Laracon Chicago Recap

Laracon US 2018 is now in the books and it was a fantastic event and a lot of fun was had in Chicago. As someone who has never visited Chicago before I was very impressed with the city. The weather was magnificent and the parts I walked around seemed safe and pretty clean for a large city. Of course, it also features a beautiful skyline which I couldn’t keep from gawking over.


Every Laracon strives to bring a great experience from the venue to the location, the swag, and this year didn’t disappoint. Here are photos of the free bag, notebook, and t-shirt that everyone received.




The venue was at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry which is one of the largest science museums in the world and is home to more than 400,000 square feet of hands-on exhibits. As a Laracon ticket holder, everyone received free access to the entire museum to wander around during any downtime.

With over 800 attendees and a full schedule, the downtime was few and far between, but it was a nice perk if you wanted to get away for a bit, but not leave the area.

As previous years the conference featured a single track of talks so all the attendees were on the same schedule and gave everyone ample time to mingle and socialize. I personally found it awesome to catch up with old friends and make new ones. It’s surprising how much I look forward to this event every year.

All the talks that I saw were fantastic and I’m going to skip going through a recap of each one because they were recorded and you’ll be able to see the videos once they are released. Of course, the highlight was Taylor’s keynote with the launch of Laravel Nova and the video on it has already been released:

If you are interested in reading about all the talks check out this live blog that Chris Forrence put together as the event was going on.

Below is a few photos I was able to capture from the event. Many selfies were taken but I’ll leave those out.



Thanks to the whole Laracon crew for making this year a success and I can’t wait to see everyone again next year. I just hope I’m finally able to spot that mythical ninja that claims to attend these events.