S-Tier Software with Taylor Otwell

Ian

Hello.

Aaron

Good morning, Ian. How are we doing?

Ian

Very good. We got a extra special guest today. We

Aaron

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

Taylor Otwell back with a mostly technical podcast.

Ian

Oh, the Taylor at will buy. It was just.

Aaron

Oh, did we lose Ian already? He's. Oh, there he is. Okay.

Ian

I'm here. I'm here.

Taylor

Yeah. Yeah. No, He was frozen in a state of permanent happiness on my screen.

Ian

If I get that Taylor Otwell audio coming through my earbuds, just locks me up. So good. Yep.

Taylor

Yep. So how's this podcast work? I don't I don't know. How's what's the agenda here?

Ian

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

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

Hot takes.

Taylor

It was a busy weekend on Twitter for sure.

Ian

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.

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?

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

The the most recent one was the final class debate. That was

Taylor

oh, man. People were

Ian

like a PHP thing. Like, that's not even a Laravel thing. I mean, that

Aaron

was very yeah. That was benign.

Ian

I don't know, t. What do you think about this? Like, obviously, you've thought all about it.

Taylor

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

I love that take. That's a hot take right there.

Taylor

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Aaron Aaron is Aaron is shook by this DHH phrase coming from

Aaron

the beat. I'm just, you know,

Ian

I just mark it down in your

Aaron

diary today. Ian praised DHH. Like, this this is my favorite. I just love the reversal here. This is a go on.

Praise DHH some more.

Ian

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.

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.

And, like, no. I don't. I'm sad because I can't do that because he's right. In the man. Yeah.

No. He's just right. But but yeah. So they were micro analyzing and pop over and hey and, you know, whatever. Yeah.

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.

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

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.

It's not a big deal. Thanks for all thanks for all the free press.

Taylor

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

I don't think, like,

Taylor

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

I saw you chime in on that one.

Taylor

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.

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.

I don't think people are just, like, purposely making bad quality stuff. You know?

Ian

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

That got me to that's the

Ian

one that got me to lead into the

Aaron

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

That's not where most people will ever be. And so it's servicing the the whole market there.

Taylor

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.

Yeah. 14 14 year old PHP framework. It's like it's put up there right against, like, the latest

Ian

Cutting edge. And greatest JavaScript.

Aaron

Success. Yeah.

Taylor

Yeah. Pretty pretty wild.

Ian

Mhmm.

Taylor

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

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

Yeah.

Ian

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

It's like, there's 3 bug fixes. It's like, no, there's stuff being shipped.

Taylor

No. Yeah. Sometimes there's some real bangers in those weekly releases.

Ian

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

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

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

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.

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.

You know?

Ian

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.

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

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.

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

Keep claiming. Yeah.

Taylor

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.

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.

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.

It's it's weird.

Ian

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?

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

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.

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.

All of that just works together so nicely.

Taylor

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

I I

Taylor

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

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

Yeah.

Ian

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.

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.

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

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

not

Aaron

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

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.

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

Mhmm.

Taylor

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

Mhmm.

Taylor

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I do think

Ian

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

there's sort of

Taylor

a new wave of, like, tech or dev journalism that, like, didn't exist

Aaron

Yeah. Years

Taylor

ago. And it's got a whole different flavor. I mean, people like like the Theo's and the Primagens.

Ian

Yeah.

Taylor

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

like. Mhmm. Yeah. And there's just like there isn't and you get why they do it. Right?

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.

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

yeah,

Ian

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.

Maybe. We're hoping Aaron becomes

Aaron

Yeah. We're I'm trying to show a different way. We'll see. We'll see. Yeah.

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.

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.

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.

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

think so. I would hope so.

Aaron

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.

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

Right.

Taylor

Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a fair point, really.

Ian

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.

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

You're making

Aaron

$416,000 in New York city being a design engineer, you know.

Ian

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.

I don't think there's There are

Aaron

there are a lot of design engineers, and they all work at Clerk.

Ian

So Right. You wanna do that. Clerk. Like so yeah. So I don't know.

Like, how many of those jobs are really out there? I feel like there's a lot of skew to that. But

Aaron

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

But

Taylor

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

Yeah. Love her.

Taylor

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.

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

Woah. Because you're done.

Taylor

So You're

Ian

supposed to get 7 or 8, I thought.

Aaron

Dozens of people.

Ian

This is your

Aaron

first designer. I love it.

