S-Tier Software with Taylor Otwell

June 4, 2024

Ian and Aaron are joined this week by Taylor Otwell, founder & CEO of Laravel, to discuss the Laravel vs. JS Twitter wars, new stuff coming down the road from Laravel, writing off Lambos (just kidding), and more. Sponsored by LaraJobs & Screencasting.com. Interested in sponsoring Mostly Technical? Head to https://mostlytechnical.com/sponsor to learn more.
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Transcript

Ian
00:00:00 – 00:00:00
Hello.
Aaron
00:00:01 – 00:00:03
Good morning, Ian. How are we doing?
Ian
00:00:03 – 00:00:08
Very good. We got a extra special guest today. We
Aaron
00:00:08 – 00:00:18
do. One one that I'm already mad at because he came on and rubbed it in my face that he's drinking soda, and I'm in over here like an idiot drinking coffee. So we'll see. We gotta turn this around.
Taylor
00:00:19 – 00:00:22
Taylor Otwell back with a mostly technical podcast.
Ian
00:00:27 – 00:00:28
Oh, the Taylor at will buy. It was just.
Aaron
00:00:28 – 00:00:33
Oh, did we lose Ian already? He's. Oh, there he is. Okay.
Ian
00:00:33 – 00:00:33
I'm here. I'm here.
Taylor
00:00:33 – 00:00:37
Yeah. Yeah. No, He was frozen in a state of permanent happiness on my screen.
Ian
00:00:38 – 00:00:44
If I get that Taylor Otwell audio coming through my earbuds, just locks me up. So good. Yep.
Taylor
00:00:45 – 00:00:49
Yep. So how's this podcast work? I don't I don't know. How's what's the agenda here?
Ian
00:00:49 – 00:00:55
We got a couple things, but, I mean, no. Not a not a totally formal agenda, but a lot's going on. So I feel like we'll have plenty to talk about. It was
Aaron
00:00:55 – 00:01:02
a heck of a weekend, and I feel like I feel like Ian got back on the keyboard this weekend, which was great. We love we love to see Ian back on Twitter.
Ian
00:01:03 – 00:01:04
Hot takes.
Taylor
00:01:04 – 00:01:06
It was a busy weekend on Twitter for sure.
Ian
00:01:07 – 00:01:28
I feel like we haven't had one like that in a while. I don't know. It's like the crossover of the the JavaScript people of, like, last, like I think it's, like, a couple months, right, of, like, the JavaScript world discovering Laravel, which is awesome and what we're all really excited about that, I think. And maybe some cultural cultural differences in the 2 ecosystems. So I don't know.
Ian
00:01:28 – 00:01:46
I know what maybe we could start. I mean, you were on a podcast last week kinda talking about the Taylor and you had some tweets about it over the last couple weeks. Like Mhmm. I know. I guess even before we get to that stuff, I I kinda feel like the thing I've been thinking about is how is it that Laravel has the best community in software development?
Ian
00:01:46 – 00:01:55
Like I, I legit believe that it's the best community. Like there's rarely ever drama. I mean, that has been drama drama in, like, years, I would say.
Aaron
00:01:55 – 00:01:58
The the most recent one was the final class debate. That was
Taylor
00:01:58 – 00:01:59
oh, man. People were
Ian
00:01:59 – 00:02:02
like a PHP thing. Like, that's not even a Laravel thing. I mean, that
Aaron
00:02:02 – 00:02:04
was very yeah. That was benign.
Ian
00:02:05 – 00:02:08
I don't know, t. What do you think about this? Like, obviously, you've thought all about it.
Taylor
00:02:10 – 00:02:23
Yeah. It is super low drama, and I think it's a great place to be right now. I'm not sure if it's because, you know, I'm not sure what has led to that. I'm not sure because we conquered all our old enemies, and now we're living in peace times.
Ian
00:02:24 – 00:02:27
I love that take. That's a hot take right there.
Taylor
00:02:27 – 00:02:46
I don't know. I think it's probably a combination of things. Like, it's a mature community where we've kind of solidified on a lot of how we do things and what tools we like, and people's options are sort of known and mature. And so there's not a lot to, like, bike shed or debate about these days. I don't think.
Taylor
00:02:47 – 00:03:07
I think I'm just more chill personally in a lot of ways than I was 10 years ago, in terms of, like, I don't really, like, do a lot of, like, arguing online in a in a serious way. Yeah. So I don't know. I think it's a combination of things. I think just the ecosystem maturity plays a lot into it where there's just not a lot that we're debating these days.
Taylor
00:03:07 – 00:03:21
We're kind of just all building stuff, shipping stuff. We're using tools like Livewire, Inertia and Eloquent to do our thing. So I think that's a big piece of it. Whereas JavaScript is not that way. You know?
Taylor
00:03:21 – 00:03:30
Like I say, nothing feels very solidified. There's still lots of debating. There's still lots of bike shedding, which is crazy because it's, like,
Ian
00:03:30 – 00:03:49
the oldest, like, old ecosystem. So I think it's also, like, the benevolent dictator aspect of things. Right? Like, in your personality in that, I feel like even when you were slightly less chill, you're still pretty chill guy overall. And, I think that's been I mean, I feel like you get this in rails too with DHH.
Ian
00:03:49 – 00:04:04
Right? He's way less chilled than you are, but still, like, there's kind of this vision and a person leading, and people are behind that. You know? I think that does help a lot, where JavaScript obviously just a little, you know, wild west, and there's all different leaders, and everybody's got their own agendas and all that stuff.
Taylor
00:04:05 – 00:04:30
Yeah. Yeah. I think so. I mean, I think what, like, to recap, like, you know, over the weekend, there was, like, this debate between some some kind of prominent people in the JavaScript space and some prominent Laravel people. And I think one of the biggest differences is it feels like people like me and you, like, approach the problems from this very product centric focus in terms of just, like, shipping finished complete software.
Taylor
00:04:31 – 00:05:05
And it feels like a lot of people on the JavaScript side don't approach the discourse that way. It's very nitty gritty technical combo. What about combo boxes and tool tips? Very like at the micro level of the discussion in terms of, like, building quality software where we I think I don't this kinda makes them sound worse than I mean it to, but I think we look at it from just a higher level and just the whole product and prioritizing it and building a sustainable business for, like, yourself and your family or whatever, which is just a much different discussion.
Ian
00:05:05 – 00:05:13
Yeah. I think DHH had a great tweet about it because this all kicked off for those who somehow aren't in the loop with, like, kind of some JavaScript eyes.
Taylor
00:05:14 – 00:05:18
Aaron Aaron is Aaron is shook by this DHH phrase coming from
Aaron
00:05:18 – 00:05:19
the beat. I'm just, you know,
Ian
00:05:19 – 00:05:21
I just mark it down in your
Aaron
00:05:21 – 00:05:29
diary today. Ian praised DHH. Like, this this is my favorite. I just love the reversal here. This is a go on.
Aaron
00:05:29 – 00:05:31
Praise DHH some more.
Ian
00:05:31 – 00:05:50
And it's so funny because I literally have like 15 years of documented like on podcast being like DHA just takes a terrible don't follow the advice like and he, well, I don't know. He felt like so spot on with it. Like DHA to the last month is just like, he's just totally done a 180 for me. It's just like he's in the he's in the pocket. He could say no wrong.
Ian
00:05:50 – 00:06:09
He could do no wrong. He's just he's just on point. I don't know. I can't, I can't explain it. It's like, I mean, I said this, privately to some of my friends here is like, I feel like I should be in my moment of glory that, like, I everybody's piling on DHH, and I could be in there right with them piling on his technical takes.
Ian
00:06:09 – 00:06:14
And, like, no. I don't. I'm sad because I can't do that because he's right. In the man. Yeah.
Ian
00:06:14 – 00:06:24
No. He's just right. But but yeah. So they were micro analyzing and pop over and hey and, you know, whatever. Yeah.
Ian
00:06:29 – 00:07:09
And yeah. And it's just like, you know, he followed up after they fixed it and made it fast, obviously, as you knew they would. It took 10 minutes or whatever to tweak this one thing. And it's just like when you're looking at it with your own money and you're trying to build a product and you're making trade offs in a real product for real customers, like, yeah, like, every popover being micro optimized, it's making dealing with feedback from actual paying customers and the new features they want and all those things that have to actually happen. And then, yeah, down the line, you can you can get there.
Ian
00:07:09 – 00:07:22
But, you know and his other take is, like, yeah, if you're cal.com and you got $50,000,000, yeah, you have 30 developers who do nothing but optimize JavaScript. Great. Like, go ahead and do that. But, that's not how
Aaron
00:07:22 – 00:07:38
He said, hey. It was primarily built by one one person with a few people pitching in at the end. So I think it was that I don't know if it's George or Jorge. I I think it was that one guy that did most of the stuff, And DHH tweeted, oh, yeah. He, you know, he took a look at the popover, and he fixed it this weekend.
Aaron
00:07:38 – 00:07:42
It's not a big deal. Thanks for all thanks for all the free press.
Taylor
00:07:43 – 00:07:56
Yeah. Yeah. Pretty crazy. I I think people would be like it's almost like everyone needs to try to build a complete product at some point in their life just to, like, get a taste of making those kinds of decisions and trade offs.
Ian
00:07:57 – 00:07:58
I don't think, like,
Taylor
00:07:58 – 00:08:07
in the Laravel world, like, I think there was some discourse about how, like, we just don't care, you know, about quality. And I actually think that
Ian
00:08:08 – 00:08:10
I saw you chime in on that one.
Taylor
00:08:10 – 00:08:23
I think most people in the Laravel world are doing the best that they can, you know, with their skill set. I don't think people are just, like, cutting corners. I gotta get my Lambo. Like, this side is gonna be trash, but it doesn't matter. Mhmm.
Taylor
00:08:23 – 00:08:41
I think most people are shipping the best products they can. And I thought back to, like, when I first shipped Laravel Forge, it was like bootstrap CSS. It looked almost just like straight up default bootstrap Right. CSS. But in many ways, it was, like, the best that I could do, like, at the time, honestly, with just, like, the overall skill set I had.
Taylor
00:08:42 – 00:08:48
I don't think people are just, like, purposely making bad quality stuff. You know?
Ian
00:08:48 – 00:08:54
No. That was, like, one of the bizarre things in the whole weekend. I was like, what? Don't even know what to do. You're talking about.
Aaron
00:08:54 – 00:08:55
That got me to that's the
Ian
00:08:55 – 00:08:57
one that got me to lead into the
Aaron
00:08:57 – 00:09:12
arena. Yeah. When he when he was like, as long none of almost none of y'all care if you ship garbage as long as it gets you a Lambo. And I'm like, oh, you're talking you're talking about my 2 friends, Taylor and DHH here. I don't I don't like that one bit.
Aaron
00:09:12 – 00:09:33
But, yeah, the whole the whole, like, you don't care as a as long as it makes money. Unfortunately, I am not post economic like some people might be. And, like, I money is a consideration for me. Like, it it really is. Like, it's my number one thing when I'm thinking about business is how do I make money to to put food on my family.
Aaron
00:09:33 – 00:09:48
You know? And so to say that, like, you would ship garbage in exchange for a paycheck, I'm like, well, I would ship in exchange for a paycheck. My goal is to never ship garbage. I don't like that. I mean, we named our company TryHard Studios for goodness' sakes.
Aaron
00:09:48 – 00:09:57
Sakes. Like, we're gonna try as hard as we possibly can, but, like, that's really a disingenuous framing that we want to ship garbage, and that I was like, oh, I gotta say something here.
