Laracon Online 2017 Recap

The first Laracon Online conference just wrapped up and based on feedback many loved the event. I want to personally thank the Laravel community for helping make this a reality. Here is some feedback from attendees:

Laracon 2017 was an amazing social and professional experience. The kind of event that should happen more often — Hudson Pereira

Laracon Online was a great way to see some cool topics by people I like in the Laravel community and I was even able to choose where I would stream the conference from! — Simon Jensen

This conference was a fun learning experience with priceless insights into the inner-workings of Laravel from some of its most influential artisans, and allowed me to connect to several like-minded peers opening a world of opportunities! — Vitor Spencer

Laracon Online gave me a rare opportunity to hear excellent presentations and interact with a developer community; both of these are normally impossible for me because of working remotely from a rural area and not having a personal or company budget that allows for conference attendance. I’m very appreciative of everyone who helped to make the experience possible. Looking forward to the next one already! — Michael Roderick

It was great coming together with the Laravel community without needing to find a hotel room and worry about airfare! — Chris Forrence

We had developers from all over the world hanging out in Slack, watching the live stream, and socializing. It got a little crazy at times but everyone behaved, and it was fun watching the room scroll so fast that even the world champion speed reader would have trouble keeping up. People even got together and had viewing parties:

We’re ready for @LaraconOnline pic.twitter.com/mV9IdVpXr2

— Spatie (@spatie_be) March 8, 2017

Watching Evan You talk at #LaraconOnline from #Pakistan ???? pic.twitter.com/5CGRqkHABR

— Muhammad Ahsan Abrar (@iAhsanAbrar) March 8, 2017

Getting ready for @LaraconOnline! w/ @blueclock @freekmurze @TheEdonian @sebdedeyne @michielloncke @Riasvdv @AlexVanderbist #LaraconOnline pic.twitter.com/sQz0B6MJB9

— Dries Vints ????️‍???? ???????? (@driesvints) March 8, 2017

Check the #laracononline hashtag on Instagram and Twitter for even more pictures.

The event kicked off with Ian Landsman doing a quick video introduction and lead right into Jeffrey Way’s talk on Laravel and the Front-end.

In the beginning, he talked about the experience from the speakers’ standpoint and how giving a talk online changes the speaker dynamic completely because there is zero audience feedback. Of course, because Way runs Laracasts he’s used to screencasting, and his talk went off flawlessly.

Next came Evan You, the creator or Vue.js, with the topic Inside Vue Templates. He was in China so we worried about the internet connection, if the stream could handle it, and every other problem that might arise from the great firewall. As I watched and listened, there weren’t any streaming issues.

Rachel Andrew took to the stage, or screen next blowing our minds with a talk about CSS Grid and Flexbox in 2017. It showed me how little I’ve kept up with the frontend over the past few years and inspired me to start learning more.

Adam Wathan went all political in his topic, “Lies Alt-Facts you’ve been told about testing”. It was all live coding and he argued that testing in isolation leads to brittle tests that make it harder to refactor your code.

Taylor Otwell jumped on next and went through the Laravel internals. I thought this was a great topic because I know a lot of people use Laravel and never dive deep into how it actually works.

Next was Nick Canzoneri from Postmark speaking about email and how it works. This was a deep dive and covered a lot of the internals of an email message, headers, DNS, and more.

Jason McCreary came next with You Don’t Know Git and for me at least the title was dead on. I know enough basics to get through my day, but when things go wrong I’m left stuck or searching the web for an obscure answer I’m not comfortable running.

To finish off the days talks Matt Stauffer showed us how to Master the Illuminate Container. Matt was talking fast, and he covered tons of great stuff.

“It’s like you’re watching him at 1.5x”, robinlayfield said on Slack, “He’s basically doing a 2 hour presentation for us”.

After the event was over, the swag was sent out, and videos arrived the following day. If you didn’t purchase a ticket, it’s too late to get access to the videos now, but we will be releasing them to the public later on in the year.

#Laracon Online Sponsors

We want to thank following sponsors for helping us make this conference a success:

• Vehikl Consulting as the platinum sponsor
• Linode
• Algolia Search
• Bugsnag
• Nexmo
• Pop.co
• Postmark — Transactional email service
• Eyewitness
• Blackfire

#Laracon Online Resources

Finally, the community has already started putting together resources from the talks.

Laracon Online 2017 Notes
Notes from most of the Laracon Online 2017 presentations, along with links gathered from the whole conference.

Q&A With The Speakers From Laracon Online 2017
Caleb Porzio gathered all the important items from the Q&A sessions and posted them on the Tighten blog.

SitePoint Live Coverage
Bruno Skvorc wrote a post on SitePoint and updated it throughout the day with observations from the talks.

We have so many ideas for improvement to implement for next year and we look forward to seeing you then!