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About Me

Hello, my name is Aaron Francis.

I'm a software developer with a keen interest in processes and automation. I'm a developer educator at PlanetScale — a serverless MySQL database platform. I'm on Twitter all the time, and I livestream coding on Twitch a couple of times a week.

I'm also a CPA and former Big 4 accountant but I've gladly left that life far, far behind me.

I love making things and having lots of side projects going. I live in Dallas with my beautiful and perfect wife Jennifer and our year-and-a-half old 👦 ðŸ‘§  twins.

Open source software

I like writing software, so I do it a lot.

  • Sidecar — Deploy and execute AWS Lambda functions from your Laravel application.
  • Fast Paginate — A faster offset/limit pagination macro for Laravel.
  • Airdrop — speed up your deploys by skipping your asset build step whenever possible.
  • Pseudo Daemon — a Laravel package to mimic daemons via scheduled commands without having to change server configuration.

Places I've spoken

  • MergePHP — I gave a talk called "Microservices in Your Monolith" at a virtual PHP meetup. (October 2022)
  • Laracon Online — I gave a talk called "Database Performance for Application Developers" at a Laravel conference. (September 2022)
  • Laracasts — I recorded a video series for Laracasts on developing serverless functions in Laravel (July 2022)
  • RailsConf — My business partner and I gave a workshop on building query builders. (Not recorded. May 2022)
  • Laracon Online — A live coding demonstration of Sidecar at a Laravel conference. (February 2022)
  • Laravel Worldwide Meetup — This was my first live presentation and I presented on Sidecar, the open source library I wrote. (September 2021)

Things I've written

Turns out I write a lot! Much of it right here, on my site, and some of it elsewhere. Here are some that I've written for other people:

Podcasts I've been on

I'm the co-host of two podcasts. One is The Hammerstone Podcast, where my business partner and I talk about trying to build a business. The other is Framework Friends, where my friend Andrew and I talk about Laravel, Rails, and all the other web frameworks.

I've also been a guest on a few other shows!

Head over to the now page to see what I'm up to at the moment.

Copyright 2013 - 2023, Aaron Francis.