Ian
00:09:57 – 00:10:31
What really I think to be a framework author and how that take too, I thought was very bizarre. Because to me, it's like like the ultimate Taylor Laravel thing to me is like, we're trying to provide this foundation so that even a beginner can ship something that's like pretty secure reasonably fast, like operates in a reasonable manner. And yeah, like you can get down in there and micro optimize and do all the run octane and do all that stuff. Right? But but just if you just ship Laravel out of the box, like, you're getting a pretty good baseline application.
Ian
00:10:32 – 00:10:58
That's pretty good. Like, if you literally don't know what you're doing and you just ship some basic forms and stuff, it's a pretty good application compared to 10 years ago or even 5 years ago. So, like, to me, that's, like, the whole point of all these frameworks is, like, to raise all the ships up to, like, a reasonable level. And, yeah, like, obviously, if you're have a very high standard or you have a lot of skill, you can take it up to that next level of true magic. But that's not where most people are.
Ian
00:10:58 – 00:11:05
That's not where most people will ever be. And so it's servicing the the whole market there.
Taylor
00:11:07 – 00:11:17
Yeah. I agree. Honestly, I just find it crazy that, like and, like, grateful that Laravel is even in these discussions at all. Like, to me, that's isn't that clear? Yeah.
Taylor
00:11:17 – 00:11:24
Yeah. 14 14 year old PHP framework. It's like it's put up there right against, like, the latest
Ian
00:11:24 – 00:11:26
Cutting edge. And greatest JavaScript.
Aaron
00:11:26 – 00:11:27
Success. Yeah.
Taylor
00:11:27 – 00:11:29
Yeah. Pretty pretty wild.
Ian
00:11:30 – 00:11:30
Mhmm.
Taylor
00:11:30 – 00:11:41
So I'm I'm happy for that, you know, even though it's been a busy weekend on the Twittersphere. I feel like privileged to be, like, in the spot.
Ian
00:11:42 – 00:12:06
It's sort of like, I mean, I think we'll get to some of this stuff later. I don't wanna get all the way over there to yet yet, but with, like, what you're doing with kind of expanding Laravel. But it feels to me like the for the first time, maybe in web development ever, where like you can have these frameworks that are maturing, but then get to benefit from being mature. And then you can build out from there. Whereas like in the past, I feel like everything's changed so quickly.
Taylor
00:12:06 – 00:12:06
Yeah.
Ian
00:12:06 – 00:12:25
That's like, okay, framework gets started. We ditch it because the next framework comes and then we ditch it and the next framework comes and you have all those changes. So you never get to the phase of, like, we are a big established player and all the benefits that come with that. And then we can build on top of that into really massive things because the tech just changed so quick that you're throwing stuff out all the time. But now it's like, no.
Ian
00:12:25 – 00:12:38
Like, Laravel's, like, super relevant today as it was in the beginning. And I don't there's nothing obvious that's gonna change that right now. You never know. But seems like a good we're in a good foundational spot there.
Taylor
00:12:39 – 00:12:48
Yeah. Yeah. It's it's interesting. I think about it a lot. I mean, I think Symphony, like, sorta got close to this in PHP where they got pretty dang established.
Taylor
00:12:49 – 00:13:25
Yeah. But I feel like Laravel was just sort of like right place, right time in the overall PHP language lifespan where we got name spaces, we got anonymous functions, we got the features that let us build Eloquent and was able to sort of capitalize on that right moment in time. In a lot of ways, seems like, you know, potentially will be sort of like the last big PHP framework to be written, you I would imagine. You know? I think just once you get to a certain level, like, kinda like Laravel or Rails, you're kinda, like, there, and it's hard to really build something new, so everyone just kinda piles onto it.
Taylor
00:13:26 – 00:13:37
But, yeah, I mean, it's awesome to be able to build out this sort of wide ecosystem, and I think we still have a lot of cool ideas in the future too that I'm excited about. So not running out of gas yet.
Ian
00:13:37 – 00:13:50
That's a huge thing for Laravel. I mean, every Tuesday or whatever it is. Right. It's like, there's a new Laravel release, like just like clockwork, just every week there's a new release and it's just like, and there's real stuff in there. It's not even just like, oh yeah.
Ian
00:13:50 – 00:13:53
It's like, there's 3 bug fixes. It's like, no, there's stuff being shipped.
Taylor
00:13:53 – 00:13:56
No. Yeah. Sometimes there's some real bangers in those weekly releases.
Ian
00:13:57 – 00:14:08
I thought you moved even more in you kinda leaned into that more. I feel like you used to maybe hold more back for kind of the big releases, but you're kinda moved towards just, like, let's let's get it out. Yeah. I feel like as I
Taylor
00:14:08 – 00:14:29
get closer to Laracon, I start holding a little bit more back. And then after Laracon, I'll just, like, start shipping in the weekly releases. But, yeah, we definitely you're right that it used to be, like, back in the day, I would hold almost everything back for those 6 month releases, you know, and then put it all out at once. But we're trying to just continually sort of provide value throughout the year at this point, I think.
Aaron
00:14:29 – 00:14:52
How much do you think how much do you think the success of Laravel is because Laravel is your your business? Like, DHH has, you know, 37 signals, and so he's focused on all that. But you're building forge and vapor and nova and all of these things that, like, flesh out the ecosystem just on the paid side. On the free side, you're building everything. So what what do you think that has to do with it?
Taylor
00:14:52 – 00:15:14
I mean, I think it's huge. I think it's the biggest difference between Laravel and Rails from, like, an operational perspective. DHH, obviously, super talented, but Rails wasn't necessarily, like, his core focus. I don't think at least that's my read on it. He was more focused on Basecamp and then later, you know, Hey and all of their other products that have come and gone Campfire and other stuff.
Taylor
00:15:16 – 00:15:41
Yeah. Where I think whereas me, Laravel has always literally been, like, what I thought about from pretty much, like, sun up to sun down and was my primary focus. So it's got to be, like, obviously a huge reason we were able to grow it to this point. So, yeah, I thought about that myself, too. I think it is a pretty big difference in the way the two projects have operated and mainly a big difference maybe between any other web frameworks.
Taylor
00:15:41 – 00:15:42
You know?
Ian
00:15:42 – 00:15:54
That's what I'm gonna say. Yeah. I don't think there's really any that built up this type of level of ecosystem around them. Which is even tricky too. Cause like we can get it to the JavaScript stuff.
Ian
00:15:54 – 00:16:15
It's like they, they almost can't build this level of ecosystem. It's like you could do training materials or whatever, but like, it's hard to imagine like an infrastructure play, like, really around a lot of them. And it's, like, how so then how do they get funded and all those things, whereas you've just had this engine of funding that's really just, like, you build out a team that that works on it full time. It's a huge advantage.
Taylor
00:16:15 – 00:16:52
To build, like, a cohesive framework like Laravel, there's just so many decisions that have to be made at all sorts of layers of the stack. Like, the database layer is a big one, just so that you can build out like, you can't build a tool like Nova if you don't know the database, if you don't know the RN. Like, you don't make a hard decision about it. And even the same with things like Cashier, where they need to that needs to interact with the database too, and it needs to handle events and routes. And it's just it's hard to build, like, the really fleshed out batteries included ecosystem if you can't make just some, you know, stake in the ground decisions about how certain things are gonna work.
Taylor
00:16:52 – 00:17:01
And I think that's that's why, like, they've never gotten to that point in JavaScript. And I kinda I I think they kinda just like it that way. I don't really know. Like, that's just a cultural difference.
Aaron
00:17:01 – 00:17:02
Keep claiming. Yeah.
Taylor
00:17:03 – 00:17:25
Yeah. So, like, I was talking to, I was out in San Francisco a few weeks ago, actually, so I was, like, in the nitty gritty of that ego. Belly of the beast. Yeah. And I was talking to a CEO out there, of a, I guess, a moderately well known kind of up and coming startup, and they built kind of their whole stack on JavaScript, front end and back end.
Taylor
00:17:25 – 00:17:35
So I was asking him, like, this question directly. Like, isn't it hard to, like, build anything in that ecosystem? And he was like, yeah. It's super hard. Like, it's it's actually really annoying.
Taylor
00:17:36 – 00:18:06
And I would actually just much prefer to have a more opinionated stack, and he says, but you just, like, come to embrace the darkness, you know, of of of that stack. And he said he said it's actually pretty interesting because, like, you can see, like, the seasonal changes, the yearly changes in opinion in JavaScript in their own product of, like, you go to this feature of the product, and it's like, oh, this was written in you know, this is a 2021 feature because it's built this way. You know? Yep. So just, like, still nothing is very solidified.
Taylor
00:18:06 – 00:18:07
It's it's weird.
Ian
00:18:08 – 00:18:29
Yeah. And you never I mean, if you just think about all the big programming frame like, before we had all the open source frameworks, we had, like, Microsoft and Apple and IBM or whoever, like, who had yeah. They have thousands of developers, and we're building out this whole framework and everything's highly integrated and thought through together as a single unified platform. And like, there's a reason that exists. You know?
Ian
00:18:29 – 00:18:52
Like, that's just a nice way to build software, when everything knows how everything else works, and you can have standards and interactivity and things. And when you just have like all these different groups trying to like build stuff and yet it's, we're trying to abstract it all. So it could all work with anything, but, like, you have such a layer of abstraction to pull that off, but then there's always gonna be a weird amount of glue there, I think, to make it work.
Aaron
00:18:52 – 00:19:25
Yeah. I'm trying to come up with the perfect example for a video to illustrate this of, like, why picking your own components sounds good, but ends up being painful. And I feel like one of them in Laravel is, like, sending an email, because the way that you can do that is you you have to have, like, the mail component. You usually wanna queue that, so you have to have the queue component. But then you're also passing a user or or some kind of model in, and so you have to, like, serialize and unserialize.
Aaron
00:19:25 – 00:19:51
But with Laravel, it just keeps the ID around and then rehydrates it. And then you have to know, like, well, I wanna send this email after the transaction closes. So you have dispatch after transaction. That's like 4 or 5 components that need to know about each other, and you don't wanna just, like, be grabbing random stuff and gluing it together. Because with Laravel, you can just say dispatch after transaction, and it goes into the queue and it reseals like, it rehydrates the user.
Aaron
00:19:51 – 00:19:53
All of that just works together so nicely.
Taylor
00:19:54 – 00:20:09
Yeah. There's so many things I think that just get taken for granted. Like, even that whole model serializing, unserializing thing from the queue and back and forth. Putting all of those pieces together would take you weeks in your job script to figure out.
Ian
00:20:10 – 00:20:11
I I
Taylor
00:20:11 – 00:20:31
don't know. And I think it's kind of the other side of the coin to the whole discussion this weekend of, like, I guess you guys don't care about quality. I think we could make that same kind of dig at this stuff. You know, like, oh, you're not going to, like, serialize your emails onto the queue and send them in the background. They're just going to send synchronously, and, you know, like, we could just kinda make that same claim from that perspective.
Ian
00:20:31 – 00:20:41
Yeah. How many bugs are in there because you had to invent all this glue that is so fleshed out in Laravel that millions of people have used and been tested and all that thing.
Taylor
00:20:42 – 00:20:42
Yeah.
Ian
00:20:42 – 00:20:58
I mean, to me, it's like that same background. It's like the background that we've kind of all come up with in Laravel, like the more entrepreneurial background. Like, to me, that's so much like my like, when Microsoft builds out their frameworks, they're like, we won't want people thinking about all the glue and stuff. We just want them making products. And that's how Laravel is.
Ian
00:20:58 – 00:21:15
Right? It's like, we don't, what's the upside to me of thinking about how the queue works? Like, there's no business upside for me to have a deep understanding of, like, what's being serialized and how it goes and blah blah. Most of the time, like, obviously, you can come up with scenarios where, like, that's super important. But most of the time, like, I'm just trying to send this email.
