The Laravel Podcast

In the Season 7 finale, Matt Stauffer talks with Sam Sappenfield, senior field marketing manager and two-time Laravel team member, about her unlikely path from athlete to journalism grad to marketer to Laravel's first dedicated events hire.

They get into why she left, why she came back, and how Laracon US talks on agentic programming turned her into a builder. Sam walks through shipping a Laracon photos app on Laravel Cloud, a Stripe-and-Printful generative art t-shirt store, and why building ruined HubSpot for her. 

• Matt Stauffer on X - https://x.com/mattstauffer
• Sam Sappenfield on X - https://x.com/samsappenfield1
• Sam’s Website - https://thesambrain.com/
• Laracon Photos - https://laracon.us/photos
• Building Ruined Hubspot for Me - https://thesambrain.com/building-ruined-hubspot-for-me
• Generative Art Shirts - https://your-art-on-shirt.laravel.cloud/design
• Solo - https://soloterm.com/
• Laravel Twitter - https://twitter.com/laravel
• Laravel Website - https://laravel.com/
• Tighten Website - https://tighten.com/
• Suggestion Box - https://suggest.gg/laravelpodcast

----- Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten - https://tighten.com/

Big thanks to the companies that support the show:

Flare by Spatie - http://flareapp.io and Performance Monitoring - http://flareapp.io/performance-monitoring

Laracon AU - https://laracon.au

The Laravel Podcast is brought to you by Tighten, your friendly neighborhood Laravel experts. Check us out at tighten.com and also by other sponsors you will hear about later in the episode. 

In this episode, Matt Stauffer is joined by two of his oldest friends in the community — Michael Dyrynda and Jake Bennett, co-hosts of the Laravel News Podcast — for a Laracon-fueled catch-up that starts with golf, soccer, and adult swim lessons before turning to the framework.

They dig into the Laracon US highlights that stuck with them: rediscovering the joy of building "silly software," using AI as an educator for your own codebase, and the new releases they're most excited to ship — first-party image manipulation, the Laravel AI SDK's OpenAI-compatible provider, OG tag management, and Blade support in Pint.

Along the way, Matt talks rescue work and Laravel 5 apps in the wild, and Michael pulls back the curtain on what it actually takes to run Laracon AU.

• Matt Stauffer on X - https://x.com/mattstauffer
• Michael Dyrynda on X - http://x.com/michaeldyrynda
• Micheal Dyrynda on GitHub - http://github.com/michaeldyrynda  
• Michael Dyrynda’s Website - dyrynda.com.au
• Jake Bennett on X - http://x.com/jacobbennett
• Jake Bennett on GitHub -  https://gitHub.com/jacobbennett
• Jake Bennet’s Website - http://jakebennett.net/  
• Christina Martinez's Laracon Talk - https://youtu.be/2oUu9-jW6mg?si=rjckBIfr2wVCUKQA
• Matt Stauffer’s Laracon Talk - https://youtu.be/au9bIQsrh8k?si=BNJBMFIGFZR5oUqJ
• Boom Party - https://boomparty.party/
• Laracon AU - https://laracon.au/
• Laravel News Podcast - https://podcast.laravel-news.com/
• Mateus Guimaraes’s Laracon Talk - https://youtu.be/Wb8qsfP2sJc?si=zSKc_EeVTv9wDA91
• Will King’s Laracon Talk - https://youtu.be/TlQm1fiQUZs?si=Dk2uZBgBHRcawsUC
• Kent C. Dodd’s Laracon Talk - https://youtu.be/zZPV_ggx5F8?si=88JRgSZ518lQhhp_
• http://itch.io  - https://itch.io/
• Laravel Twitter - https://twitter.com/laravel
• Laravel Website - https://laravel.com/
• Tighten Website - https://tighten.com/
• Suggestion Box - https://suggest.gg/laravelpodcast

----- Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten - https://tighten.com/

Big thanks to the companies that support the show:

Flare by Spatie - http://flareapp.io and Performance Monitoring - http://flareapp.io/performance-monitoring

Laracon AU - https://laracon.au

The Laravel Podcast is brought to you by Tighten, your friendly neighborhood Laravel experts. Check us out at tighten.com and also by other sponsors you will hear about later in the episode. 

