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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