Ian
00:21:16 – 00:21:40
The email is, like, a way secondary thing to the point of my application, and I just wanna get through that part in 10 minutes and move on to the next thing, but know it's reliable and know it's scalable to to over some reasonable amount and all those things so I can get to building my application that I'm trying to build, and not be down in the weeds of that foundational stuff. And Yeah. I've never really thought about Laravel as Microsoft before, but I feel like there's actually a few
Aaron
00:21:40 – 00:22:05
people in the world. Day full of takes, man. I I kinda wonder I kinda wonder if that's, like, because of or part of the PHP ecosystem. Like, I feel like the PHP world going back to, you know, the mid early 2000 is just like, we're gonna hack something together, and we're gonna build we're gonna build a product, and we're gonna make a business. And I feel like because PHP is
Ian
00:22:06 – 00:22:06
not
Aaron
00:22:06 – 00:22:27
it's not like the fun, sexy language. The people that are here are like, I'm here to accomplish a purpose, not to be some sort of, you know, astronaut architect astronaut or whatever. And so I feel like it's kinda like our our legacy or our our history of, hey. We're we're gonna just build something because we can. That's how it feels to me.
Taylor
00:22:28 – 00:23:23
Mhmm. I'm curious what I'll just kinda brainstorm with, you guys live for a second because it's something I've been thinking about. You know, there's been a lot of discussion about, I guess, publicly or and some kind of back channel private discussions of, like, how do we convince people that are currently using these kind of so called full stack JavaScript frameworks that they would be much better served, like, just building on Laravel, and maybe even using JavaScript JavaScript on the front end because I think that's something that people have been Right. Were not aware of until maybe the last few weeks of discussion that, like, Laravel embraces JavaScript in a way that, for example, Rails doesn't because we have things like inertia that we push essentially almost as a first party type of package, where you can use Vue and React on the front end with your Laravel back end and just return stuff from your controllers like normal, and it feels great. And you can use all of the fancy React component libraries that are out there these days.
Taylor
00:23:25 – 00:23:50
But, anyway, there's I've kinda debated in myself internally. Do I even try to, like, convert these people, or is it better, like, to focus on putting PHP and Laravel back at the top of the funnel of where people first get into web development? Because I think 10 years ago or even longer ago when I first started writing Laravel, super common to, like, enter web programming via PHP.
Ian
00:23:51 – 00:23:51
Mhmm.
Taylor
00:23:52 – 00:24:13
Because it's just like an easy language to learn. It was easy to host, easy to get started with. The documentation is fairly good as far as, like, the available functions and how they work and stuff. So, like, part of me has been like, you know what? Like, I think trying to convince people to, like, switch their whole stack is actually really, really hard, and we even tried to do this, like, in PHP itself, right, where
Ian
00:24:14 – 00:24:14
Mhmm.
Taylor
00:24:14 – 00:25:11
Like, 2015, 2016, there's sort of this Laravel contingent and there's no framework contingent or maybe other framework contingent. And it's just very hard to, like, pull those people into your camp. And I almost wonder if it would be better to, like, really position Laravel as the most productive way to build complete products and market that just to people coming in to, like, web development from the beginning, so you can just recapture them, and maybe reposition PHP back at the top of that funnel where right now it feels like dominated by JavaScript via boot camps and just learning materials in general. And I think part of that work is on us because while PHP was easiest to deploy 10 or 15 years ago, it actually isn't the easiest to deploy anymore. But I think we're work I mean, that's something we're working on here at Laravel, you know, to kind of get us back to competing with, like, deployment on Vercel, where it's like one command, boom, 1 minute you're live.
Taylor
00:25:12 – 00:25:27
And I think we'll get back to that, you know, but it's, you know, maybe later this year or early next year. But, anyway, that's kinda what I've been thinking. I'm curious how y'all feel about that whole, like, trying to convert people versus putting PHP back at the forefront of entry to programming and stuff like that.
Ian
00:25:28 – 00:26:00
Yeah. I I think, I really liked the idea of being the place you go at the start, that like PHP and Laravel is the best way to get started, whether started with programming purely or just that like idea of like, I'm ready to build a product. What's where do I go for that? And it's the batteries included and the I feel like the ecosystem around that layer of, like, you're just getting started is so strong with Lara Bell. It's like you have the Lara cast, you have all the stuff Aaron does, you have a million other 8,000,000,000 blog posts and everything else that's out there.
Ian
00:26:00 – 00:26:21
Right. And like, that's such a strength, I feel like, of the community and the product and everything. Whereas, like, yeah, like trying to and and then it's like one of these things where, like, you have your niche and you talk about that and then the other people are still gonna come in. Right? Like the JavaScript people are still gonna be brought in over time, maybe more slowly than if you are explicitly targeting them.
Ian
00:26:21 – 00:26:52
But also it's just gonna be much easier versus, like, trying to convert everybody and be in these constant battles of, like, let me prove to you and convert you to my religion here, which is always a little bit of a tricky thing to do in general. So let them discover on their own that, like, oh, I'm struggling back here with this, and I've heard of this Laravel thing. So, you know yeah. I I I think to me that's really logical and probably still like, we like, it's been happening. Like, there'll be natural olive branches of a sort to the JavaScript world.
Taylor
00:26:52 – 00:26:53
I do think
Ian
00:26:53 – 00:27:29
there's this whole JavaScript world that's unfortunately poorly served by like the Twitter JavaScript world, like the big famous people who kind of suck up all the oxygen on Twitter and on YouTube are maybe not representative of the regular day in, day out JavaScript developers. So that's a little so I do think there's probably something there where it's like, forget about these, like, you know, the big wigs, but it's like there's probably some path into the actual people doing actual work who aren't tweeting 20 times a day and all that stuff. Yeah. But they also think They're sort of a
Aaron
00:27:29 – 00:27:30
there's sort of
Taylor
00:27:30 – 00:27:34
a new wave of, like, tech or dev journalism that, like, didn't exist
Aaron
00:27:35 – 00:27:35
Yeah. Years
Taylor
00:27:35 – 00:27:41
ago. And it's got a whole different flavor. I mean, people like like the Theo's and the Primagens.
Ian
00:27:42 – 00:27:42
Yeah.
Taylor
00:27:42 – 00:27:58
Or it's like they're, like, Twitch streamers. They're, like, tweeters, almost like journalists and commentators, and it's fun. Like, in a lot of ways, I'm glad to have it around, but it is just very different than how web development discourse functioned even just, like, 2 or 3 years ago, it feels
Ian
00:27:58 – 00:28:02
like. Mhmm. Yeah. And there's just like there isn't and you get why they do it. Right?
Ian
00:28:02 – 00:28:14
They're running the playbook that other groups have realized works. Right. But it's like prime agenda who I enjoy. I like to, he tweeted the other day. It's like, so tell me everything you hate about go.
Ian
00:28:14 – 00:28:21
And it's like, you know, it's like a, it's like a negative, like give me all your hate and I'm gonna run with the hate and do something with it, you know? And it's like,
Aaron
00:28:21 – 00:28:22
yeah,
Ian
00:28:22 – 00:28:38
that's a different kind of vibe than we've had probably and definitely in the Laravel world that we we've had. So, yeah, I think that Yeah. That is true that there is, like that's ultimately what what the algorithm wants, though. Right? And, like, that's how you get 400,000 YouTube subscribers.
Ian
00:28:38 – 00:28:40
Maybe. We're hoping Aaron becomes
Aaron
00:28:40 – 00:28:44
Yeah. We're I'm trying to show a different way. We'll see. We'll see. Yeah.
Aaron
00:28:44 – 00:28:59
I don't like the I don't like the journalism part of it. Like, the, Sam Altman gets fired, so let me make a video about it. Like, what do you know about Sam Altman and OpenAI? Like, who I go to actual journalists for that. I like the let me show you how to do something cool.
Aaron
00:28:59 – 00:29:24
Like, I like the education aspect of it better, and I think that is, like, in my opinion, that is, like, the more, like, pure way to do it. Like, to what you were saying or to your question, who should we went over? I think I don't know that the the groups are discrete. So, like, the old school or the people currently using JavaScript and the new entrants. The groups are discreet, but I don't know if the way that we reach them is discreet.
Aaron
00:29:24 – 00:29:39
I think we can do the same kind of content and reach both both groups at once. And I think we've seen that in the past several weeks of people being like, wait. Inertia exists? Y'all can use full on React on your front end? Or, like, yeah.
Aaron
00:29:39 – 00:30:02
We've we've been saying. And so I think that helps existing people and new people. I think our problem I think the problem with getting the new people is PHP as a whole, if you're going to look for a job, doesn't pay as much as React. And I don't know if that dries up with all the money being gone now and, like, if that becomes
Ian
00:30:02 – 00:30:04
think so. I would hope so.
Aaron
00:30:04 – 00:30:31
I mean, hopefully, it becomes more more even. But you have, like you know, you've got the Stack Overflow survey coming out saying PHP are the worst lowest paid developers. And part of me is like, yeah. But are they doing WordPress? Like, they're the PHP ecosystem is so enormous, and it's so global that I have to feel like those results are somewhat skewed if you're doing Laravel in the USA or Europe versus WordPress somewhere else.
Aaron
00:30:31 – 00:30:52
I have to feel like that that makes a big effect. But that's one of the common refrains against which I have no rebuttal is we don't get you know, PHP doesn't get paid very much. And I think all of us are kind of, like, immune to that because we're like, oh, I'm using PHP to build my own thing. It's not like I'm going to look for a job, but I think a lot of people are looking for jobs.
Ian
00:30:53 – 00:30:53
Right.
Taylor
00:30:53 – 00:30:56
Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a fair point, really.
Ian
00:30:56 – 00:31:20
I do want I'm curious how many actual jobs there are though in React. You know what I mean? Like, obviously, again, this is one of these, like, bias things where it's like, yes. We we see a bunch of React developers on Twitter because they're semi Twitter famous and all this stuff. But in reality, are there I have a hard time believing there's not many, many more PHP jobs than React jobs, just because there's just a lot more PHP apps.
Ian
00:31:20 – 00:31:35
There's a lot more WordPress in that whole ecosystem. So, yeah, like the average might be more, but if you're doing like high end SaaS PHP Laravel work, I don't, you know, I think you're making a more reasonable salary than somebody who has other PHP.
Taylor
00:31:35 – 00:31:36
You're making
Aaron
00:31:36 – 00:31:40
$416,000 in New York city being a design engineer, you know.
Ian
00:31:41 – 00:31:47
But how hard is that job to get? That's the point. Right? How many of your jobs actually exist? Like, in reality, I don't know.
Ian
00:31:47 – 00:31:48
I don't think there's There are
Aaron
00:31:48 – 00:31:51
there are a lot of design engineers, and they all work at Clerk.
Ian
00:31:51 – 00:31:55
So Right. You wanna do that. Clerk. Like so yeah. So I don't know.
Ian
00:31:55 – 00:31:59
Like, how many of those jobs are really out there? I feel like there's a lot of skew to that. But
Aaron
00:31:59 – 00:32:09
I'm excited about PHP becoming easier to deploy one one click or one command, get get an app out there. That I think that is gonna be that's gonna be huge.
Ian
00:32:10 – 00:32:10
But
Taylor
00:32:10 – 00:32:26
Yeah. That's the I think we're working on a lot of things. Like, it's taking it's taking a little bit of time to get all the chess pieces, like, in the right spots for, like, this whole story, but, I mean, there's been parts of it already in place. Like, I think, Laravel Herd was actually a really big piece to get in place on the local side of things.
Ian
00:32:27 – 00:32:28
Yeah. Love her.
