, listen, you're partnering with Laravel. I want to treat them. I want to treat our partners with respect. I want to make sure it's not just like, yeah, by the way, here's an email announcing this major thing that is going to severely impact how you market yourself, how you like that's not how you do things. So got some input, but tried to be quick about it. Right. This is

This is not getting input like I'm in higher ed where it's like, all right, we've got a committee. Let's get a, you know, it's not, I don't know. So working quickly there and ⁓ basically refactored the program to try to accomplish, to try to reflect what I think Laravel is trying to do right now, right? So.

Matt Stauffer:
Yes. Yep.

Okay, and that's a perfect transition

because I want to- well actually hold on, you're still going but I- okay.

Dave Hicking:
Yeah. No,

I don't think I did do that. Listen, it's not my first time. ⁓ I'm trying to do, I would say two things with the partner program, which I think really nicely tie in to one another. So on the one hand, this is going to sound very obvious, but I want to build a, and I love this word. I want to build a balanced network of agencies around the world that are doing great work with Laravel and balanced, meaning different locations, but

People in agencies in different locations have customers, but sometimes people want to work with somebody for cultural reasons. Sometimes it's for time zone reasons, don't have to tell you, right? Both for the agency as well as the client. You might have a really awesome potential lead that shows up on your doorstep, but if they are 12 hours different from your dev team, you're just going to be like, that's just not really going to work for us, right? So different locations. ⁓

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, it's just not gonna work. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Hicking:
different types and sizes of agencies. Some people wanna work with a small, almost boutique sized, smaller, super small. There are pros and cons that come with that. Some people want something in the middle. Some people want, I almost described it as like, it's like the full car wash. It's like, I wanna go in one end and pop out the other and along the way, I want branding. I want SEO. Like they want the whole thing. And they are looking for a larger agency, right? So I want different sizes.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Hicking:
⁓ For partners who have these ⁓ different sort of specialties or different, well, I'll say actually more like different industries or ICPs, right? So some partners, they will work with just about everybody and their sort of niche is either their tech capability or their geographic region or whatever. But we have some partners where it's like, no, actually we really wanna work with ⁓ higher ed or we really wanna work with financial companies and we have expertise specific for that, right?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Hicking:
⁓ Not all partners do, but it's really nice to have those in the mix. ⁓ And then also different tech stacks or different products that people are pairing with Laravel So everybody's using Laravel, right? That's supposed to be a given, but it's like, we truly have some partners where they're like, no, no, We really, we're like, our bread and butter is like live wire, it's filament, it's Laravel, we're going. Like that's what we really want to do. And of course, when you run an agency, when you run a consultancy, sometimes you just like, hey,

Matt Stauffer:
Right.

Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Hicking:
work this seems like good work maybe it's not like ideal but it's okay like I understand all that but like trying to understand like given you know if you had your your say if you had your pick right we have other partners where it's like ⁓ what we really want to do is we want to build statomic plus this because that's how we were right so trying to get a good a good mix of all of that ideally if somebody needs ⁓ help from an agency if somebody has a product they want to build if somebody has a product that needs rescuing

if somebody needs consulting advice and they don't already have one in mind because they've heard about them or they've learned about them or they visit or whatever, they come to Laravel partner page within reason, I want to accommodate a healthy 80 to 90%. There's edge cases everywhere where it's just like, I'm sorry, I actually don't have 20 partners around the world who can all take your CodeIgniter 3 apps and turn them, like, okay, have, there's gonna be some edge cases there, right? So that's one thing I wanna do with the partner program

And up until my arrival, I'm the first person here to ever like officially run the partner program in this way, because Laravel was much smaller, right? Two years ago, Laravel was like, what, 10, 12 people starting to grow. And now we're just over 100. So, you know, now we have somebody who can do this and who can try to think about, oh, I don't have any partners there. Like we have just added for the first time, I mean, we had some before, but we've re-added a partner in Australia.

We're probably gonna add one or two more because Australia is a pretty large market for Laravel. And, you know, we talked about like time zones and things there. It's not that you can't work with clients in Australia if you're elsewhere in the world, but they're awfully far away. It's awfully complicated. It's more than a big enough market. They've got a Laracon for crying out loud. You know, like there's plenty going on there. The second thing we wanna do is for a portion of these partners, especially our longstanding partners, yes like Tighten.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yep.

