Laracon EU – Interview with speaker Freek Van der Herten

This year’s Laracon EU has a fantastic speaker lineup including twenty-two speakers from all across the world. Tickets are still available and it’s one you will not want to miss.

Freek Van der Herten (@freekmurze) is one of those speakers and he graciously took a break from releasing new packages to allow me the opportunity to ask him a few questions about his talk and the conference experience.

#Is this your first Laracon EU?

No, I’ve been the last year’s edition as well and I had a blast there. To be honest it was the best conference I’ve ever been to. The people, the talks, the venue, … it was incredible. The bar is set very high for this edition.

#How far away are you from Amsterdam?

I live in Belgium, which is a neighboring country of The Netherlands. From my hometown, Antwerp, Amsterdam is only 2 or 3 hours away by train.

#Your Laravel backup package seems to be popular is that what you are going to be giving a talk on?

I’ll dedicate quite some time of my talk to introducing the package. I’ll demonstrate what it can do. Since we’re going to be in a room full of developers I’ll also show the inner workings of the package. But aside from that I’ll also touch on the pitfalls and best practices regarding backups in general and highlight some good backup solutions.

#Should everyone be using a backup system outside of what hosting companies provide?

Unless you have a dedicated ops person/team that takes care of backups, you as a developer should definitely take care of your own backups in addition to what your hosting company provides. Take DigitalOcean for example: they provide backups, but they only take a snapshot once a week. So if you solely rely on their backups you could potentially lose data for several days. Most cloud providers store their backups in the same datacenter as your servers. So if the datacenter is down, the backups are unavailable. These are all good reasons to take care of backups yourself.

#What other talk are you most excited about?

Sorry, it’s just too difficult to name a single speaker here. I’m looking forward to seeing two my fellow Belgians speaking: Hannes Van de Vreken will talk about cool stuff you can to with the IoC container, Mattias Geniar will explain how Varnish can be used to speed up a site. Also, high on my list is Gabriela D’Avila who will talk about making the most with MySQL 5.7

#Any other words of encouragement for those coming to Laracon?

I’m a big fan of uncon’s at conferences and I’m happy this edition of Laracon EU will have one. If you’re not familiar with an uncon, it’s just a room at a conference where everybody is allowed to give a talk. Usually, there’s a big notepad with the schedule in front of the room where you can write down your name and subject of the talk. If you want to learn how to give a talk in public an uncon session is the perfect playground.

Be sure to socialize a bit with your fellow artisans between the talks. It’s incredible how much you can learn from everybody.

And last but not least: just have fun!