Taylor
00:32:28 – 00:32:56
We're also working on, Joe Tannenbaum recently joined the Laravel team, and one of the first projects he's working on is getting our Versus Code story a little bit more first party and solidified. Whereas right now, a lot of the developers either coming into development or in other ecosystems, especially JavaScript, are using Versus code. They don't necessarily want to go, like, full blown IDE level thing just to try out Laravel. You know? Sure.
Taylor
00:32:56 – 00:33:25
So we're trying to kinda consolidate a lot of the popular Versus code Laravel extensions that do, you know, things like the extra IntelliSense stuff or the blade highlighting and all of that basic stuff you would need into 1 first party Laravel Versus code extension to where this one thing really levels up, like your Laravel experience and basically the most popular free editor. So I think that will help. And then we recently also hired a designer, our first full time designer at Laravel.
Aaron
00:33:26 – 00:33:28
Woah. Because you're done.
Taylor
00:33:28 – 00:33:28
So You're
Ian
00:33:28 – 00:33:30
supposed to get 7 or 8, I thought.
Aaron
00:33:30 – 00:33:31
Dozens of people.
Ian
00:33:31 – 00:33:32
This is your
Aaron
00:33:32 – 00:33:33
first designer. I love it.
Taylor
00:33:33 – 00:33:42
Yeah. Our first full time designer. Yeah. So he'll be starting next week. He's actually worked with Primagen and a lot of those guys on their coffee.
Ian
00:33:43 – 00:33:45
Oh, cool. Oh, okay. Yeah. So they
Taylor
00:33:45 – 00:33:47
they actually referred me, referred me to him. Oh, I
Aaron
00:33:47 – 00:33:49
think I know who this is. That's cool.
Taylor
00:33:49 – 00:33:53
Yeah. But also has a lot of real world, app development experience
Ian
00:33:53 – 00:33:53
and
Taylor
00:33:53 – 00:34:00
a lot of, like, real when I looked at his portfolio, I was excited because the apps looked very real and kind of information dense, and they weren't just, like,
Ian
00:34:00 – 00:34:02
pie in the sky types
Taylor
00:34:02 – 00:34:23
of apps. But, anyway, I think, like, you know, the next one of the other chess pieces I wanna get in place is just sort of like our marketing site, laravel.com, the story we're trying to tell, the way we present, the full ecosystem with Livewire and Inertia and the different options you have and trying to tell, like, a compelling make a compelling case for, like, choosing Laravel
Ian
00:34:24 – 00:34:24
Mhmm.
Taylor
00:34:24 – 00:34:43
On that side. And then, again, like, the deployment stuff, I think, is something basically a big chunk of the company is working on both on forge and sort of evolutions of what that story might look like. And, you know, I think there's still months of work to do there, but hopefully, by the end of the year, we have something to to show there that really kinda takes things to the next level.
Ian
00:34:44 – 00:35:05
So I do wanna talk more about that, but jumping back one one second. One of the things with inertia, I feel like is so you have like LiveWire and inertia in some ways, if you want the like real interactivity. Right. And it's like, they both kind of come under the Laravel umbrella in one way or another. But LiveWire does.
Ian
00:35:05 – 00:35:16
You know, have Caleb who's like very actively out there. He's developing. He's talking about it. He's building courses and all that stuff. And Inertia doesn't really have that person.
Ian
00:35:16 – 00:35:39
Like, I mean, Jonathan obviously built it and still kinda involved, but he's obviously doing other things with Tailwind and whatever. I wonder if at some point just having, like, you know, some type of DevRel person that's, like, responsible for inertia or something like that, you know, where somebody's, like, really just taken it under their wing a little bit to be that Caleb person on the inertia side. You know? Yeah. I think it would be useful.
Taylor
00:35:39 – 00:35:52
I think inertia and LiveWire, they feel very similar in their goals, but they're quite a bit different technically. Yeah. I think, like it's tough. Like, I don't wanna put words in Jonathan's mouth, but I'm sure it's
Ian
00:35:53 – 00:35:54
hard for him. I think he
Taylor
00:35:54 – 00:36:10
knows that this is, like, sort of an issue, you know, where, he created inertia. So it's obviously kind of his baby, and he feels, like, very passionate about making sure it stays good, which I can relate to that because the idea of letting someone else, like, take over merging poor requests on Laravel just feels extremely scary to
Aaron
00:36:10 – 00:36:11
me. Right.
Ian
00:36:11 – 00:36:12
But at the same time, I think
Taylor
00:36:12 – 00:36:32
he does know, like, it's hard to do both work at Tailwind full time in a very, like, senior role at Tailwind and then, also maintain inertia. So, it's something we've actually been talking about just, like, a couple days ago, like, on Telegram. It's it's kind of an ongoing discussion of, like, hey. There's x y z. I would like to get an inertia before Laracon.
Taylor
00:36:33 – 00:36:51
Like, what's the best way to kinda make that happen, and who should work on it on our side? Who should work on your side? Because we have resources here. We recently hired on Claudio Decker, who's a big contributor to inertia, in the past. And we have other even people like Jess and and Tim McDonald and others can contribute to inertia as well.
Taylor
00:36:51 – 00:36:59
So I think also one of the big differences is, like, I agree we need that person with inertia or at least we need kind of the same momentum.
Ian
00:37:00 – 00:37:00
But at
Taylor
00:37:00 – 00:37:34
the same time, it's hard because inertia is just such like a a slimmer type of product compared to Livewire, whereas Livewire has to have a lot of these big flashy cool features, whereas inertia is almost just like this communication protocol between viewer react and your Laravel back end. And at some point at some point, honestly, probably in the near future, like, inertia will be the final complete software in a way that Liveware probably will never be. It will always be, like, evolving and iterating. And that may that's hard from, like, a marketing perspective. It is.
Taylor
00:37:34 – 00:37:40
In an inevitably raises, like, is this project dead? Is this project still alive? And I don't think inertia is
Aaron
00:37:41 – 00:37:49
I get all the time about inertia is, well, it's not maintained anymore. We should use hybridly, or we should use something else that's actually maintained. It's like Mhmm.
Ian
00:37:49 – 00:37:49
I don't
Aaron
00:37:49 – 00:37:50
know if that's true.
Taylor
00:37:50 – 00:38:03
Yeah. I I think there's more to do on inertia. Like, I don't think it's complete software yet, but it will potentially get there in a way that LiveWire won't. And I think people just it's hard for people to mentally kind of wrap their head around that.
Ian
00:38:03 – 00:38:04
Yeah. Overall,
Taylor
00:38:04 – 00:38:14
I agree. We need to be, like, pushing it more. I don't think it's, like, awareness is or people aren't aware of it like they should be in other ecosystems as well.
Ian
00:38:14 – 00:38:32
Right. Just the awareness back there, even more than like the actual nuts and bolts of the development of it. It's like just somebody out there just by talking about it, you know, it's like that, that kind of awareness, but I'm going the I'm going the opposite direction. Laravel JavaScript framework. That's what we need.
Ian
00:38:32 – 00:38:39
That's the missing piece. That's the front end. We need the reactive Laravel that comes from the mind of Taylor Otwell on the, like, that was
Aaron
00:38:39 – 00:38:40
vue vue 2.
Ian
00:38:40 – 00:38:40
There we go.
Aaron
00:38:40 – 00:38:50
Vue 2. Like, I feel like Taylor and view 2 were a match made. And now it's composition, and we're getting all we're getting all JavaScript y, but view 2 was the peak.
Taylor
00:38:51 – 00:38:54
I do feel like Vue 2 was pretty goated level software.
Ian
00:38:54 – 00:38:55
Mhmm. Yeah.
Taylor
00:38:55 – 00:39:25
Just like s s tier level software. So we we use Vue 3 on forge and stuff, but I agree. Like, I I really have a soft spot for Vue 2. You know, when I hired, Jess Archer, actually, a few years ago, She was always hired to be sort of like Laravel's Area 51 type of developer where I was gonna give her kind of, like, these very skunkworks experimental projects. And, definitely, building, like, a a JavaScript framework was something that came up, like, in discussions.
Taylor
00:39:25 – 00:39:36
You know? That's something we might consider doing, and I think I ran it by her a time or 2. But we just we never really pulled the trigger on that, and we're not working on that now, you know, for clarity.
Ian
00:39:36 – 00:39:41
Yeah. Right. Well, probably not a good idea, but, you know, a boy It did come up. Yeah.
Taylor
00:39:41 – 00:39:54
I'm I just like it did come up. Yeah. Yeah. She's actually working on her and Tim, and a new hire that hasn't started yet is working on something that I think is going to be pretty dang cool, though. It's not the deployment.
Taylor
00:39:57 – 00:40:19
It's not the deployment stuff either. It's a totally separate project. You know, them being in Australia and, the new developer we hired to work with them is in Japan, only like a 1 hour time difference from them. Mhmm. So they they're kind of functioning almost like this microcosm of the company where I think, eventually, you know, they may need their own designer, their own PM out there just to, like, function.
Taylor
00:40:19 – 00:40:28
But they're working on a very independent project than some of the other, like, forge and kinda infrastructure type projects that we're working on. But I'm actually really excited about the stuff they're doing.
Aaron
00:40:28 – 00:40:31
I won't push too hard, but front end, back end, infrastructure, command line, can you give us any directional help? Us? Yeah.
Ian
00:40:39 – 00:40:40
That's what we're talking.
Taylor
00:40:40 – 00:40:54
I guess you would say it's related to back end and infrastructure and stuff, but it's not like a deployment platform or anything like that. So pretty cool. I think people will like it.
Aaron
00:40:54 – 00:40:56
Is this going to be a Laracon reveal?
Taylor
00:40:56 – 00:41:24
I think it may be I hope I don't get in trouble for, like, revealing too much of this stuff. I think this product may be like a Laracon EU 2025 reveal. I think you'll I think you will hear more about it before then, but I'm just saying in terms of, like, launch, I think that's kind of the timeline we're thinking. But I think things will start, coming out, you know, either just like teases or informational posts about it or waiting list sign ups, stuff like that. I think we'll come out before then.
Aaron
00:41:25 – 00:41:28
God. I love a new Laravel product. We don't get products.
Ian
00:41:28 – 00:41:32
It's been a while. It's been a while since we had a full new product. Right?
Taylor
00:41:32 – 00:41:34
We got 2 going. We got 2 products going.
Aaron
00:41:34 – 00:41:36
Oh, boy. What details are the
Ian
00:41:36 – 00:41:38
other one? Wait. Oh, yeah. Wait. Give us something.
Ian
00:41:38 – 00:41:43
Give us something. Alright. So we got the the r and d our Australia r and d division. Australia Japan division. Product.
Ian
00:41:44 – 00:41:48
And then the Laravel Inc mothership, I assume, is working on the other product.
Taylor
00:41:48 – 00:41:50
Yeah. Mhmm. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
Taylor
00:41:50 – 00:42:30
And that is more like that is more, you know, iterations, evolutions of things we've done, like forge and paper, that kind of thing, trying to go to the next level, though, in terms of how those work and ease of use and speed of deployment and kind of the time it takes from sign up to getting your first app out there, we would greatly like to reduce because, like, right now on Forge, you sign up for Forge. You gotta connect to DigitalOcean account. You gotta wait 15 minutes for that server to finish provisioning. You gotta deploy your app out to it. It's like, there's a lot of waiting and sort of like and just, like, the the scariness of, like, if you wanna link an a AWS account, you gotta go get an IAM credential.
Taylor
00:42:30 – 00:42:40
That's a pain. So trying to improve that whole story, you know, where on the deployment side of things, it feels like we can catch up a little bit to something like for cell or Netlify or something like that.
Ian
00:42:40 – 00:42:59
Well, and I assume as part of that story, I mean, even, even with boards, you could do this, but it sounds like obviously you're going beyond that, but I'm like controlling the framework will let you do interesting things, I assume, of, like, a deeper integration and being able to Yes. Sue things faster and all that.
