Top 5 Highlights of Laracon EU 2023

Day 1 of 🇵🇹 Laracon EU 2023

The venue was the urban LX Factory exhibition grounds in Lisbon's hip district: the event was well attended, the Ferrari stood right by the entrance ... the burning question was clear: "Does Taylor Otwell own a red Ferrari?".

And then it was already time for the first highlight:

#1 Laravel Community === ❤️

Anyone who dives into the popular PHP framework Laravel will quickly come across three things:

1. The orange Lamborghini of Laravel founder Taylor Otwell

2. The omnipresent learning platform Laracast and its founder Jeffrey Way

3. The diverse ecosystem of Laravel tools ... maintained around the clock by the community

#2 Jeffrey Way - All My Mistakes

Jeffrey Way, tutor to an entire community, spoke about his culture of failure and the progressive mindset that comes with it. How important mistakes can be, and what surprising insights can be gained from them, IF the tolerance for failure - or culture of failure - is open to it.

#3 The Future of Testing is PHP PEST

We test for a peaceful future: no unplanned outcomes, such as duplicate transfers to unfamiliar bank accounts, no message delivery between 7am and 8pm, no reachable websites, no functioning database organization for streaming providers, and much more.

Existing testing frameworks in PHP make testing harder rather than easier. With PHP PEST, a testing framework was created that provides a developer-friendly testing tool for PHP's broad ecosystem. It's simple. Reduced to the essentials. And it offers integration with other frameworks that also want to be tested:

• Laravel,

• LiveWire,

• Faker,

• Mock,

• SnapShots

• Watch, etc.

Day 2 of 🇵🇹 Laracon EU 2023

#4 How Essential is Computer Science (Data Structures, Algorithms) for Web Developers?

With his talk, Kai Sassnowski showed 500 attendees how he used his computer science background to build an algorithm into projects. He also skillfully dispelled the notion that moving from computer science to web development is a step down - which struck a surprisingly positive chord in a room full of web developers.

Conclusion: an algorithm lurks in some unexpected places. So web developers, too, are allowed to reach for a book on data structures and algorithms every now and then.

#5 More Luck Through Published Projects

The database guru Aaron Francis didn't talk about relational databases, Redis, SQL, or GraphQL this time. Instead, the topic was how much luck surprised him with a new job, and his analytical take on the contested path of luck.

Through a series of Twitter posts, he became aware of challenges faced by others and started working them out and posting them. Over time, his posts drew more and more attention ... and after many ups and downs, he arrived at his current job.

ℹ️ More Info from the Event

• Teaser of Laravel 10 by Taylor Otwell

• Live Hacking Laravel Session by Stephen Rees-Carter

• Laravel and AI (ChatGPT Basics) by Marcel Pociot

• Dealing with Legacy Code by Katerina Trajchevska

• InertiaJS - Build single-page apps, without building an API

🍣 Conclusion for Sushi Dev GmbH

1. Keep extracting functionality into packages - but also publish more.

2. Use the new code quality features of the testing tool PHP PEST

3. Looking forward to the features of Laravel 10 👀