Dave Hicking:
Vehikl, Kirschbaum, byte5 There's so many names that I should be naming. Apologies to all of my partners. I can't name them all. ⁓ But we want to work alongside these partners to help them with their clients, like build new apps on Cloud or find great opportunities to migrate them over. Laravel is always going to be an open source ecosystem. It's the foundation. It's at the base of everything we're doing. But we are also a product company, truthfully. ⁓ We've been a product company for a long time, to a certain degree. I mean, Forge.

the original Laravel product, the reason why Taylor could go independent. We've been a product company for a very long time. And truthfully, the more successful we are with our products, that's obviously great for Laravel. We think that it's very self, I can selfishly say that, but that's also more that we are able to invest in open source. We have grown the open source team. We have a larger portion of people devoted to open source, in terms of raw numbers than I think we probably ever have.

Matt Stauffer:
Exactly, yeah.

Dave Hicking:
Laravel, the more we can invest in the community and events, we sponsor meetups, we send swag out, we actively are facilitating that we have people who are doing exactly that because the more people we bring into the ecosystem, the more people we bring into the community, yeah, sure, the better it is for Laravel, but the better it is for our partners, the better it is for every dev listening to this. And so these things operate in this lovely cycle, ideally, right? That's the dream, but that's what we're working to do. And our partners help us accomplish that.

Matt Stauffer:
I want to talk about the future of partnership, but you did a thing like someone who's podcasted their whole life and you take a breath and I'm going take that breath and we're going to do another two ad reads.
All right, so our second set of sponsors, our first sponsor is friend of the show, Thunk. ⁓ Thunk is... ⁓

created by Daniel Colborne who used to work at Tighten so kind of more Tighten connections here, and he went off and spun off and did some other things and then created his own agency called Thunk. And after years of losing time and money to scheduling chaos and chasing invoices and client communication gaps, the team at Thunk built Tidy. So you don't have to risk your business learning the same lessons. You can check it out at tidyup.agency And I kind of told a lot of people that I'm like every...

agency owner at some point wants to say, let's build software with, you know, how we run things and sell it to people. And it never usually happens and it never usually is successful. So I'm super excited to see the guys at Tidy, the guys at Thunk, hopefully, you know, find a way to carry not just the, the, the software processes, but also the ethos of what it looks like for them to run an agency and, and help other people run agencies in a way that doesn't have to risk their business. So anyway, check it out, tidyup.agency.

And our last sponsor is the mothership, Laravel Holdings, I think is what they're called now. So it's sponsored by Laravel, the wonderful folks behind all sorts of things, including what we're talking about today, Laravel Cloud and Laravel or Laracon US. So Laravel Cloud is the fastest way to deploy Laravel apps and it also serves all sorts of common problems that keep web artisans from shipping. And Laracon US is the premier in-person event for all web artisans to come be with your people, level up and leave ready to ship faster and better than ever. So check them out.

cloud.laravel.com and laracon.us

I mean, I think we've already basically pitched both of those throughout the span of both the entire podcast and also the specific episode today. But please know that they are putting their money where their mouths are and not just sending me wonderful people to interview, but actually helping support the financial future of this podcast so I can actually show it more consistently. So thank you so much for all of our sponsors for making this happen. OK, yes. I am. Wow, you're right. I'm speaking at Laracon US Yes, yeah. Yeah, so every once in a while

Dave Hicking:
And Matt, you're speaking at Laracon US this year.

Yeah, look at that.

Matt Stauffer:
I'm like, you know what? I'm tired and overwhelmed and also I really miss speaking and I sent out a message and I apply like everybody else and I'm just like, hey y'all, I would love to speak. Here's like 30 options. You know, here's here's 20 things I could give a talk on. I can pick one, but also you can pick one because you know my capabilities. You know what I'm capable of doing. So if you need if you need a business talk, I'll be business dad. If you need a whatever not business dad, that's gene, but I'll be you know.

I'll be the business talk, you and I was just like, literally, if you want an intro to this talk, and so they haven't actually told me what I'm talking about this year because they're like, thanks for all the ideas. We'll kind of let you know as we slot everybody in. But I am super excited because it's so fun. It's so freaking fun. And I can't do it every year because it just, you know, I have responsibilities at Tighten at Laracon And I also like to be the Laravel podcast guy at Laracon right? It's hard to be more than one role at the conference. But gosh, I freaking love that.

Dave Hicking:
Yeah. ⁓ so good.

Listen. ⁓

Listen, listen, last year,

last year I spoke, thankfully only a lightning talk. It was only 10 minutes. I spoke, but I also, you saw me because you did the Laravel podcast back there. We had a content room backstage. I must've done 50 video. I don't even, I lost track. Like basically myself, Josh Siri, Chris Sev pitched in. We were just basically locked in that room for like the all like two days straight, plus running around doing five of the million things. And I was just like, okay, here's the deal. Like I got.