Taylor
00:42:59 – 00:42:59
So That
Aaron
00:42:59 – 00:43:12
was never more clear than when y'all released vapor, and then you look back on some of the commits to Laravel, the framework, and you're like, oh, this is only possible because you control both sides. And I think that's a great strength.
Taylor
00:43:12 – 00:43:18
Yeah. I kinda had to shift some things around, make things possible in a way that wasn't possible before. Mhmm. Yeah.
Ian
00:43:19 – 00:43:19
Which is another thing I
Taylor
00:43:20 – 00:43:31
We may have to do that a little bit with these two products, but I don't think there's any like, things that would give it away that have snuck in so far. We may have to do that in the future.
Aaron
00:43:31 – 00:43:32
I'll be keeping my eye out
Ian
00:43:32 – 00:43:33
for those. Everybody's watching.
Aaron
00:43:33 – 00:43:48
Yeah. I gotta get the scoop. One interesting thing one interesting thing you said was Claudio is back. So do you is Laravel now a big enough and old enough company that you're starting to get boomerang employees? Because Mohammed is back and Claudio is back.
Taylor
00:43:49 – 00:43:55
Every employee that's ever worked here still is currently here, which is pretty crazy. That's crazy. That just
Aaron
00:43:55 – 00:43:57
doesn't happen. That's awesome.
Taylor
00:43:57 – 00:44:16
Yeah. Yeah. Mohammed's back, which is awesome because he was, like, employee number 1, you know, and we built so much foundational stuff, just me and him on Telegram, basically. Yeah. So he he was gone for a year or 2 as he sort of transitioned to Dubai, and all of that comes with that in terms of, like, work visas and things like that
Aaron
00:44:16 – 00:44:18
that we like a stressful period.
Taylor
00:44:18 – 00:44:28
Things that we couldn't really accommodate, you know, here at Laravel being in the US and stuff. Yeah. It's great to have him back, and then Claudio's back. Yeah. And he'll be working with kind of the forge team.
Taylor
00:44:28 – 00:44:44
We kinda call the forge envoy or vapor Trio. That's what we call core services. Mhmm. So we kinda have a team around that that focuses on those 3 products, and then we have 2 kinda new product teams. So, yeah, it's a lot of moving
Aaron
00:44:44 – 00:44:48
parts here. You got a core services team? You're a big co now. That's crazy.
Ian
00:44:49 – 00:44:52
So what are we up to in terms of number of employees here?
Taylor
00:44:53 – 00:44:58
I think we're, like, 31 or something. And at the beginning of the year, we were, like, 11.
Aaron
00:44:58 – 00:45:02
Right. 31.
Taylor
00:45:02 – 00:45:26
Wow. So we hired, 3 infrastructure people because a lot of the work we do is obviously infrastructure, just with forge and vapor and and some of the new stuff we're doing. So 3 infrastructure people. I think we hired 5 or 6 devs, just kinda full stack Laravel classic Laravel developers. I think we hired 4 customer support people to answer tickets, you know, on forge vapor.
Taylor
00:45:26 – 00:45:29
We were way understaffed on that, which is, like, 1 person.
Ian
00:45:29 – 00:45:30
But It was PHP Goose
Aaron
00:45:30 – 00:45:31
doing the whole thing?
Taylor
00:45:31 – 00:45:39
Yeah. So Wow. Yeah. And he was serving, you know, probably, like, 22,000 paying customers on Laravel Forge or something like that.
Ian
00:45:39 – 00:45:39
That's insane.
Taylor
00:45:40 – 00:45:50
So that's just, obviously, that's just stupid. You know? So beef that team up a little bit, and that takes time to ramp up. It's hard to find people to do that because it's very technical products. Yeah.
Taylor
00:45:50 – 00:46:18
We hired, let's see, a couple people just on kind of the the operation side of thing, business side, kind of doing customer research, partnerships with people. You know, we would love to make partnerships with, I think one's actually dropping today with Century where you can link your Century project right in Forge. Building partnerships with people like Digital Ocean, you know, Hetzner, so just like stuff like that. Yeah. Finance manager, you know, you don't want me doing the books for this company anymore.
Taylor
00:46:18 – 00:46:20
You know? So just basic people like that. But
Ian
00:46:21 – 00:46:21
CEO, of
Aaron
00:46:21 – 00:46:24
course Do you feel more or less stressed?
Ian
00:46:24 – 00:46:24
Because it
Aaron
00:46:24 – 00:46:30
sounds like you've got a lot more people doing development, but also a lot of people that took business stuff off your plate. So how do you feel?
Ian
00:46:31 – 00:46:31
I don't
Taylor
00:46:31 – 00:46:49
think I feel more stressed. It's definitely a little bit busier right now, but I think a lot of that is just figuring out our how we wanna work. You know? Like, down to very practical stuff of, like, okay, what kind of sprints do we wanna do with the dev team? What kind of, like, check ins do we need to do or stand ups to make sure it all works well?
Taylor
00:46:49 – 00:47:18
And a lot of that has been, you know, Andre, our new director of engineering, kinda working with me to figure out how we used to work because we don't wanna change things too much. Right? Where it just feels like this gyro driven, weird, faceless corporation while at the same time putting in a little bit more of the structure that you need with this many people to make sure nothing slips through the cracks. So we've been figuring that out, and, I've had a few more calls, which, as you know, I've historically been very call.
Aaron
00:47:19 – 00:47:19
Right.
Taylor
00:47:19 – 00:47:39
But I've been able to, I think, relegate most of my calls to the morning and kinda knock them out. And, I've actually come to like them in this sick way, which I'm not sure what to think about. Yeah. Especially, we kinda have, like, team calls. We have a weekly core services call, a weekly secret product one call, and a weekly secret product 2 call.
Aaron
00:47:39 – 00:47:41
Oh, I thought we were gonna get him. That was close. We almost got him.
Ian
00:47:41 – 00:47:42
Coach. It almost slipped.
Taylor
00:47:43 – 00:47:46
And it does kinda help me, you know, kinda stay up to date on what everyone's doing.
Ian
00:47:48 – 00:47:51
Hey. You need the one on ones even if they're not actually 1 on 1. You know? Yeah.
Taylor
00:47:51 – 00:48:08
So Andre's been doing a lot of the Andre's been doing a lot of the 1 on ones with the with the devs, and now we have actually team leads with them. So, like, for example, James Brooks, developer lead on kind of core services forge on Voir Vapor. So they have their own kind of stuff. Yeah. Yeah.
Taylor
00:48:09 – 00:48:11
Weird. Real it feels like a real company. Yeah.
Ian
00:48:11 – 00:48:12
They're a company.
Aaron
00:48:12 – 00:48:18
No wonder you're 3 Coke zeros in at 9 AM. You got a you got a lot of calls to do, man. Yeah.
Ian
00:48:18 – 00:48:56
So maybe they'll go back a little bit, because it's, I'm curious, like obviously you've been running everything for years now and very profitable and small team. So obviously something changed in terms of like your, you know, decision making and what you wanna do with the company. Cause I presume you could have just, I mean, maybe could have added a few more support people or whatever, but you could have kept it, you know, relatively small and just kind of cruise along. So you decided to not to change direction a little bit to get bigger and do some different things. So maybe be curious to hear your take on what you were thinking and why you decided to do that.
Taylor
00:48:58 – 00:49:42
Yeah. A few reasons. I think I can speak more freely about this maybe, like, around Laracon US, but I think we got for a lot of years, I ran the company in what I would say, like, a very selfish way, where it was, like, very much to maximize my personal bottom line. And that's what leads to just, like, not hiring more people because every person you hire is, like, this very sort of, like, measurable impact on your take home pay, not taking, like, big risk in terms of the products we're building because that, again, can just, like, burn into your own money. And at the beginning of the year, it kinda just reached a point where, I actually felt like I was sort of on cruise control with Laravel a little bit.
Taylor
00:49:42 – 00:50:10
I had kinda built everything that I had envisioned building, that I had wanted to build for myself, both on just the open source side and on the commercial side with with forge and vapor and spark and nova and just kinda like felt like we had kinda tackled what we wanted to tackle. And it kinda became this kind of fork in the road where I can either just coast into the sunset, you know, and let things ride and keep things maintained, but we're not really being super ambitious with what we're doing necessarily.
Aaron
00:50:11 – 00:50:12
Just play Fortnite League all day.
Taylor
00:50:13 – 00:50:24
Yeah. Just play Fortnite, play Rocket League, do some poor requests, you know, have a few conferences, or just, like, really go, like, hardcore and try to take it to the next level.
Ian
00:50:25 – 00:50:25
Yeah.
Taylor
00:50:25 – 00:51:07
Which is obviously what we sorta decided to do. Yeah. And, again, like, I can kinda get more into the specifics about that later in terms of what that looked like, but, basically, it was a matter of reaching a point, you know, just personally and financially where it was okay to take some of those risks and to not worry about that bottom line so much, which allowed us to do that hiring, do that scaling up of the company, treat it like you would really like a real company where you would invest, like, the money coming into the company, you would invest into building the company back out, right, typically, which is something I always avoided for better or worse. You know? So, basically, that's kind of the gist of it.
Ian
00:51:07 – 00:51:26
Well, it is also hard to go to that next level. Like at a certain point, once you have existing products, like they're always holding you back from the next product. Right? Because it's like you have customers and support and downtime and what are all this stuff to just maintain the current products. And like the next product just is gonna require way more people and energy than you have.
Ian
00:51:26 – 00:51:39
You can't just add 1 developer and be like, now we're gonna build the next huge thing because that's just not how it works. Right. So, yeah. Yeah. That big leap, you kinda have to take that bigger leap there to at some point.
Aaron
00:51:39 – 00:51:59
I feel like this is a pretty common story with a lot of famous entrepreneurs is they sell their first business for, like, a good amount of money, but not not, like, as much as they're known for now. And then after that, they feel able to take the risk to do the big thing that we know them for. And it's interesting that you're kinda you you're kinda doing that, but with the same exact company.
Taylor
00:52:00 – 00:52:00
Yeah.
Aaron
00:52:00 – 00:52:04
Like, you you have your base, and now you're taking a risk, but it's all one company.
Taylor
00:52:04 – 00:52:22
This is actually circles all the way back to DHH a little bit. So something I thought about. It was a very offhand comment. I think I heard him say in person when me and Adam Wadden went to Chicago to a base camp workshop to learn. Like, they had a very small workshop with, like, 25 people to learn how they do work, and it was very much in the early days of Laravel.
Taylor
00:52:22 – 00:52:27
I don't think Adam even had a business yet. Maybe maybe he had, like, an ebook out or something.
Ian
00:52:27 – 00:52:28
Oh.
Taylor
00:52:28 – 00:52:53
And I remember David said that very thing that, like, some founders, they achieve success. They sell their first company, and they're like, okay. I'll go do something else. He was like he had so many personal friends where it feels like very rarely are they able to capture, like, the same lightning in a bottle that they had with the first project, and they end up sort of, like, regretting it. Because it's just like something like a Laravel or, like, a Tailwind or any other any pro any product that achieves any success.
Taylor
00:52:53 – 00:52:58
It's just, like, hard to do it again. Yeah. Because it's so many things have to go right the first time.
Ian
00:52:59 – 00:52:59
Mhmm.
Taylor
00:52:59 – 00:53:11
So I I definitely couldn't, like, recreate Laravel. It's like a once in a lifetime type of thing. But yeah. That's why, like, I never that all that quote that he said, I don't think he was talking to me or talking to someone. It always just, like, scared me from that point on.
