Laracon EU 2025

So it’s over that’s it for Laracon EU 2025, it was a great event! The location itself was really nice it’s the first time I’d been to that venue so it was great to experience it for the first time.

The food and drinks on offer were again top notch and the space to go mingle and talk to people during the breaks was perfect.

the talks themselves were wide ranging and interesting, I’ve just touch on a few of the ones that stood out to me.

Jess Archer - Nightwatch Returns

This was one of the surprise talks of the event for me and I think a true sleeper product for Laravel.

There has been a huge push and talk about cloud, and Nightwatch has had its fair share of mentions as well but this product is going to be a huge success for them.

From the simplicity of install and setup to the ease of drilling into the data it’s a huge win for development teams out there.

We use sentry on most of our apps but I’ll be honest this looks like it will replace it. Any discussions around "can it handle scale" I think can be closed down pretty quickly. The Laravel team had this running on Laravel Forge for a month and it collected over 2 billion events without any issues and noticeable increase in performance. Heck the forge team even started to use the data to improve the service as mentioned in James Brooks Latest Post

I can’t wait for the release of this and to give it a try in a number of our apps.

Taylor Otwell - Laravel Update

Of course there was a lot of buzz for Taylor’s talk he announced the upcoming release of Laravel 12, he demoed more of Laravel Cloud, we’ve had early access to cloud at jump24 for a few months now and have been really impressed with the speed and ease of use, it just works!

Over the last fortnight with the run up to Laracon it’s been great seeing more and more changes come in as well as seeing a release date and then more discussion around when other features are due such as support for MySQL.

Another great moment in the talk was when he mentioned that Laravel has taken over Inertia! I’m a huge fan of Inertia and we use it all the time at Jump24. If we’re building an app that isn’t just an api 95% of the time we also reach for this, so to seem them fully take it over and bring it in as a first party package is great as it means it’s going to get the full support it deserves, looking forward to seeing more and more updates for this package.

Simon Hamp - Building Mobile Apps with PHP

I’ve known Simon for a long time now going back to the early Multipack days and I’ve enjoyed watching his work on NativePHP.

I was really pleased for him when he got his speaker slot and was looking forward to watching him on stage it had been a while since I’d seen one of his previous talks (big data!).

He did a great job and NativePHP is moving along nicely he demoed building an iOS apps and how to we can now do this with PHP of all things! He’d also talked about how he go on trying to get an app into the iOS App Store how cool is that!

He of course is currently doing this as a side project so for him to spend more time on building this out he needs to raise funds so he has made early access to this a one time cost, he’s also developing a service that will help you build your apps called Zephpyr.

Aaron Francis - Introducing [REDACTED]: a new paradigm for Laravel + Javascript

What is there not to love about Aaron! I mean the guy is just one of the nicest people I’ve met in the Laravel space. He demoed his new Javascript Library Fusion this allows you to write PHP inside Vue & React this is honestly crazy!

He has also opened up a way to help support the development of this as well as the other software he's developed, you can find out more about that over here

The talk and demos of the Javascript Library were great but he also made a few key points to try and motivate us developers and the big one was

"He's not qualified to do some things he does. But he's still trying."

This is honestly such a great statement and one that we as developers should really take to heart, we don't have to be subject matter experts to try and do things we should just do them and see what happens!

This guy just seems to do great things all the time, from his video courses to SideCar and Solo. Imagine how much better this world would be if we had more Aarons out there.

David Hill - Designing Laravel

I was lucky enough to get an early preview of this talk at PHPStoke. Im not a designer but to be able to see and understand how David has gone about coming up with a new Laravel look and feel, how he’s gone about working on bringing a harmony across all the applications that the Laravel core team are developing and have developing is a real eye opener. It was great to see the attention to detail that he's put into every little thing from the website to the applications even to the swag.

Before they hired David Laravel didn't have a design team but now they do and its growing at the time of the talk there are 5 in the team and David is doing the ground work to lay out the future for how things should look at Laravel.

Ryan Chandler - From Zero to Static Analysis Hero

Ryan is One of Laravel latest hires, his talk was on a subject that I am a big proponent of Static Analysis! We all know that it can be a pain in the butt sometimes but it can also save you a lot of time over the lifetime of the project by implementing it from the word go.

Ryan talked through PHPStan and went into a bit of detail of what happens under the hood. He then showed us how to go about writing our own custom rule, this is useful for people to understand as there are already a number of good rules out there but being able to write your own rules is a useful skill to have.

Laravel Event

As well as the great talks there was a really nice event held by the Laravel team After the second day. I was lucky enough to get invited along to the event.

We got to chat to the team more about Cloud and Nightwatch we also got to see more of the demos and play with each, but we also got to chat to the other team members who have not been involved in those projects, getting to find out more about them And what they have been working on, also there was some great swag!

Another lovely Laracon EU, it’s got me excited for Laracon US in July as well as looking forward to PHPUK later this month.