Matt Stauffer:
Uh-huh.

Yeah.

That's too much, I can't.

Dave Hicking:
It was also sort of like, let's not flatter. Like, okay, I spoke at Laracon once. I'm not exactly like on the like tier of like speakers to go every year, but I was also like, you know, I got way too much going on at these Laracons Like I can't also do this because like actually one of the things we just did this in India, we did it at EU. We're going to do this at Laracon US is we do like a little event with partners where it's like, so at Laracon EU, we got, ⁓ you know, we got all the partners, all the European partners who were there.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Hicking:
We got them, basically it was just like, you know, we took advantage of the fact that, well, they're catering lunch. We've got an extra room here. And it was like, but it was me, it was Taylor, it was Tom, it was Andrew, our head of sales, our VP of sales. And it was like, we gave all these partners a sneak peek at like, here's some stuff we're working on so that they kind of know what's coming down. But also it was just like, because it was a closed door, like just the people running these agencies, it was like, okay, like let's talk Turkey. Like, what do you want to see? Like, how can we make you more successful? Like it was.

Matt Stauffer:
Nice.

Yeah.

Dave Hicking:
Like that kind of like, honestly, just like amazing thing. Like one of the things I, you you talked earlier, like what did I do that first year? You know, especially initially, what I really tried to do is that word partner. Like it really does matter to me. And so like sort of helping to deepen the connections between our partners and all parts of Laravel, I think is great for our partners. I think it's great for Laravel, right? So helping our partners get into early access programs or.

helping answer questions or all those sorts of like tighter connections. And that also like these partner events that we're doing now also play a role there where it's like, no, like you actually can really openly, sure, of course you could, you you could always DM people or email people, but it's so different when you're in the room, sitting across the table from Taylor and Tom or whoever else, but also with fellow partner, where it's not just like this sort of async distributed messaging in, but it's like somebody says something and someone is like, yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Dave Hicking:
I would love that too. And you can kind of plus on top of each other. It's just a totally different environment. We got awesome feedback from, uh, from partners in India and Europe. We're going to do, do it again. We'll have even more partners at the U S one. So it might even be something bigger. The Laracon US schedule is getting a little crazy. Like there's so much going on, but that's another way where it's like, can, you know, uh, Laravel partners, they, yes, they're agencies, but you run the Laravel podcast Vehikl does the Laravel worldwide meetup. Um, it's not uncommon for.

not every partner, but lots of partners are involved, either involved or they help run local meetups or they're doing things that like, our partners are really deeply involved in the ecosystem and the community. like one of the things that I love doing is I love connecting. Like in a weird way, like that's one of the things I feel like I'm really good at is connecting. And so I can kind of go, ⁓ I see this person's doing this. I see this person's doing this. Like not even just making that connection, but it's like facilitating that it's like, ⁓ you're trying to make that happen. Can I?

Can I make that connection and let that go run off and bear fruit and ⁓ let's do this and like, ⁓ because the Laravel Partner Program, which has been around again for what, nine years, has grown up alongside the ecosystem, it means that we have all of these, I feel like all these connections were, in some cases they happened, but in some cases they were just so close to being ready and then I was able to just kind of pluck them out and go, yeah, let's go, let's do this, let's do this, let's do this, so yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Well,

I really appreciate that, because one of the things I was going to ask you was your thoughts. mean, and you did had you'd mentioned like this kind of whole big new thing you're announcing. But I know that in a lot of our conversations, one of the things that I wanted to talk about was misconceptions people had about what partnership meant. And some of them were ill founded and some of them were founded. ⁓ And the goal to get to the point where partner means partner, not just sponsor. Right.

Dave Hicking:
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
And so like,

can you talk to me a little bit about like, what is your vision? You've already mentioned some bits, but I want to, I want you to be able to give like your elevator pitch. Like what does, what does partnership mean in the context of a Laravel partner?

Dave Hicking:
Sure.

So I think, and this is going to sound so incredibly simplistic, but it really is true. It's like, yes, the more successful Laravel is, ideally the more successful our partners are. But the inverse of that, the more successful our partners are, both in terms of winning, like just work on a day to day, week by week basis, but also ⁓ their long term success, the better off Laravel is, period.

Matt Stauffer:
yeah.