Taylor

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

Oh, cool. Oh, okay. Yeah. So they

Taylor

they actually referred me, referred me to him. Oh, I

Aaron

think I know who this is. That's cool.

Taylor

Yeah. But also has a lot of real world, app development experience

Ian

and

Taylor

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

pie in the sky types

Taylor

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

Mhmm.

Taylor

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

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.

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.

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

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

hard for him. I think he

Taylor

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

me. Right.

Ian

But at the same time, I think

Taylor

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.

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.

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

But at

Taylor

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.

In an inevitably raises, like, is this project dead? Is this project still alive? And I don't think inertia is

Aaron

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

I don't

Aaron

know if that's true.

Taylor

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

Yeah. Overall,

Taylor

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

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.

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

vue vue 2.

Ian

There we go.

Aaron

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

I do feel like Vue 2 was pretty goated level software.

Ian

Mhmm. Yeah.

Taylor

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.

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

Yeah. Right. Well, probably not a good idea, but, you know, a boy It did come up. Yeah.

Taylor

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.

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.

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

I won't push too hard, but front end, back end, infrastructure, command line, can you give us any directional help? Us? Yeah.

Ian

That's what we're talking.

Taylor

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

Is this going to be a Laracon reveal?

Taylor

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

God. I love a new Laravel product. We don't get products.

Ian

It's been a while. It's been a while since we had a full new product. Right?

Taylor

We got 2 going. We got 2 products going.

Aaron

Oh, boy. What details are the

Ian

other one? Wait. Oh, yeah. Wait. Give us something.

Give us something. Alright. So we got the the r and d our Australia r and d division. Australia Japan division. Product.

And then the Laravel Inc mothership, I assume, is working on the other product.

Taylor

Yeah. Mhmm. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

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.

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

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

So That

Aaron

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

Yeah. I kinda had to shift some things around, make things possible in a way that wasn't possible before. Mhmm. Yeah.

Ian

Which is another thing I

Taylor

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

I'll be keeping my eye out

Ian

for those. Everybody's watching.

Aaron

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

Every employee that's ever worked here still is currently here, which is pretty crazy. That's crazy. That just

Aaron

doesn't happen. That's awesome.

Taylor

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

that we like a stressful period.

Taylor

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.

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

parts here. You got a core services team? You're a big co now. That's crazy.

Ian

So what are we up to in terms of number of employees here?

Taylor

I think we're, like, 31 or something. And at the beginning of the year, we were, like, 11.

Aaron

Right. 31.

Taylor

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.

We were way understaffed on that, which is, like, 1 person.

Ian

But It was PHP Goose

Aaron

doing the whole thing?

Taylor

Yeah. So Wow. Yeah. And he was serving, you know, probably, like, 22,000 paying customers on Laravel Forge or something like that.

Ian

That's insane.

Taylor

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.

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.

You know? So just basic people like that. But

Ian

CEO, of

Aaron

course Do you feel more or less stressed?

Ian

Because it

Aaron

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

I don't

Taylor

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?

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

Right.

Taylor

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

Oh, I thought we were gonna get him. That was close. We almost got him.

Ian

Coach. It almost slipped.

Taylor

And it does kinda help me, you know, kinda stay up to date on what everyone's doing.

Ian

Hey. You need the one on ones even if they're not actually 1 on 1. You know? Yeah.

Taylor

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.

Weird. Real it feels like a real company. Yeah.

Ian

They're a company.

Aaron

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

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

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.

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

Just play Fortnite League all day.

Taylor

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

Yeah.

Taylor

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

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.

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

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

Yeah.

Aaron

Like, you you have your base, and now you're taking a risk, but it's all one company.

Taylor

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.

I don't think Adam even had a business yet. Maybe maybe he had, like, an ebook out or something.

Ian

Oh.

Taylor

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.

It's just, like, hard to do it again. Yeah. Because it's so many things have to go right the first time.

Ian

Mhmm.

Taylor

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.

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.

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.

Just burn through tons of cash, but just what if we just broke even? You know? Like, what

Ian

what if we reinvest it? Yeah. Pause for a second and say that,

Aaron

like, Taylor's, like, worst case scenario is break even, and that's the best case scenario for for most other companies.

Ian

It's like, oh, we're just trying

Aaron

to make it to breakeven. And Taylor's like, wow. What if we really, really force

Ian

ourselves Yeah. To break even. Yeah.

Taylor

I mean, Laravel's in a different Laravel's a, you know, of 10 years old on the commercial side.

Aaron

So we're

Ian

we're not

Taylor

if we can't do that now, like, it's time to, you know, pack pack it up.

