[ COMMUNITY ]
Laracon EU 2024, Amsterdam
Amsterdam, 5–6 February 2024. A note on why the speaker list is the point.
Laracon EU is the Laravel calendar in Europe. What makes it worth the trip is not the keynote — it is that the people whose packages sit in your composer.json are in the room and will talk to you.
Who was speaking
Taylor Otwell, who created Laravel — a framework whose whole argument is that developer experience is a feature.
Freek Van der Herten of Spatie, whose packages have been downloaded north of 891 million times. There is a good chance several of them are in whatever you shipped last.
Kévin Dunglas, creator of API Platform and FrankenPHP, and part of the Symfony core team.
Tobias Petry, fifteen years deep in databases and the author of Indexing Beyond the Basics — a talk that changes how you read a slow query log.
Marcel Pociot, co-founder of Beyond Code, with over a hundred PHP and Laravel packages behind him.
James Brooks of Laravel, who built Forge and Envoyer.
And Tim MacDonald, from Melbourne, whose work includes contributions to Indigenous language preservation projects.
Why it is worth going
Open source runs on the assumption that someone else has already solved your problem. A conference is where you find out who that someone is, and where a maintainer tells you in five minutes what a GitHub thread would have taken a week to.
Originally published
This first appeared on LinkedIn in February 2024: linkedin.com/in/amar-beka-2771ab1b3