Dave Hicking:
It really matters when if someone is if someone's coming in, maybe they're coming in from they've got legacy PHP stuff they're trying to figure out. I'm biased at this point. You're you're hopefully focusing on the Laravel and you're like like having well regarded partners, deep connections to the community, but also deep connections within Laravel so that we have trust with our partners. Our partners have trust with us. It's not just this nameless faces entity and it's not even just, I know Dave. It's like, ⁓ no, like

I know this marketing people, but also, hey, I met that salesperson at a conference or I did this or I understand this. Like having our partners understand that and be a part of that means that we can start to get to a place. And we've started to do this a little bit. We're still kind of building this. I'm going to say this motion up. I start to sound like I work at a startup now. I guess I do. ⁓ But build this, build this flow up where it's like.

Matt Stauffer:
You

Dave Hicking:
not for every deal that any partner does, but you know, sometimes you get the really big ones where it's like, this is like, it's going to be this and it means this and it's really big. And it's like, well, what if we can be there alongside you, right? Not just a logo on a slide, not just, hey, Dave, can you answer my questions? But it's like, we're pitching the whole thing because increasingly it's like, if people are choosing Laravel, they're choosing the whole thing. That's always like one of the

Matt Stauffer:
and

Yeah.

Dave Hicking:
great things about Laravel has always been, you don't have to reinvent the wheel for so many common things, right? And people, they're not just choosing this repo in GitHub, they're choosing the whole package. And so working with our partners to help sell that, I think there's so much more we can do. I think we've just kind of started doing that. ⁓ I think there are still...

more ways that I can continue to honestly just like work with partners and try to like truly just like make them as successful as possible. Like it's one of those things where it's like that sounds so vague, but it's because like again, I'm getting, I'm trying to, building this diverse network of partners, which means big partners need something different than small partners and partners who specialize here need something different. So there's like all sorts of minor details, but truly it's like, if I can do a little bit of work on my side and help either enable a partner to do this or level up a partner to do this or make that connection.

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.

Dave Hicking:
they can be off and running, they can do more and they can grow. Like that's what we're trying to do.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Well, I love that because we've got at least two directions there, right? Like Laravel does well when Tighten and all the other partners do well and Tighten does well and all the other partners do when Laravel does well. So there's already a mutuality there. But also there's there's definitely a rising tide lifts all boats thing, because ⁓ if Tighten does well and then therefore Laravel does well, then so does Vehikl If Vehikl you know, like you guys had somebody who did a ⁓

a case study and I was like, they're on Laravel? That looks good for me, right? And I reached out to them. I'm like, tell me more about this. This is amazing. I'm so proud of you guys, right? And not just agencies, but also like for example, I have individual developers working at companies that don't use Laravel and they pitch Laravel and they have a hard time selling Laravel because Laravel doesn't have the reputation. And so instead it's like, well, it's PHP, it's old. Well, the better the reputation that Laravel and PHP are able to establish,

Dave Hicking:
Sure.

Right.

Matt Stauffer:
the more likely that individual developer will be in selling Laravel in their agency. Or somebody looking for a job, the more likely it is that they'll find a job in this Laravel world. So like all of us working together, the work each of us does benefits the rest of the organization. That's the community, I guess, you know? Yes. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Dave Hicking:
Yes, 100%. The rest of the ecosystem, I mean, it is an ecosystem, truly. ⁓

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. ⁓

Matt Stauffer:
So I love it because

there is the technical partnership we're doing there, but also we're all, all supporting everything all of us are doing. And I'm like, that's, that's great. ⁓ You had mentioned that, you know, you were reaching out to all of us at the end of the year, you took the pause because you wanted to make sure we all knew what was coming. So I don't know how much you do or don't want to talk about it, but what was coming?

Dave Hicking:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

sure. Yeah,

so what was coming was, so ⁓ we previously had four different tiers to the partner program and it was, you know, we were trying to figure out, if this tier does this and what does it mean to be in this tier and what benefits do you get and how does this all work? And it just wasn't working. There was all sorts of reasons why it wasn't working.

was a little more complicated than we wanted it to be. But like when I talked before about these two things that we're trying to accomplish, right? We want to build a balanced network of agencies and we want to work with a portion of those agencies to help sell our products, truthfully, but help them also win work using our products, using our framework, like to do that kind of a thing. And so it actually really just made a lot of sense to, it's almost too reductive to think that it's, we have two tiers and that's all those two tiers do but truly like,

We now ⁓ have a tier that is called the Community Partner tier. ⁓ And it is designed to allow us for the first time, because I'll just say it, up until this point, we charged to be a Laravel Partner, period. That was always the way that it had worked. ⁓ The price is scaled and the different tiers. But then you're getting into a world where it's like, I'm spending this much, what am I getting? And how am I doing this? And how am I doing that? And we wanted to have it be a world where we have a paid tier, where we can hopefully, and you know.