In this episode, Matt Stauffer sits down with Taylor Otwell for a post-Laracon debrief covering the biggest announcements across the Laravel framework, AI tooling, and Laravel Cloud.

They walk through the new goodies — the LSP, Artisan Doctor, and CPX (think NPX for Composer) — before digging into how AI is reshaping the framework itself, from human-in-the-loop tooling in the AI SDK to treating AI as a framework primitive. On the Cloud side, Taylor breaks down managed queues, sub-second scale-to-zero for everything, and why he'd turn it on for every app.

The conversation closes on a bigger idea: Laravel as a multilingual, full-stack application framework — not just a PHP one — and what that means for the community it's about to welcome.

• Matt Stauffer on X - https://x.com/mattstauffer
• Taylor on X - https://x.com/taylorotwell
• Laravel Updates from Laracon US 2026  — Taylor Otwell - https://www.youtube.com/live/0P-VMS7JMQY?si=_kp2ob_OMmo8PSF6&t=24379
• Laravel Twitter - https://twitter.com/laravel
• Laravel Website - https://laravel.com/
• Tighten Website - https://tighten.com/
• Suggestion Box - https://suggest.gg/laravelpodcast

----- Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten - https://tighten.com/

Big thanks to the companies that support the show:

Flare by Spatie - http://flareapp.io and Performance Monitoring - Performance Monitoring for Laravel & PHP | Flare

Laracon AU - https://laracon.au

The Laravel Podcast is brought to you by Tighten, your friendly neighborhood Laravel experts. Check us out at tighten.com and also by other sponsors you will hear about later in the episode. 

In this episode, Matt Stauffer sits down with Aaron Francis — just days before his first day — to explore his journey from programmer and entrepreneur to VP of Marketing and Community at Laravel.

They trace his winding path from big-four CPA to developer, PlanetScale, and two and a half years of independence, then unpack the hard decision to "go to the mothership." Aaron lays out his strategic vision: protect the artisan core while expanding to the larger circle of pragmatic builders, and make Laravel's engineering credibility legible to the outside world.

It's a candid look at how his diverse experiences shape his approach to community and growth — and why lifting Laravel's reputation raises the tide for the whole community.

• Matt Stauffer on X - https://x.com/mattstauffer
• Aaron Francis on X - https://x.com/aarondfrancis
• Mostly Technical Podcast - https://mostlytechnical.com/
• Laravel Twitter - https://twitter.com/laravel
• Laravel Website - https://laravel.com/
• Tighten Website - https://tighten.com/
• Suggestion Box - https://suggest.gg/laravelpodcast

----- Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten - https://tighten.com/

Big thanks to the companies that support the show:

Flare by Spatie - http://flareapp.io and Performance Monitoring - http://flareapp.io/performance-monitoring

Laracon AU - https://laracon.au

The Laravel Podcast is brought to you by Tighten, your friendly neighborhood Laravel experts. Check us out at tighten.com and also by other sponsors you will hear about later in the episode. 

In this episode, Matt Stauffer sits down with Taylor Otwell, creator and CEO of Laravel, just days before Laracon in Boston, and gets into why Laravel has become such a natural fit for building with AI coding agents.

They talk through Laravel Boost, the value of an opinionated, “batteries included” framework when agents are writing the code, and how “vibe-coding” platforms tend to hit a wall that Laravel doesn’t. Along the way, Taylor makes a striking claim: the big shift in programming has already happened. Most of us aren’t writing code by hand anymore, and the open question is just how much we review versus trust.

