I'm excited to announce the launch of our new community: ArchTech Forum.
For those who know me but don't know what ArchTech is, it's a brand I created earlier this year to manage my projects — Tenancy for Laravel, Lean Admin, Laravel Code Tips, SaaS boilerplate, and many OSS packages. I figured that they've become too large to be just my personal projects, so a dedicated brand & company was the right decision.
And now, ArchTech has a new project: a forum for Laravel developers.
You're probably thinking, why another Laravel forum? Aren't there many already? There's Laracasts, Laravel.io, r/laravel, and many other communities.
The motivation for creating a new community is that — despite having many communities already — the Laravel ecosystem lacks a community specifically for advanced discussions.
Now, this is not meant in some exclusive or elitist sense, but simply that there isn't a place where experienced developers could have conversations with their peers, and as a result come up with new projects and other cool ideas that would benefit the ecosystem as a whole.
The main issue with the current platforms is that they lack quality standards and largely serve for support questions. Which is not a bad thing in itself — there has to be a place for people to learn. But there also has to be a place for the ecosystem to evolve.
Aside from a special purpose (advanced conversations to evolve the ecosystem), the forum also has very specific (and reasonable) standards.
Here's what we like:
- "I discovered this way of building X, what do you think?"
- "I'm struggling to find a good way to structure X. I made it work but don't like how things are organized, any advice?"
- "Why I think named parameters are an issue for frameworks"
- sharing projects (even if they're paid) as long as the post is well-written
And here's what we don't like:
- Low-effort questions / self-promo
- Toxic / political conversations
In short, it's a forum for talking about the things we love — Laravel and related technologies — without all the noise.
Sharing your work is okay, asking questions is okay, challenging others' views is okay — as long as everyone is respectful of others.
Everything that ruins quality conversations in other places (aggressive arguments, unrelated polarizing discussions, endless streams of low-effort posts) is simply disallowed and will be removed. The goal is to make the community as valuable as possible for members who are genuinely interested in creating value with others, be it by advancing each others' skills or by teaming up on cool projects.
The forum already has some content and I deeply appreciate anyone who participates early on. As we all know, communities are notoriously difficult to get off the ground due to the lack of initial traction. But once the network effects kick in — it can become a great place for all of us to talk about the tech we love.
Later on, I'll also provide benefits to active members of the forum, for example free licenses for our paid projects like Lean Admin.
So, if this sounds like a community you'd like to be a part of, go ahead and introduce yourself on the forum. Or if you'd like to just read for the start, that's fine too — just visit forum.archte.ch.
I'm a freelance Laravel developer and the creator of http://tenancyforlaravel.com.