If you disagree, tell me offline. I'm just kidding. Where we can hopefully make the value so obvious that we can focus and make that like a really compelling case. And then we have another tier. And by the way, I, every partner that I add to the network, we do research, we check references, like we are vetting. So it's not just like send Dave an email and we add you to the list. ⁓ But it allows us to get to work with different kinds of agencies.

Matt Stauffer:
Amen.

Dave Hicking:
who are either in parts of the world where that price might not have, might've been pretty prohibitive, but maybe there's some, maybe there's a home for a partner there. Or in some cases it's like, ⁓ we really weren't gonna work with a super small two to five person shop before, because even though the price is scaled, the smaller you are, the bigger of a chunk of your budget that is. And now you're just like, I gotta justify that and what's the ROI and everything else. Ya know, I have a smaller subsection of partners where sure, let's talk about ROI, let's make that worthwhile, let's do everything else.

I need to have a longer tail of partners where it's like, no, no, like, that's great. We want to work with you to do all those other things, but like, I want you in the, in the network because you're helping to fill a role or you're really involved with the community or you're, balancing us out in so many ways. And the other thing that lets us do is it hopefully lets us work with an agency might be starting really small. And then as they grow, as they bring on more, as their budgets get bigger, as they do whatever, they might look at this and go, ⁓

Maybe it's time to move up. Like we never had a way for agencies to really like do that, to progress, to grow with Laravel. We still have to prove that out because we literally just launched this like six weeks ago, five weeks ago, but that's another thing we kind of, you we want to hope to accomplish with this.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

That's really good. ⁓ So you said you just launched it five or six weeks ago and actually my next question was like what's the future? And I both mean what's the future of partnership and also you know as somebody inside the organization who is talking with a lot of people who are not just working with Laravel but trying to move Laravel into new places. What's the future of Laravel? What's the future of the organization? Like just everything, the partnership, everything. Like what are you looking forward to a year or five years from

Dave Hicking:
Yeah, lot.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Sure.

⁓ what I'm really looking forward to over the next year, we'll start with the year. What I'm looking forward to over the next year is, okay, so we, I got in here, took stock of what was working, what was now working, tucked lots of partners, starting to build that trust, build those relationships. Now I've kind of taken my, my, my stand and going, okay, here's how I think I want this to work. ⁓ first of all, I get to see like what works about this, what doesn't work about this, right? Continue to adjust, continue to try to understand, ⁓ okay. Like.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Dave Hicking:
⁓ I thought I needed two partners over here with this kind of thing, or this is an emerging part of the market. And is this a case where it's like, ⁓ I need to like, find existing work with existing partners and go, Hey, do know this exists? Like it's, it's really just now that I've got the structure in place, ⁓ letting it play out a little bit and letting it actually work and actually seeing what it's like to do this. And then the goal is, okay, well, now that we're doing things like doing more with

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Dave Hicking:
selling alongside our partners and marketing their wins and, okay, great, you did this awesome thing, we were there, great, now let's do a video, a webinar, a case study to keep that whole like flywheel moving. We're gonna see what the sort of the demand is. I'm currently a partner program of one. ⁓ At some point that will change. And so, okay, what do we need more of? We need more of this, we need more of that, which then frees me up to go.

to other things, right? To go tackle other challenges, to go work with our partners in other different ways or to do more for Laravel in whatever way that might be. So that's what I'm looking forward to doing over the next year, over the next five years. I'm gonna try to say something that doesn't involve AI because we're all sick of, I'm sure we're all sick of hearing about AI. ⁓ We have an internal Slack channel at Laravel, it's just called AI, but we almost need two ones. We need like the, I'm sick, we need like the anti, not anti, but just like, all right, I've, you know.

Matt Stauffer:
Right?

⁓

Dave Hicking:
Okay, can I can I take a break? ⁓

Matt Stauffer:
commentary

and the eye of practicality.

Dave Hicking:
Right, right, right. ⁓ I do think that we're in this like paradox right now, where it's like on the one hand, I'm just going to echo a conference talk I did, I'm turning in that person. ⁓ It's never been cheaper to write a line of code, all things considered. Does it mean it's the right code? It doesn't mean it's the right feature? It doesn't mean it's what the business needs?

