In this episode of Syntax, Wes and Scott talk with Taylor Otwell, the creator of Laravel. Taylor shares insights on his journey from creating Laravel in his free time to building a strong community and user base. He discusses Laravel’s growth, including the major features and tools that were developed over the years. Taylor also shares his outlook on the PHP ecosystem, productivity tips, and plans for Laravel Cloud, a new deployment platform for PHP and Laravel applications.

Show Notes

00:00 Welcome to Syntax!
00:29 Laracon
03:13 Laravel’s inspiration and features
- Intertia
- Livewire
07:18 Why don’t we have a “Laravel for JavaScript”?
09:02 What parts of Laravel came first?
10:07 The Laravel ecosystem
- Forge
- Vapor
12:29 Laravel Cloud
14:00 What parts of Laravel are Intertia and what parts are React?
15:57 How many people are using Laravel?
16:59 Taylor’s productivity and development philosophy
24:43 Brought to you by Sentry.io
25:19 What makes a beautiful API?
29:33 Taylor’s thoughts on typing PHP
30:41 Features Taylor would like to see in PHP
33:03 What people get wrong about modern PHP
34:22 PHP stacks and CMSs
- Nginx
- FrankenPHP
- Statamic
37:30 Taylor’s thoughts on WordPress
38:14 Lambo memes
43:44 Taylor’s coding setup
- Sublime Text
- Vs Code
45:36 Sick Picks + Shameless Plugs

Sick Picks

Taylor:
- Tiny Glade
- No Man’s Sky

Shameless Plugs

Taylor: Laravel Cloud

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