It’s also a candid conversation about craft, deleting experiments without guilt, and Taylor leaning back into being unapologetically himself.

• Matt Stauffer on X - https://x.com/mattstauffer
• Taylor on X - https://x.com/taylorotwell
• Voxacon - https://voxacon.laravel.cloud/
• Kayla Helmick on the Laravel Blog - https://laravel.com/cloud/customer-stories/how-a-non-technical-built-an-app-with-laravel-cloud-claude
• Laravel Twitter - https://twitter.com/laravel
• Laravel Website - https://laravel.com/
• Laracon US 2026 - https://laracon.us/
• Tighten Website - https://tighten.com/
• Suggestion Box - https://suggest.gg/laravelpodcast

----- Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten - https://tighten.com/

Big thanks to the companies that support the show:

Honeybadger - https://www.honeybadger.io/for/laravel/

Laravel - Laracon US and Laravel Cloud

Laracon AU - https://laracon.au

The Laravel Podcast is brought to you by Tighten, your friendly neighborhood Laravel experts. Check us out at tighten.com and also by other sponsors you will hear about later in the episode. 

In this episode, Matt Stauffer sits down with Jeremy Butler, product design lead at Laravel, to trace his path from building an app to sell advertisements to shaping the look and feel of Cloud, Nightwatch, and Forge.

Jeremy shares how a copy of Laravel: Up & Running rescued a struggling NHS project, why he leans on systems thinking and design thinking over raw pixels, and how design finally became its own pillar at Laravel alongside engineering.

They also dig into his side projects — useClassy and DSLinter — plus design system governance, tokens, and why solid design fundamentals still matter in the age of AI.

• Matt Stauffer on X - https://x.com/mattstauffer
• Jeremy on X - https://x.com/jrmymbtlr
• Jeremy on Bluesky - https://bsky.app/profile/jrmybtlr.com
• Laravel Up and Running - https://laravelupandrunning.com/
• Classy - https://useclassy.com/
• UseMods - https://usemods.com/
• DSLinter - https://dslinter.com./
• Laws of UX  - http://lawsofux.com
• Untools - https://untools.co/
• Laravel Twitter - https://twitter.com/laravelphp
• Laravel Website - https://laravel.com/
• Laracon US 2026 - https://laracon.us/
• Tighten Website - https://tighten.com/
• Suggestion Box - https://suggest.gg/laravelpodcast

----- Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten - https://tighten.com/

Big thanks to the companies that support the show:

Honeybadger - https://www.honeybadger.io/for/laravel/

Laravel - Laracon US and Laravel Cloud

Laracon AU - https://laracon.au

The Laravel Podcast is brought to you by Tighten, your friendly neighborhood Laravel experts. Check us out at tighten.com and also by other sponsors you will hear about later in the episode. 

In this episode, Matt Stauffer sits down with Wendell Adriel, senior software engineer on the Laravel team, to trace his path from a small town in Brazil to working on open source full time.

They dig into Maestro, the new orchestration system that makes Laravel's React, Vue, and Livewire starter kits buildable from a single layered source of truth, plus the new Vite font plugin that pulls Google and Bunny fonts local automatically.

Wendell also shares a candid story about persistence — six-plus applications, a direct email to Taylor, and finally landing the job nine years in the making.

• Matt Stauffer on X - https://x.com/mattstauffer
• Wendell Adriel on X - https://x.com/wendell_adriel
• Wendell on GitHub - https://github.com/WendellAdriel
• Wendell’s Website - https://wendelladriel.com
• Prince of Persia Rotoscoping Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbbX_Mq-gdg
• Laravel Twitter - https://twitter.com/laravelphp
• Laravel Website - https://laravel.com/
• Tighten Website - https://tighten.com/
• Suggestion Box - https://suggest.gg/laravelpodcast

----- Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten - https://tighten.com/

Big thanks to the companies that support the show:

Honeybadger - https://www.honeybadger.io/for/laravel/

Laravel - Laracon US and Laravel Cloud

Laracon AU - https://laracon.au

The Laravel Podcast is brought to you by Tighten, your friendly neighborhood Laravel experts. Check us out at tighten.com and also by other sponsors you will hear about later in the episode. 