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Dave Hicking:
It doesn't mean any of that. just means this. was it was easier, faster, cheaper to get something that is that you know, I used to talk all the time. I tell you about the 80 20 rule, right? It's never been easier to get to that 80 20. OK, great. Is this worth polishing? Is this worth building? Is this worth not even just making? Not even saying like is this worth making like real or like coded by it like because there plenty of happens every day at Laravel I'm sure it happens every day at Tighten now. Plenty of.

very real, very credentialed, very experienced engineers, software devs are using AI substantially, right? So it's not even about like, this is not real and less. No, it's not even about that. It's more like, oh, okay, we got this. Should we have done this? Is this actually the right thing to do? sure, whatever. We're amongst friends here, however many thousands of people are gonna listen to this. You know, Anthropic has been.

Matt Stauffer:
Yes.

Many.

Dave Hicking:
on this torrid pace of releasing features. And we were just having a conversation in Slack today where it's like, just pulled the, because I'm a millennial, so of course I love animated GIFs. I pulled the animated GIF of Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park where it's like, the scientists were so busy trying to figure out if they could, they never stopped to think if they should. And for such a long time, it felt like there was this friction.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Dave Hicking:
with regard or, you know, or even just like thinking of engineering or, or devs as this scarce resource. And it's like, we've all like flipped that in a sense, or at least people think they flipped that, but like, there's so much more that goes along with that. Right. And so like, it's going to be terrifying. It's going to mean that some things are going to change, but like what agencies, what partners have always been about what Laravel has always been about is like, we are helping people solve problems, business problems, personal things are trying to do dreams that they're trying to accomplish.

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Dave Hicking:
The method was using Laravel and writing Laravel code. ⁓ Devs have lots of agency, lots of experience, lots of expertise. Our partners have so many of those, so many of those qualities. And to be able to leverage that, there's never gonna be, there's just, there are gonna be so many more Laravel apps out there. And you're gonna, sure, AI is gonna do a lot of boilerplate, gonna write a lot of things. Awesome, great.

⁓ But you still have to understand how it works. You still have to understand, you still have to think about things like, how am going to scale this? How is this, is this even the right feature to build in the first place? Just cause I, great, cool. I built, yeah, I built a fourth way to, to SSO into our system. Why? I don't know. ⁓ Claude said I could, you know? ⁓ I think, I think, I think agencies have so much to offer there. So much to offer. It's always been about expertise.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, 100%.

Dave Hicking:
The code is just a means to an end to a certain, and that's not to denigrate it. The code was the method, it was the hammer. ⁓ And now we have, but there's always been other tools and watching our partners and helping our partners and working with our partners to make sure that they can articulate like, yeah, we have those other tools along with this other skill and like, we're gonna help you do that. It's gonna be a radical transformation in some ways, but in some other ways, it's just like, there are parts of...

Like there are so many companies, so many businesses that are operating with tech from like 25 years ago, 30 years ago. So like there's gonna be such a long tail. you know, ⁓ it's gonna be messy, but that's what makes it interesting.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I like that. And I mean, there are also lots of companies that have had the same functioning code for 15 years and have let people go in favor of AI and all of sudden production crashes all the time. if people wonder why, you know, like there's a much broader and more robust story to be told about the future of our human and application and organizational interactions with AI coding that has been told right now. And this is somebody who uses AI and has my team, you know, using AI, but I'm just like, it's not, it's not simple.

And I'm with you that I feel more hopeful that the biggest change will hopefully be more software has the potential to be built. ⁓ The hope is that it doesn't mean just more crappy software will be released, because that's kind I'm seeing that more even in my own work, right? Like I built several apps over the last year that I'm just like, I haven't touched that in six months because it was it was the type of idea that the friction to create would have made me never make it in the past.

Dave Hicking:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
But I'm like, I just made the whole thing in one totally obsessive, nonstop token burning week, you know? And I learned everything there was possibly to be known about this so I could prompt the thing to build it well. And then I've never used it since. So I'm just like, yeah, we're figuring things out.

Dave Hicking:
We're totally figuring things out. ⁓ I'm right there alongside you. made sure, know, think Claude might still be doing something in the background now, but I was like, okay, I'm an obsessive user of polyscope. Shout out to Beyond Code. ⁓ I was like, I don't need, I can close on poly. I don't need stuff burning in the background, but no, it's, ⁓ you know, whole separate conversation is like, if you have ADHD or neurotypical, like what AI coding does to your brain is like a whole other thing that at some point somebody should do a podcast about, but yes. ⁓

it's nobody understands exactly how this is going to work yet, except to say, like, I know I'm towing the company line here, but I know we're going along. ⁓ Laravel is so well positioned for this. So well positioned. It's so it's opinionated. know you I know you talk it's so well it's like you it's so well positioned. ⁓ We're obviously like pitching that and like making that a thing. But like, you know, this is not the world of like, OK, I want to build this app.