Taylor
00:53:11 – 00:53:33
It's like, okay. Like, I don't wanna be that guy that, like, sells and goes to do something else, and I just kinda flounder and wandering in the desert for so long. I can't really figure it out. So I've just kinda doubled down on Laravel. And Laravel, you know, to come back to sort of the economics of it, was always, like, this very highly profitable business with, obviously, in software, good margins, you know, low expenses.
Taylor
00:53:34 – 00:53:54
And right now, it's just like, okay. What if we just ran the company in this very breakeven kinda way where we just invested everything we got back into the company, hire people, hire the designer, build cool stuff, build new products, and, like, what would happen? You know? And I think that's where we are now, basically. So not being stupid, you know, not trying to hire 200 people and Right.
Taylor
00:53:54 – 00:53:58
Just burn through tons of cash, but just what if we just broke even? You know? Like, what
Ian
00:53:58 – 00:54:01
what if we reinvest it? Yeah. Pause for a second and say that,
Aaron
00:54:01 – 00:54:09
like, Taylor's, like, worst case scenario is break even, and that's the best case scenario for for most other companies.
Ian
00:54:09 – 00:54:10
It's like, oh, we're just trying
Aaron
00:54:10 – 00:54:15
to make it to breakeven. And Taylor's like, wow. What if we really, really force
Ian
00:54:15 – 00:54:17
ourselves Yeah. To break even. Yeah.
Taylor
00:54:18 – 00:54:23
I mean, Laravel's in a different Laravel's a, you know, of 10 years old on the commercial side.
Aaron
00:54:23 – 00:54:24
So we're
Ian
00:54:24 – 00:54:24
we're not
Taylor
00:54:24 – 00:54:28
if we can't do that now, like, it's time to, you know, pack pack it up.
Ian
00:54:28 – 00:54:51
Yeah. But I do like what you were saying is like, the thing is like, even what Aaron was saying is like, yes, there's people we can point to and be like, they sold their first company and then they started another company and then we really know them for that. But like 98% of the time somebody sells their 1st company and then you never hear from them again because like, it's really hard to do a second product and reach that same level of. Yeah. It's just hard to get that juice down.
Ian
00:54:51 – 00:54:58
You're in a different place in your life. You're, you're older, you have kids, Like, all that. It's hard to have the same hunger too if you have
Taylor
00:54:58 – 00:55:22
some money if you have some money in your bank account. Whereas a lot of us who have built our first products, we maybe had a little bit of money, but we weren't like we we were trying to, like, make it, you know, like, to make a a decent income. And I think once you get there I've talked about this with Adam a little bit of tail, and it's like, it's hard to have the same hunger once you're older, once you're more established. Like, it's hard to recapture it.
Ian
00:55:22 – 00:55:31
Yeah. To start at literally 0 and be like, okay. Fresh sheet of paper. What am I gonna build up? Like, actually pretty I mean, it's like when someone drops their
Taylor
00:55:31 – 00:55:36
first album. You know what I mean? Like, it's all it's almost always the best album. Right. Because you're you're hungry.
Taylor
00:55:36 – 00:55:39
Like, you're you're trying to make you're doing your best. Like
Ian
00:55:40 – 00:55:48
That that's gonna be your clean sheet. Me and Taylor forever have had Laravel Laravel Music. This is the this is next gen. Gonna start a a label.
Taylor
00:55:48 – 00:56:05
Yeah. If I ever pivot, it's definitely okay. So here's when I retire from Laravel and my kids are grown, I am my current plan is to move to, like, Mallorca in the, you know, Balearic Islands and just DJ pool parties every weekend. I'm I'm definitely pivoting out to music.
Ian
00:56:05 – 00:56:08
I can't wait for this. I'm so excited.
Aaron
00:56:08 – 00:56:13
DHH and the Goldman Sachs CEO are all gonna be out there d or, DJing. That's amazing. Yep.
Ian
00:56:13 – 00:56:16
I love that idea. I can't wait to go to those parties.
Taylor
00:56:16 – 00:56:18
Yeah. When Steve Shoger used to work at Laravel, he
Ian
00:56:18 – 00:56:22
I don't know if many people know. He used to work at he worked at Laravel before he worked at Tailwind.
Aaron
00:56:23 – 00:56:24
I didn't know that. Doing what?
Taylor
00:56:25 – 00:56:34
Yeah. So I was looking for a part time designer. I I didn't have enough work to hire someone full time, And Adam Wathan was, like, I know this guy. He's kinda, like, looking for
Ian
00:56:34 – 00:56:35
a thing. He worked for, like,
Taylor
00:56:35 – 00:56:48
a local company there in Canada doing stuff. And I was like, I'm looking for this guy or he's looking for something new. And then I linked up with Matt Stauffer at Tailwind, and there was a third per Ian, were you involved in this? There was a third wheel to this. I never heard who it was.
Ian
00:56:48 – 00:56:56
I think you asked me, but I was like, I don't even have, like, a quarter of a guy worth of work for you. So, yeah, I don't. I know he
Taylor
00:56:57 – 00:57:15
worked for Laravel for a week, Titan for a week, and then maybe he just did his own thing for a week. I can't remember what the arrangement was, But, yeah, he worked for Laravel. It was over a year. He built the original Spark landing page. He built a lot of, maybe some of the early Nova stuff as well.
Taylor
00:57:15 – 00:57:17
So, yeah, he was around here for a little while.
Ian
00:57:18 – 00:57:20
Yeah. But, anyway, back me and Steve,
Taylor
00:57:20 – 00:57:32
when he worked here, we would always say, like, this is just the preliminary to starting a record label because he does he makes music. He's good at making, like, electronic music. He should post more music, honestly.
Aaron
00:57:32 – 00:57:43
Y'all are crazy wanting to start a music label. That's like that's that feels like the same margins as selling coffee through the terminal. It's like, you're doing what? But I guess that's more of a passion project if
Ian
00:57:43 – 00:57:58
you do that. Thing is I always wanna do, I like the music label idea. I would like to be, like, a minority, stakeholder in Taylor's Music Empire, but I always wanna do a movie producer. Like, I just wanna produce movies. I mean like, the amount of money you need for that, it's just like, I'm never gonna get to that long.
Aaron
00:57:58 – 00:58:00
What does it even mean to produce a movie?
Ian
00:58:00 – 00:58:10
What does that mean? Nobody knows. You don't. Like, just make it up. Like, you get a script and you bring it to some people, you get some actors, and you're just kinda like making connection.
Ian
00:58:10 – 00:58:11
Some research.
Aaron
00:58:12 – 00:58:13
You don't even know what it means.
Ian
00:58:13 – 00:58:14
I don't wanna know.
Taylor
00:58:14 – 00:58:17
I'm gonna show you anything. How do I make a movie?
Ian
00:58:20 – 00:58:33
You just could never think but it's like every movie is produced by, like, you know, JJ Abrams. Right? And, obviously, JJ Abrams isn't working on 30 movies a year where he's like deeply involved. It'd be impossible. So, but he's the producer on 30 movies a year.
Ian
00:58:33 – 00:58:38
So how does he do that? Right? He's just, like, making connections. He does the meetings. Kicks it off.
Aaron
00:58:38 – 00:58:40
Completely ridiculous. You don't even know what a
Ian
00:58:40 – 00:58:48
producer does. Wanna do. I'm gonna do my version. My projected version is I'm just making connections, bringing good scripts to good directors.
Taylor
00:58:49 – 00:58:50
Curators, tastemaker,
Ian
00:58:50 – 00:58:52
taste. It's all about taste. Exactly.
Aaron
00:58:53 – 00:58:58
Yeah. I wish you the best. I don't think I'll be investing in that one, but I wish you the best. That's awesome.
Ian
00:58:58 – 00:59:00
Need, like, a 100,000,000. It's no big deal.
Taylor
00:59:00 – 00:59:08
We can make it sure. Talked about this, Ian. Some sometimes people just make baffling decisions on the music and movie stuff, and it's just like too. If they would just ask us
Ian
00:59:08 – 00:59:09
It was us.
Taylor
00:59:09 – 00:59:15
We would tell them this is a bad idea. You wouldn't have to pay me. I wanna I want this movie to be better.
Ian
00:59:15 – 00:59:15
You don't
Taylor
00:59:15 – 00:59:17
have to pay me. I just wanna help you make it better.
Ian
00:59:18 – 00:59:33
We'd be the Rick Rubin of I think we do this even for sass ops too. This is what we could do. To be taste people. Bring your movies, your your sass ops, whatever you have, we'll give you the yay or nay or the tweaks. There is some there's something there with that.
Aaron
00:59:33 – 00:59:39
I I would be a Rick Rubin. I if when I retire, I'll be the Rick Rubin of something. Yeah. Yeah. Just give opinions.
Aaron
00:59:39 – 00:59:40
I just love to. Yeah.
Ian
00:59:40 – 00:59:41
Yeah. How much
Taylor
00:59:41 – 00:59:42
is a great fun one?
Ian
00:59:42 – 00:59:48
Such a great job. Yeah. We used to we did a couple of movie podcasts way back in the day. I think I remember one of the one of the
Taylor
00:59:48 – 00:59:49
star wars. Yeah.
Ian
00:59:52 – 00:59:53
Star Wars.
Taylor
00:59:53 – 00:59:55
What a what a mishandled franchise that is. I feel like I just
Aaron
00:59:56 – 00:59:57
God, how? YouTube.
Ian
00:59:57 – 00:59:57
You could
Aaron
00:59:57 – 00:59:59
have done so much better.
Ian
00:59:59 – 00:59:59
I agree.
Taylor
01:00:00 – 01:00:02
Probably. Yes. Actually, I really I
Ian
01:00:02 – 01:00:10
really I really agree. I actually agree. Yeah. How did they fumble Star Wars? It's like, dude, it's nights and space.
Ian
01:00:10 – 01:00:15
It's just, like, you could literally almost do anything. How how do you mess it up?
Taylor
01:00:15 – 01:00:28
Yeah. I saw someone tweet the other day. They went to, like, the Star Wars place at Disney World or whatever, and it was all adults. And it was, like, the perfect illustration of how they've, like, fumbled that for the kids. Kids don't care about Star Wars.
Ian
01:00:28 – 01:00:28
You know
Taylor
01:00:28 – 01:00:29
what I mean?
Ian
01:00:29 – 01:00:30
Like, they don't care.
Taylor
01:00:30 – 01:00:33
It's just all nostalgia for millennials at this point.
Ian
01:00:33 – 01:00:51
And it's so funny because George Lucas' whole thing is, like, he's always, like, whenever anybody critiques him about he's like, well, it's a movie for kids. Like, that's his main line, but it's like, but the kids don't wanna watch it. Like, then why'd you make it all about the trade Federation? Like, it doesn't make any sense. Like, nobody my 10 year old doesn't care about the Trade Federation.
Ian
01:00:51 – 01:00:58
It's like It's so hard. Bad. I don't Bad. And then you then I was like, oh, hopeful. Disney.
Ian
01:00:58 – 01:01:09
Yes. Like, bring it into the board where they're just gonna, like, make it happy. They have all these creative people, and it's like, a couple of them are okay, you know, but it's still not what anybody thought it would be. I don't think so.
Taylor
01:01:10 – 01:01:22
I've I consider myself a a Star Wars fan, and if someone had a gun to my head right now and said, explain the trade federation in Naboo and how all that went down and why that movie even happened, I just died. I gotta have to die.
Ian
01:01:22 – 01:01:23
Like, they just have to shoot me.
Taylor
01:01:24 – 01:01:26
I feel like I'm a fan of this franchise.
Ian
01:01:27 – 01:01:31
What what what's even the point of Jar Jar Binks? Like, does he what's the plot devices he, like, you
Taylor
01:01:31 – 01:01:34
know have no chance. You know? They have they got nothing.