In this episode, Matt Stauffer talks with Abby Gilson — Laravel's recently promoted field marketing manager, better known in the community as "Gen Z Abby" — about the winding path that took her from studying for the LSAT to running events for one of the web's most passionate developer communities.

They get into what it's like to learn marketing and event management on the fly, why Laravel events deliberately don't feel like typical tech marketing, and how being a non-developer pushed her to actually start shipping apps on Laravel Cloud.

Abby also previews Laracon US in Boston — including dodgeball, LaraProm, and the SoWa Power Station venue — before sharing how she went full-time digital nomad and landed in Milan.

• Matt Stauffer on X 
• Abby’s Email - [email protected]
• Abby on X 
• Laravel on X
• Laravel Website 
• Laracon US 2026 
• Community Events 
• Tighten Website 
• Suggestion Box 

----- Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.

Big thanks to the companies that support the show:

Honeybadger 

Laravel - Laracon US and Laravel Cloud

Laracon AU 

The Laravel Podcast is brought to you by Tighten, your friendly neighborhood Laravel experts. Check us out at tighten.com and also by other sponsors you will hear about later in the episode. 

In this episode, Matt Stauffer is joined by Cynthia McGillis to talk about her unlikely path from English major and nonprofit fundraiser to leading marketing at Laravel.

They discuss what it’s like to market developer tools as a non-developer, how Cynthia helped launch Laravel Cloud, and why the Laravel community feels different from other dev tool ecosystems. The conversation dives into Laravel Cloud features users still don’t realize exist — including auto-scaling, hibernation, preview environments, and the CLI with tinker — along with the challenges of pricing, onboarding, and scaling a modern hosting platform.

Matt and Cynthia also explore how AI is reshaping workflows inside Laravel, including how the marketing team is using Claude Code to generate weekly kickoff decks from Linear and Hex APIs, vibe-code landing pages without a CMS, and operationalize a fast-moving marketing org.

• Matt Stauffer on X 
• Cynthia on X 
• Cynthia’s Website 
• Cynthia’s Email - [email protected]
• Laravel Twitter 
• Laravel Website 
• Tighten Website
• Suggestion Box

----- Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.

Big thanks to the companies that support the show:

Honeybadger
Mailtrap 

Thunk 

Laravel - Laracon US and Laravel Cloud

The Laravel Podcast is brought to you by Tighten, your friendly neighborhood Laravel experts. Check us out at tighten.com and also by other sponsors you will hear about later in the episode. 

In this episode, Matt Stauffer talks with Tom Crary, President and COO at Laravel, about the path that took him from a Big Four CPA firm to running the business side of one of the most loved frameworks in PHP. Tom walks through his years at Accel-backed startups, his time as CEO of Pond5 through the Shutterstock acquisition, and the surprisingly fast turnaround that ended with him signing his Laravel offer letter on Christmas Eve.

They get into the division of labor between Tom and Taylor Otwell, scaling the team from 10 to 105 people in two years, and what Tom calls the hand-to-hand combat phase after Laravel Cloud and Nightwatch launched. Tom also previews fast hibernation, the growth of Private Cloud, and how Laravel is leaning into AI-assisted workflows.

• Matt Stauffer on X 
• Tom Crary on LinkedIn 
• Laravel Twitter
• Laravel Website
• Tighten Website
• Suggestion Box 

----- Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.

Big thanks to the companies that support the show:

Honeybadger - https://www.honeybadger.io/for/laravel/

Mailtrap - https://l.rw.rw/laravel_pod_3

Thunk - https://tidyup.agency/

Laravel - Laracon US and Laravel Cloud