Matt Stauffer:
100%. Yeah, speaking of a podcast about that.

Dave Hicking:
Well, I hope the LLM was trained on the 50 things I have to glue together. It's like, no, actually not exactly. you should like, know, Laravel has always been great about like making like lessening the barrier to like, I need to get this done. I want to bring what's unique to this app, to this code base instead of like reinventing the wheel. ⁓ and AI has been trained on that and they know that, ⁓ at least in theory, they know that. And you know, you can use tools like Laravel boost to help, but this is another thing where it's like,

Experienced devs using AI are so much more capable than someone who's not experienced because you know, great, I want to use this Spatie package or I want to use this or actually let's reach for Filament in this case because of this or no, no, I think this is appropriate for this. Like you're flying, you know, there's so much that the Laravel ecosystem. Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, you can plan the architecture or you can review the code, you know, but

I couldn't agree more. I don't think anybody is better set up than we are because we have all the tools and the tools are all set up to work together and they're extremely well documented. And you take those three things together. It's sort of like, yeah, it's going to take you a really long way in terms of the agents spending their time on things that are unique to you. it's like, huh, that's the same story we've been talking about developers spending your time on what's unique to this code base versus

Dave Hicking:
Yeah. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
wasting your time picking which database driver of 10,000 you're gonna use in the JavaScript world. ⁓ So I've got one last thing for you, but first I will say, because this is the first Laravel podcast recorded since I started my other podcast, I do have a podcast called Pragmatic AI, where we've talked about quite a few of topics you and I talked about. It's PragmaticAI.fm, ⁓ and the idea is saying we wanna be somewhere between the Luddites who are just saying AI's gonna burn the whole world, and the hype boys who are just saying,

Dave Hicking:
Yeah, yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
AI, AGI tomorrow, AGI yesterday. All I ever do is AI and it solves all my problems. I don't write code anymore. We want to be in the right in the middle talking about very practical and pragmatic kind of approaches to it. So check that out if you're interested.

All right, so because we are at time, the last thing I wanted to talk about was Dave completely outside of the context of Laravel. There's probably quite a few people who have heard of you as Producer Dave, which is funny because you're actually two different types of Producer Dave. Producer Dave that everyone's heard of is the mostly technical Aaron Francis, Ian Landsman reference to the fact that you manage their podcasts and you do editing.

Dave Hicking:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
But there's a reason why Laravel had you in that booth at the back of Laracon And there's a reason why you edit, you know, all those podcasts and stuff. It's because you have a whole life, an entire rich, robust life outside of the context of Laravel. Would you tell us a little bit about it?

Dave Hicking:
Oh man, I have a life. No. Yeah, I have been producing hip hop music for, I'm gonna date myself, longer than some listeners of this show possibly have been alive, probably since 2002, 2003. Very long time. I've been recording my own podcast on hip hop called Clock Radio Speakers. I've got a Patreon for that. I've had that for, this doesn't sound ridiculous, for 15 years now.

Matt Stauffer:
You

Dave Hicking:
which is incredible. Patreon's not been around 15 years, but the podcast has been around for 15 years. Patreon's been around for a while, but not that long. I have some albums out on streaming services. So yeah, I'm just a self-taught music producer. I've been editing podcasts for a long time. I used to edit Ian's old Bootstrap.fm with Andre Butov. You know, I mean, when I worked at Tighten, I worked on 20 % time.

Matt Stauffer:
I didn't know if I knew that Patreon was around 15 years ago, Okay, got it.

Yeah, that's right.

Love that show. ⁓ I love that show.

Mm-hmm.

Dave Hicking:
You know, I co-host Cheese and Weather, which is an occasional podcast with fellow Tighten alum, Zuzana, former Tighten client, Ben Holmen. So yeah, I have, and now I'm, know, producer Dave for Mostly Technical where I edit the show. I do the video clips on social. I do all that. And now I've got a new, we're adding a new one to the, to the repertoire. Ian and Aaron are starting a new podcast.

So I'll be doing that as well. And for those podcasts and all my podcasts, I also do theme music. So like, yeah, I'm just wearing a lot of hats, you know? So because of that, and because I love to just get involved in doing stuff, you know, I sometimes help Laravel with content stuff if they need it. We have a great team, but like I pitch in and I know how to video edit and I know how to do stuff. Or sometimes you'll see me at a conference and I'll have like a GoPro and some mics and I'm going up to people because it's like, I'm comfortable asking people questions. So I'm just in the mix, you know, I'm doing stuff.