Ian

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.

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

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

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

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.

Like, you're you're trying to make you're doing your best. Like

Ian

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

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

I can't wait for this. I'm so excited.

Aaron

DHH and the Goldman Sachs CEO are all gonna be out there d or, DJing. That's amazing. Yep.

Ian

I love that idea. I can't wait to go to those parties.

Taylor

Yeah. When Steve Shoger used to work at Laravel, he

Ian

I don't know if many people know. He used to work at he worked at Laravel before he worked at Tailwind.

Aaron

I didn't know that. Doing what?

Taylor

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

a thing. He worked for, like,

Taylor

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

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

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.

So, yeah, he was around here for a little while.

Ian

Yeah. But, anyway, back me and Steve,

Taylor

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

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

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

What does it even mean to produce a movie?

Ian

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.

Some research.

Aaron

You don't even know what it means.

Ian

I don't wanna know.

Taylor

I'm gonna show you anything. How do I make a movie?

Ian

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.

So how does he do that? Right? He's just, like, making connections. He does the meetings. Kicks it off.

Aaron

Completely ridiculous. You don't even know what a

Ian

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

Curators, tastemaker,

Ian

taste. It's all about taste. Exactly.

Aaron

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

Need, like, a 100,000,000. It's no big deal.

Taylor

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

It was us.

Taylor

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

You don't

Taylor

have to pay me. I just wanna help you make it better.

Ian

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

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.

I just love to. Yeah.

Ian

Yeah. How much

Taylor

is a great fun one?

Ian

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

star wars. Yeah.

Ian

Star Wars.

Taylor

What a what a mishandled franchise that is. I feel like I just

Aaron

God, how? YouTube.

Ian

You could

Aaron

have done so much better.

Ian

I agree.

Taylor

Probably. Yes. Actually, I really I

Ian

really I really agree. I actually agree. Yeah. How did they fumble Star Wars? It's like, dude, it's nights and space.

It's just, like, you could literally almost do anything. How how do you mess it up?

Taylor

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

You know

Taylor

what I mean?

Ian

Like, they don't care.

Taylor

It's just all nostalgia for millennials at this point.

Ian

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.

It's like It's so hard. Bad. I don't Bad. And then you then I was like, oh, hopeful. Disney.

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

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

Like, they just have to shoot me.

Taylor

I feel like I'm a fan of this franchise.

Ian

What what what's even the point of Jar Jar Binks? Like, does he what's the plot devices he, like, you

Taylor

know have no chance. You know? They have they got nothing.

Ian

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.

Episode 7

Taylor

was good. Episode 8 and 9

Ian

were

Aaron

Yeah. I

Ian

really I actually really like 7. But Yeah. 7's a good movie.

Aaron

What was 7? Yeah.

Taylor

The first one that had, like, Ray and Finn and kind of the new Yeah. Characters.

Aaron

I don't think I saw it 89.

Taylor

It was a good, tight, focused movie.

Aaron

What was the standalone one with Felicity Jones? That wasn't

Taylor

a bad movie. Good. I like that one. Good movie.

Ian

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.

But, yeah, I don't know. It's so disappointing. So disappointing. I don't know. Maybe they'll bring it around.

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

Yeah. Maybe when y'all become executive producers, it'll turn around.

Taylor

No no one ask us what we do there. Yeah. We taste, mate. We're the taste makers.

Ian

That's exactly what they do.

Taylor

Put that in my email signature.

Ian

Yeah. The taste maker. Yeah. Oh, man. I don't know.

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

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.

Anything else on y'all's mind?

Ian

How's Larry County coming along?

Aaron

Yeah. I wanna hear how excited you are to come to Dallas. Yeah.

Taylor

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

Oh, nice.

Taylor

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.

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.

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

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.

It'll be great.

Taylor

Yeah. I feel like he's actually a pretty neutral player in the space.

Aaron

He is.

Taylor

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

Mhmm.

Aaron

I'm excited for this.

Ian

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.

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

Like, dude, you're an order of magnitude beyond. I have no idea what you're talking about.

Taylor

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

Because he finds it, like, funny and fast paced and,

Aaron

like Yeah.

Ian

Interesting. So, like, if we're on a long car ride,

Taylor

he's like, dad, can we listen to that one funny programmer guy? And I'm like,

Aaron

imagine he's like, yeah.

Taylor

Yeah. So when I told him he was gonna be at Laracon, he was actually pretty excited. You know, awesome. Pretty funny.