Ian
01:01:36 – 01:01:47
Even just, like, what's the name of episode 9? I couldn't tell you the actual title of episode 9. I don't think I could bring it to my head. Like, how do I not know the name? Just so bad.
Ian
01:01:48 – 01:01:48
Episode 7
Taylor
01:01:48 – 01:01:50
was good. Episode 8 and 9
Ian
01:01:50 – 01:01:50
were
Aaron
01:01:50 – 01:01:51
Yeah. I
Ian
01:01:51 – 01:01:54
really I actually really like 7. But Yeah. 7's a good movie.
Aaron
01:01:54 – 01:01:55
What was 7? Yeah.
Taylor
01:01:55 – 01:01:58
The first one that had, like, Ray and Finn and kind of the new Yeah. Characters.
Aaron
01:01:59 – 01:02:00
I don't think I saw it 89.
Taylor
01:02:00 – 01:02:03
It was a good, tight, focused movie.
Aaron
01:02:04 – 01:02:08
What was the standalone one with Felicity Jones? That wasn't
Taylor
01:02:09 – 01:02:11
a bad movie. Good. I like that one. Good movie.
Ian
01:02:12 – 01:02:23
That's the best of the offshoot sort of ones, like solos. Obviously, not good. All the television shows except for Andor is are not good. Although Andor is super good. Andor is, like, the best.
Ian
01:02:24 – 01:02:31
But, yeah, I don't know. It's so disappointing. So disappointing. I don't know. Maybe they'll bring it around.
Ian
01:02:31 – 01:02:39
They own it forever. You know we're getting Star Wars stuff forever, so maybe they'll For sure. They'll turn it around. They get the right creative people in there. Maybe when we they they sign us on.
Aaron
01:02:40 – 01:02:43
Yeah. Maybe when y'all become executive producers, it'll turn around.
Taylor
01:02:44 – 01:02:50
No no one ask us what we do there. Yeah. We taste, mate. We're the taste makers.
Ian
01:02:50 – 01:02:52
That's exactly what they do.
Taylor
01:02:53 – 01:02:54
Put that in my email signature.
Ian
01:02:54 – 01:03:01
Yeah. The taste maker. Yeah. Oh, man. I don't know.
Ian
01:03:01 – 01:03:09
I don't wanna keep you too long, but do we have other stuff we need to touch on here? Tell you of any any stuff on your end that you wanna talk about of what's going on or anything like that? I
Taylor
01:03:09 – 01:03:21
mean, I feel like y'all have a pretty good update as far as what we're doing over here. You know, we've got the secret products cooking as all classic Laravel fashion. Yep. Hiring update. I don't know.
Taylor
01:03:21 – 01:03:22
Anything else on y'all's mind?
Ian
01:03:22 – 01:03:23
How's Larry County coming along?
Aaron
01:03:23 – 01:03:26
Yeah. I wanna hear how excited you are to come to Dallas. Yeah.
Taylor
01:03:26 – 01:03:36
Yeah. I mean, I've always been a big Texas and Dallas fan. Just 4 hours away from from me, so actually pretty close. I'm actually coming down for a finals game, Aaron.
Aaron
01:03:36 – 01:03:36
Oh, nice.
Taylor
01:03:36 – 01:03:49
If the the tickets are probably ridiculous, so I don't know. We'll we'll see. But I'm pretty excited about it. I mean, we got the whole speaker lineup done. I've actually got a call, Wednesday with our event planner.
Taylor
01:03:50 – 01:04:04
We hire a separate company to sort of put those events together. So I think it's gonna be pretty sweet. The venue's good. Big, huge, bright screen. We're gonna have good food, good vibes, hopefully, some previews of some of the stuff we've been working on.
Taylor
01:04:04 – 01:04:28
So I think it's gonna be fun. I know and I'm excited about what some of the other speakers are bringing. Like, I know Caleb's bringing some pretty sweet stuff on the LiveWire side. I'm hoping to show some hopefully, I have some inertia stuff to show on my talk so we can kinda get both sides of the coin. We'll have some of the tech, journalists there with Primagen being not only kind of a lightning talk speaker, but also serving coffee at the event.
Ian
01:04:29 – 01:04:38
Shout out to the sun. It's gonna be cool. Yeah. We're bringing the JavaScript guys. We we're bringing them into the fold slowly, but surely, we will absorb them, and Mhmm.
Ian
01:04:39 – 01:04:39
It'll be great.
Taylor
01:04:39 – 01:04:42
Yeah. I feel like he's actually a pretty neutral player in the space.
Aaron
01:04:42 – 01:04:43
He is.
Taylor
01:04:43 – 01:04:51
Like, he's he's not really, like, a JavaScript guy or not a PHP guy, obviously, but he's sort of a pretty neutral player.
Ian
01:04:51 – 01:04:51
Mhmm.
Aaron
01:04:51 – 01:04:52
I'm excited for this.
Ian
01:04:53 – 01:04:58
What I consider a real programmer. You know? He's like a real gamer. He's like, he's on his Real programmer for sure. Math stuff.
Ian
01:04:58 – 01:05:01
I'm I'm like, what the hell is he even doing? I have no idea what he's doing. He's doing that.
Aaron
01:05:01 – 01:05:06
Like, dude, you're an order of magnitude beyond. I have no idea what you're talking about.
Taylor
01:05:06 – 01:05:13
He's a better programmer than me. I'm sure. It's funny my son, who's not into programming at all, likes to listen to Primagen on Twitch. Really?
Ian
01:05:13 – 01:05:16
Because he finds it, like, funny and fast paced and,
Aaron
01:05:16 – 01:05:16
like Yeah.
Ian
01:05:17 – 01:05:18
Interesting. So, like, if we're on a long car ride,
Taylor
01:05:18 – 01:05:21
he's like, dad, can we listen to that one funny programmer guy? And I'm like,
Aaron
01:05:21 – 01:05:22
imagine he's like, yeah.
Taylor
01:05:23 – 01:05:30
Yeah. So when I told him he was gonna be at Laracon, he was actually pretty excited. You know, awesome. Pretty funny.
Ian
01:05:30 – 01:05:37
I haven't tried that angle with the kids. My kids none of my kids are that into the programming, but maybe I need to try the Primagen. Maybe that's the the way in to to their brains. He's high energy, man. He'll he'll keep their attention.
Ian
01:05:37 – 01:05:38
He's so good at that.
Taylor
01:05:43 – 01:05:50
I'm curious who listen obviously, a lot of people listen to his Twitch streams, but aren't they shouldn't they be working? Like, who are these people
Ian
01:05:50 – 01:05:50
that are
Aaron
01:05:50 – 01:05:51
I don't know.
Taylor
01:05:51 – 01:05:52
On there?
Aaron
01:05:52 – 01:06:04
I don't know. That was that's one thing that I just, like I I understand that it's happening, but I don't know how. I don't know how it's happening. I don't know who's watching it. I it makes and thousands and thousands of people are doing it.
Ian
01:06:04 – 01:06:08
Working from home and getting to do it. You know? I don't know. It's like
Taylor
01:06:08 – 01:06:11
Is it just background noise for work at home programmers?
Ian
01:06:11 – 01:06:12
Or I
Taylor
01:06:12 – 01:06:13
don't know. I don't know what it is.
Ian
01:06:14 – 01:06:16
Front round noise? Who knows? Like Yeah.
Aaron
01:06:17 – 01:06:17
I don't know.
Ian
01:06:17 – 01:06:32
But it's like every that's a I don't know. It's so funny because this noise meets no end in the real world. Like, I'm sure, like, whatever. I'm sure all of our employees and whatever, like, there's stuff going on in their house and whatever, because Laravel's entirely work from home and we're entirely work from home and stuff's going on. Right?
Ian
01:06:32 – 01:06:58
But when I go into the physical world and there is, like, a cashier on their phone, it, like, just infuriates me to no end. I'm like, I I used to be a retail manager and I'd be like, I would rip that phone out of your hand so fast and, like, just throw it on the ground. It's like, so there's something about the physical nature of being rude to your customers directly, even though, like, maybe you're delaying answering customers, and I don't even know because you got distracted by the primogen. But, like, kids these days, you know, they they got to be Kids these
Aaron
01:06:58 – 01:07:01
days. I was gonna say it if you didn't, but, yeah, kids these days.
Ian
01:07:01 – 01:07:10
Okay. We can't we have to do one more thing. Taylor, do you let anybody real time track you on your iPhone GPS?
Taylor
01:07:12 – 01:07:13
It's a great question.
Aaron
01:07:13 – 01:07:14
No. No.
Taylor
01:07:15 – 01:07:16
I'm still tracking Sam.
Aaron
01:07:16 – 01:07:17
What if I'm
Taylor
01:07:17 – 01:07:18
still tracking Sam telekoff.
Ian
01:07:19 – 01:07:27
You're tracking him. You like to track people, but you don't wanna be tracked. That makes total sense. I'm down with that. I don't mind tracking other people, but I don't wanna be tracked.
Ian
01:07:27 – 01:07:29
Alright. Yeah. I don't team no track.
Taylor
01:07:29 – 01:07:38
I don't have any opposition to, like, you know, a spouse, like, knowing where you are for, like, safety or whatever. I actually just don't go anywhere usually, so it's
Ian
01:07:38 – 01:07:40
not really, like, a problem. Where you are. Yeah.
Taylor
01:07:41 – 01:07:48
Yeah. Sort of a moot point. But, yeah, I'm still tracking old old Sam from our, Cabana Conf. I was like, Sam I because Sam was like, I do yeah. I just share with everyone.
Taylor
01:07:48 – 01:07:58
Everyone knows where I am, and, I'm I'm telling him I'm just like people. Yeah. I know. But, yeah, what what are what are y'all's teams? Are y'all team track, team no track?
Aaron
01:07:58 – 01:08:01
Track all the way. Jennifer always knows where I am. I know where
Ian
01:08:01 – 01:08:03
she is. It's convenient. It's I'm team
Aaron
01:08:03 – 01:08:06
no track. Convenient. Ian is team team no man. I don't want
Ian
01:08:06 – 01:08:14
anybody Yeah. I don't want the missile coming to get me because somebody will be on my location or the drone strike or anything like that.
Aaron
01:08:14 – 01:08:15
Not an executive producer. Not
Ian
01:08:15 – 01:08:16
that important.
Taylor
01:08:16 – 01:08:24
I think I can actually I can actually see Abigail's location, so I should I probably should share mine, honestly, to be fair. But, like, it is it is useful to
Aaron
01:08:24 – 01:08:25
do take. The one way she
Taylor
01:08:25 – 01:08:34
direction. Yeah. So it is useful sometimes when, like, okay. I know she's coming home, and I wanna, like, knock out the dish. I need to do something, you know, like, before she gets home.
Taylor
01:08:34 – 01:08:35
I put
Aaron
01:08:35 – 01:08:36
something off till the last minute.
Ian
01:08:36 – 01:08:36
How much
Aaron
01:08:36 – 01:08:38
time do I have left? Yeah.
Taylor
01:08:38 – 01:08:42
Yeah. Like, I need to get the dishwasher emptied. I need to, do something. You know? And that's
Ian
01:08:42 – 01:08:42
that's
Taylor
01:08:42 – 01:08:45
actually the most convenient feature of that, I would say.
Aaron
01:08:45 – 01:08:46
That's what I'm
Ian
01:08:46 – 01:08:54
saying. No. Yep. No. This was this was basically Aaron's take 2 of the, like, arrival time estimation and and things of that nature, but,
Taylor
01:08:55 – 01:08:55
I don't know.