Matt Stauffer:
He's that guy. Well, it's funny because when you first applied to Tighten, I knew who Doc was and I didn't know that you were Doc until some... And I was like, what? Especially because you've got a clock radio speaker's voice and it's not your day-to-day voice. And so I was like, this guy's kind of... Oh yeah, you do. You talk like... You're definitely code switching, that's fine. Nothing wrong with a good code switch. We love a good code switch, but it's a code switch for sure. So yeah, but it was so fun for me to score. I'm like, I know who this guy is.

Dave Hicking:
Yeah, you didn't know, didn't, yeah, yeah, you didn't, you were like, who's this? What is going on? Yeah.

I guess that's true, yeah. You think I'm code switching? It's possible, yeah. ⁓

Sure.

Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
in other contexts. I

Dave Hicking:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
know we're at time and you probably have another meeting to run to. So Dave, okay, well then I will take a second longer. Is there anything you wanted to get to today? I learned this phrase from my friend Dave. Anything you watched we had covered today that we didn't get a chance to get to?

Dave Hicking:
No, thankfully I don't, but thank you anyway.

You know, just I want to say thanks for not wearing any University of Michigan apparel on the show. I really appreciate that Yeah, yeah my heart hurts That's yeah. Yeah. No, it's okay. It's okay

Matt Stauffer:
I got you. ⁓ I forgot because they just won over UConn basketball. no. Now, is there any kind of

like long running rivalry? Is it purely just because of this particular moment?

Dave Hicking:
No,

just because this one game, ⁓ know, ⁓ we're a complete, I mean, lots of ⁓ places are obsessed with college sports. Connecticut, you know, does not have, yeah, I mean, and now the WNBA is leaving as well. So we will be back to not having a single pro team at all. So UConn, ⁓ UConn has been their pro team for a very long time. We are remarkably lucky to be the most successful ⁓ men's and women's basketball program of the last 25 years. ⁓

Matt Stauffer:
Pretty high up there.

⁓ my gosh, that's it. Uh-huh.

Dave Hicking:
which is great. Three years ago, I got to go to the men's final four in the championship game, got to see them win, which is great. This is my measured and adult way of saying it's a good season, it's totally fine. It's not like I was rampaging around the house or anything like that, but no, huge UConn Sports fanatic. So yeah, I appreciate you not having a Michigan flag in the background or anything like that. That's...

Matt Stauffer:
I got you. I got you. Well,

you know, for those who don't know, I grew up in Ann Arbor. My whole family went to U of M except me. But I went to the University of Florida and I was just sort of like in Florida being like, whatever, I can go Gators and I can go U of M And then the Gators played Ohio State, which is our mortal enemies in U of M Growing up, we don't hate anybody more than Ohio State. And everybody in U of M rooted for Ohio State because at least they were Big Ten. And I was like, you're dead to me.

Dave Hicking:
Sure, That's right.

Matt Stauffer:
I was just like, I can't support you. Ohio State over us? Nah, we're done. And then I moved to Chicago and I fell in love with the whites. Now in Georgia. So I'm like, I'm such a sports, you know, yeah, I'm just like, if you're happy, I'm happy. That's how I feel about it.

Dave Hicking:
Yeah, you're everywhere.

Sure.

Where I have like, you know, I have season tickets to UConn both men's and women's UConn basketball. We go to hockey as well. I have a whole this is, know, we don't have kids. I only have a dog, which means I have a whole closet in a bedroom upstairs. It's just our UConn closet. Right. It's like we got.

Matt Stauffer:
Wow. And hockey, right? Aren't you a big hockey guy?

my god, that's amazing. I continue learning new things about you. This is great.

Dave Hicking:
Well, know, sure.

I mean, that was really one of the perks of moving into this new house, aside from having this ⁓ studio, because I have like all my music stuff off on the side, the studio slash office in the basement, ⁓ you know, a dedicated closet for UConn gear, very, very important. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
the UConn Room.

I love that.

Well, Dave, ⁓ as a Laravel partner, I want to officially say thank you for the work you do because it is very valuable. And I have, as you said, I've been a Laravel partner since the very beginning and you get it. And so ⁓ if people can't tell from hearing this interview, Dave gets it. He understands what the partnership part of Laravel Partners means and is working really hard to make it valuable for the partners, for Laravel and for the entire community. So thank you for the work you do and thanks for hanging out today.

Dave Hicking:
Yeah, appreciate that.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Matt Stauffer:
Alright, everyone else, we'll see you next time.