Ian

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.

He's so good at that.

Taylor

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

that are

Aaron

I don't know.

Taylor

On there?

Aaron

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

Working from home and getting to do it. You know? I don't know. It's like

Taylor

Is it just background noise for work at home programmers?

Ian

Or I

Taylor

don't know. I don't know what it is.

Ian

Front round noise? Who knows? Like Yeah.

Aaron

I don't know.

Ian

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?

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

days. I was gonna say it if you didn't, but, yeah, kids these days.

Ian

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

It's a great question.

Aaron

No. No.

Taylor

I'm still tracking Sam.

Aaron

What if I'm

Taylor

still tracking Sam telekoff.

Ian

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.

Alright. Yeah. I don't team no track.

Taylor

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

not really, like, a problem. Where you are. Yeah.

Taylor

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.

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

Track all the way. Jennifer always knows where I am. I know where

Ian

she is. It's convenient. It's I'm team

Aaron

no track. Convenient. Ian is team team no man. I don't want

Ian

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

Not an executive producer. Not

Ian

that important.

Taylor

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

do take. The one way she

Taylor

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.

I put

Aaron

something off till the last minute.

Ian

How much

Aaron

time do I have left? Yeah.

Taylor

Yeah. Like, I need to get the dishwasher emptied. I need to, do something. You know? And that's

Ian

that's

Taylor

actually the most convenient feature of that, I would say.

Aaron

That's what I'm

Ian

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

I don't know.

Ian

I'm not I'm not converted yet, but maybe. Maybe. Right away, possibly. But

Aaron

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

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.

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.

So, yeah, I don't regret that purchase at all from that perspective. No. It's helpful to

Aaron

come much. Point, it's a write off. Hopefully.

Taylor

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

but it should be

Taylor

at this point.

Ian

It's kinda interesting how much more mileage you've gotten out of that too than, like I mean, DHH.

Taylor

Right?

Ian

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

One of his cars, it costs 20 times what a Lambo cost. Like, one of those at that Aston Martin. Aston

Ian

Martin. Yeah.

Taylor

That's like a $4,000,000 car. You know? Right.

Ian

With a little more than a slightly used Lambo. Yeah. I prefer.

Taylor

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

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

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

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.

Like, come on.

Taylor

The the empty land that house sits on is worth more than anybody bashing him on Twitter even has.

Aaron

It's worth it's worth more than our All

Ian

of them. Probably. All of them together. Yeah. Every single one of them together doesn't

Taylor

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?

So Yeah.

Ian

He's on a whole another a whole

Aaron

another on the h h for him and Meyer Hanson?

Ian

Yes. We made it for him.

Taylor

Oh, one off

Ian

you know,

Taylor

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

Yeah. It's not I did not know that. T ball versus the Yankees for And we've got the car to say,

Taylor

one off h h too.

Ian

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.

Base camp doesn't sell that much as it used to. All the competition. I'm like,

Aaron

come on. That's what

Ian

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.

Like, that's my mindset too.

Aaron

I love that. My $250,000,000, what can we build?

Ian

$100,000,000 and my 2 hands. We can do it. But

Taylor

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

of this dies, like, I I need a framework to build stuff with. So, like I said,

Taylor

I gotta keep Laravel good. You know?

Ian

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

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.

Like, I never click the issues tab

Ian

on GitHub. In years, I haven't clicked that button.

Aaron

You gotta tell Adam to do the same thing. Yeah. Totally those issues.

Taylor

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

shows me all the pull requests across

Taylor

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

So

Taylor

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Gotcha.

Ian

I feel like our workflow is actually pretty hardcore. Like, if I close a

Taylor

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.

Mhmm. Because, like, if I didn't do poor requests for a week, we would have over a 100 because we get

Ian

Mhmm.

Taylor

Like, you know, 20 a day or something like that. So it would pile up really quickly.

Aaron

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

And I'm like, in the middle of Lyricon? It's just crazy

Aaron

that you're always on it.

Taylor

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.

I had a 135 pull requests. Oh. After, like I'd only been gone for, like, 4 days. Wow. But, yeah, pretty crazy.

Gosh. That's why

Ian

I love it.

Taylor

On top of it.

Ian

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

Yeah. Still holding on.

Ian

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

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

It's building up forever.

Taylor

Yeah.

Ian

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.

I think we broke, we broke some news. I think it was great. Yeah.

Taylor

It was fun times.

Ian

Yeah. All right, man. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thanks.

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

See you.