Ian
01:08:55 – 01:08:59
I'm not I'm not converted yet, but maybe. Maybe. Right away, possibly. But
Aaron
01:08:59 – 01:09:12
I got one one more question. Ian had his question. I got one more question. How much do you think, Taylor, how much do you think the Lambo has memed, Laravel and PHP into the wider wider ecosystem?
Taylor
01:09:13 – 01:09:21
I mean, I think it's definitely it's not nothing. Like, it's definitely raised awareness. Nothing. Definitely. It's definitely raised awareness and kind of become a a joke.
Taylor
01:09:21 – 01:09:33
Uh-huh. Yeah. Meme in the wider developer. I mean, it was even at freaking Vercel's conference. They had a PHP Lambo up on the stay you know, on the screen, which is a pretty big pretty big thing.
Taylor
01:09:34 – 01:09:39
So, yeah, I don't regret that purchase at all from that perspective. No. It's helpful to
Aaron
01:09:39 – 01:09:41
come much. Point, it's a write off. Hopefully.
Taylor
01:09:42 – 01:09:49
It should be. It should be. I've never I've never been one to, you know, take those kind of chances on the write offs, but,
Ian
01:09:49 – 01:09:50
but it should be
Taylor
01:09:50 – 01:09:51
at this point.
Ian
01:09:51 – 01:09:55
It's kinda interesting how much more mileage you've gotten out of that too than, like I mean, DHH.
Taylor
01:09:55 – 01:09:55
Right?
Ian
01:09:55 – 01:10:02
Like, he was literally racing cars, and he has tons of cars way before you had a Lambo. He had all the expensive cars. Right? And, like
Taylor
01:10:02 – 01:10:08
One of his cars, it costs 20 times what a Lambo cost. Like, one of those at that Aston Martin. Aston
Ian
01:10:08 – 01:10:09
Martin. Yeah.
Taylor
01:10:09 – 01:10:12
That's like a $4,000,000 car. You know? Right.
Ian
01:10:12 – 01:10:15
With a little more than a slightly used Lambo. Yeah. I prefer.
Taylor
01:10:16 – 01:10:24
I don't think people realize how strong DHH's car flex game is. Oh, damn. Me and DHH are way different. We're not in the same ballpark on the
Ian
01:10:24 – 01:10:31
car. People have no idea how much DHH makes. They're like, oh, he's probably doing alright. I'm like, he's got 100 and 100 and 1,000,000 of dollars. Like The
Taylor
01:10:31 – 01:10:42
guy's got over $10,000,000 just in cars. There's not a car elevator. You know what I mean? Like, it's not we're not I'm I'm t ball. He's Yankees, you know, like, as far as the car goes.
Ian
01:10:42 – 01:10:53
Got a house in Malibu that overlooks the ocean. Okay? Like and it's not like it's like a house made of concrete and glass and shit. It's not just some, like, little cabin he got. It's probably a $50,000,000 house.
Ian
01:10:53 – 01:10:54
Like, come on.
Taylor
01:10:54 – 01:11:00
The the empty land that house sits on is worth more than anybody bashing him on Twitter even has.
Aaron
01:11:00 – 01:11:02
It's worth it's worth more than our All
Ian
01:11:02 – 01:11:06
of them. Probably. All of them together. Yeah. Every single one of them together doesn't
Taylor
01:11:06 – 01:11:23
People don't real people don't realize that Pagani Zonda or yeah. The the Zonda that PHH has that's a one off it's called the Zonda HH. It's it's a one off car, and that just off the shelf, that thing's gotta be, like, 3, $4,000,000. Right? You know?
Taylor
01:11:23 – 01:11:24
So Yeah.
Ian
01:11:24 – 01:11:25
He's on a whole another a whole
Aaron
01:11:25 – 01:11:27
another on the h h for him and Meyer Hanson?
Ian
01:11:28 – 01:11:29
Yes. We made it for him.
Taylor
01:11:29 – 01:11:30
Oh, one off
Ian
01:11:31 – 01:11:31
you know,
Taylor
01:11:31 – 01:11:43
a pagan not even a one off Pagani is obviously 1,000,000 of dollars, but the Zonda HH one off custom color, custom made for him, like, come on. He's a different level.
Ian
01:11:43 – 01:11:48
Yeah. It's not I did not know that. T ball versus the Yankees for And we've got the car to say,
Taylor
01:11:49 – 01:11:50
one off h h too.
Ian
01:11:50 – 01:12:00
Oh, he's, like, the Akira h h. Are, like, 8,000,000 or something like that. So, yeah, I mean, you got the $150,000,000 in cars. Okay. So, like, people are like, man, AD, they're going down.
Ian
01:12:00 – 01:12:03
Base camp doesn't sell that much as it used to. All the competition. I'm like,
Aaron
01:12:03 – 01:12:04
come on. That's what
Ian
01:12:04 – 01:12:18
you guys are talking about. Like, they're printing the money printing factory. That was so funny because when Aaron interviewed him, he's like, you know, what if we got a business one day? I don't know. I do enjoy that mindset of having that mindset of, like, if I have to build with my 2 hands, I need to.
Ian
01:12:18 – 01:12:19
Like, that's my mindset too.
Aaron
01:12:19 – 01:12:23
I love that. My $250,000,000, what can we build?
Ian
01:12:23 – 01:12:27
$100,000,000 and my 2 hands. We can do it. But
Taylor
01:12:27 – 01:12:35
Yeah. I still think about that. It's funny. I still think about that with Laravel. Like, what I said about not letting other people merge PRs into Laravel because I think, like, if all
Ian
01:12:35 – 01:12:39
of this dies, like, I I need a framework to build stuff with. So, like I said,
Taylor
01:12:40 – 01:12:42
I gotta keep Laravel good. You know?
Ian
01:12:42 – 01:12:53
Yeah. I gotta keep it pure and clean. So Yeah. One other last other thing is you still are doing all that? Like, are you still the, like, open source that's still your your thing fully is?
Taylor
01:12:53 – 01:13:12
Yeah. So we kinda have a little open source team at Laravel. So that consists right now of Joe Tannenbaum, who is new, and he's working on that Versus code stuff right now. And then, Dries, who's been long time sort of open source triage, he does all of the issue management. So I never look at GitHub issues.
Taylor
01:13:12 – 01:13:14
Like, I never click the issues tab
Ian
01:13:14 – 01:13:16
on GitHub. In years, I haven't clicked that button.
Aaron
01:13:17 – 01:13:20
You gotta tell Adam to do the same thing. Yeah. Totally those issues.
Taylor
01:13:20 – 01:13:35
Yeah. And then, Mior who works a lot on Lara Von Nova, but also does a lot of open source help for us. And then me, I still every morning, first thing I do when I sit down at the office every day is click a bookmark that says pull request, and it
Ian
01:13:35 – 01:13:36
shows me all the pull requests across
Taylor
01:13:36 – 01:13:48
the whole Laravel org. You know, all the open source repos combined into one screen. Yeah. And usually that sits at around 6 to 10 open poor requests by the end of every day. Mhmm.
Ian
01:13:49 – 01:13:49
So
Taylor
01:13:49 – 01:13:55
and that's what I do. I'm the only one that merges those poor requests still. Wow. And that goes to my framework. Yeah.
Taylor
01:13:55 – 01:14:17
I like doing that. It's fun. Most of them are pretty fast, you know, because they're just, like, a simple one line change or a typo. You do occasionally get the ones where it's, like, 30 files change, and that takes, like, a few days of, like, looking through it a little bit at a time. But, yeah, I still really like it, and it's just, like, I feel like that's I'm the cure I'm the tastemaker Right.
Taylor
01:14:17 – 01:14:26
For that stuff, you know, like, still and try to keep it cohesive, and, like, it feels like it all was written by the same person and all of that. So, yeah, that's what I do first thing every day.
Aaron
01:14:26 – 01:14:42
I saw one recently that was, like, improve application service provider loading when you have, like, 300 service providers by using a hash map. And it was pretty in-depth. And so what's your process? You, like, look at it and then switch it to draft if it's not ready? Like, what's your flow there?
Taylor
01:14:42 – 01:14:59
Yeah. So, like, if I if it needs any tweaks, I'll leave a comment and then mark it as draft because I filter out drafts on that, like, bookmark that I was talking about. So it filters out drafts. It filters out a few other repos that I don't really manage. And then I'll just tell them market ready for review when you want me to take a look again.
Taylor
01:14:59 – 01:15:00
Gotcha.
Ian
01:15:01 – 01:15:04
I feel like our workflow is actually pretty hardcore. Like, if I close a
Taylor
01:15:04 – 01:15:26
pull request, I never go back to the pull request. They could leave a bunch of comments. I would never see them unless, like, surfaces it to me because sometimes he will. But, usually, you just would have to reopen, like, a fresh poor request to kinda get me to look at it again. And I try to action things pretty quickly because otherwise, you'll just end up with 100 poor requests.
Taylor
01:15:26 – 01:15:31
Mhmm. Because, like, if I didn't do poor requests for a week, we would have over a 100 because we get
Ian
01:15:32 – 01:15:32
Mhmm.
Taylor
01:15:32 – 01:15:37
Like, you know, 20 a day or something like that. So it would pile up really quickly.
Aaron
01:15:37 – 01:15:45
That's the thing that blew my mind at the Lyricon Nashville. Like, I would come backstage looking for a speaker, and you would be sitting on the couch doing pull requests.
Ian
01:15:45 – 01:15:49
And I'm like, in the middle of Lyricon? It's just crazy
Aaron
01:15:49 – 01:15:50
that you're always on it.
Taylor
01:15:50 – 01:16:00
Yeah. I remember one time, this was a few years back. I was in the hospital for, like, 3 or 4 days, and I came out of the hospital. I didn't do pull requests there. I came out of the hospital.
Taylor
01:16:00 – 01:16:07
I had a 135 pull requests. Oh. After, like I'd only been gone for, like, 4 days. Wow. But, yeah, pretty crazy.
Taylor
01:16:07 – 01:16:08
Gosh. That's why
Ian
01:16:08 – 01:16:09
I love it.
Taylor
01:16:09 – 01:16:10
On top of it.
Ian
01:16:10 – 01:16:15
Yeah. At some point, you might need might need some help there eventually, but you can you're still holding it down for now.
Taylor
01:16:15 – 01:16:17
Yeah. Still holding on.
Ian
01:16:17 – 01:16:29
But that is a huge thing you do see come up. Every once in a while, you see just, like, a tweet fly across or whatever that people can't believe, like, there's no issues open in Mhmm. In Laravel, or they're like, do they just auto close them or whatever? It's like, no. Somebody's, like, reviewing and on top of shit there.
Taylor
01:16:29 – 01:16:43
Yeah. I think for the size of, like, the number of pull requests and number of contributors, Laravel's gotta be pretty unique in, like, the low issue pull request count, because project of this size is very common to have, like, 400 open pull request.
Ian
01:16:44 – 01:16:46
It's building up forever.
Taylor
01:16:46 – 01:16:47
Yeah.
Ian
01:16:47 – 01:16:54
Alright, man. Well, thank you for coming on. Really appreciate it. Been, been trying to get John for a bit. So this is, this is awesome.
Ian
01:16:54 – 01:16:57
I think we broke, we broke some news. I think it was great. Yeah.
Taylor
01:16:57 – 01:16:58
It was fun times.
Ian
01:16:58 – 01:17:01
Yeah. All right, man. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thanks.
Ian
01:17:01 – 01:17:16
Thanks for everybody for listening. Can, go to check out all the old episodes on mostlytechnical.com, hit us up on Twitter at mostly tech pod. And you can also email in at most technical podcast at Gmail, and we will, see you next week. Thanks, everybody. Bye.
Taylor
01:17:16 – 01:17:16
See you.
Me

Thanks for reading! My name is Aaron and I write, make videos, and generally try really hard.

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