You Can Just Do Things

So, the community, the community is growing, and I have a, a couple, two reasons why I think that is. Um, but before I get into those, I just wanna say very clearly and very explicitly, I am glad that you are here. If you feel like, "Man, I don't super belong at a Laracon," bad news, you're wrong.

You do super belong at Laracon, okay? So whether you are a backend developer, frontend developer, full stack developer, maybe, maybe you're a Rails developer who just came to check it out. I saw you. Maybe you're a Rails developer, maybe you're an emissary from the React community. Whatever it is, I am glad that you are here. Maybe you're a designer, customer support, manager, ops, finance.

Maybe you're a technical recruiter. I know you're out there somewhere. Maybe you're one of those things, or maybe your spouse or partner said, "Let's go on vacation to Denver." W- (laughing) And I'm glad you're here. I'm sorry this may not be interesting for you, but I am glad that you are here. You belong here, and we are grateful that you are here. The Laravel team, the rest of your conference-goers, the sponsors, everybody is glad that you are here.

You belong here. Now, this community is, this community is growing. Um, and I have, I think, two ideas as to why that might be. The first is, I think as an, like, as an industry, we are shipping, or we are shifting back towards pragmatism, as an industry.

I think we lost our way there for a second, maybe four or five years ago. Um, but now, now the name of the game is build things and ship them to users. That's the name of the game now, pragmatism. And what's the best way to build things and ship them to users? A full stack, batteries-included framework like Laravel.

And so now, um, as, as the industry is shifting, shifting back towards pragmatism, people are starting to pile into the Laravel community, which is a wonderful thing. And this pragmatism is something that is, um, baked into the very, like, origin stories of Laravel. If you listen to any podcasts where Taylor is on it, the, the interviewer is always gonna say something like, "Why did you decide to start a PHP framework?" And the answer is always the same.

"I didn't. I didn't decide to start a PHP framework. What I decided to do..." This is Taylor, this is my Taylor impression. "What I decided to do was, I was, you know, I was a young guy living in central Arkansas with a young family, and I wanted to change my family's life. And so I wanted to build something and ship it to people to change my family's life." And out of that came Laravel, right? It wasn't the goal.

It was a means by which he could accomplish his goal. You fast-forward, whatever it is, 12, 13, 15 years, and look where we are today. Pragmatic way to ship to end users. What do you need? You need auth, you need queues, you need scheduled jobs, you need an ORM, you need mail, you need social login, you need templating. Anything that you would need to ship a finished product to a user, Laravel has an answer for it.

You need to set up your dev machine? We've got a couple answers. You need to ship to production? We've got actually three first-party answers for that. You need to monitor your application in production? We've got answers for that. This has been baked into the core from the beginning. And I think at maybe even a lower level, Laravel is obviously written in PHP, and I think at a lower level, um, pragmatism is kind of baked into the PHP community from, you know, from the very beginning as well.

It's always been a working person's language, right? It's always been the language of people who want to get things done. We have never really (laughs), I don't know if you've been on Hacker News, we've never really gotten a lot of credit for being PHP developers, right? And so there's always been this evolutionary pressure of like, we need to, um, we, we don't really talk about PHP.

I've been using PHP for 20 years and I love it dearly, but the things that the PHP community talks about, because we don't get a lot of internet points, is we talk about these things that we're building, these final outcomes, these products, and it has shaped this very pragmatic community. And I think Taylor summed it up nicely at Laracon EU when he said, "We must ship." Like, yes, we can talk about internals.

Yes, we can go deep into computer science, of course, but the goal is to ship. And I think Taylor summed that up nicely. I think you actually have (laughs) stickers in your bag that say, "We must ship." So I think that pragmatism is one reason, but I think another reason that Laravel as a community is growing is the, the community itself. I have found the community to be very welcoming and very kind, right? And we could have seen this, we could have seen this go the other direction.

We could have been, um, you know, we could have been like the PHP community where finally every, the spotlight shines upon us, VC and the industry shifts back and everybody's like, "Oh, maybe I should try Laravel." And we could have looked at them and said, "I told you so. I have been telling you this all along. I was right. You were wrong." But I haven't seen any of that.

What I have seen is people say, "I am so glad you're here. Let me show you around. Let me send you some videos. Let me send you some links. Let me introduce you to some people. Do you wanna hop on a call?" I am glad you are here. Let me tell you what I love about this framework and what I love about this community. Very welcoming, and for me, it is a wonderful thing to see.

I've just observed it happening all across the board. I think this community is also very kind. And of course, there's a difference between being kind and putting on a facade of fakeness and niceness. What I have observed is people disagreeing, which is healthy. We can argue about whether classes should be marked final or not, and we can argue to the death. "And no, they should not be marked final.

Let me extend the class." But we can argue about those things, and that is a good thing. We can argue about whether we like TypeScripts or not.I'm not gon- I'm just gonna stay out of that one. But we can argue about those things, and that is a good thing. I'm not saying we don't disagree. I'm saying we disagree pretty well. On average, we have these great, fulfilling conversations about which way is best, and at the end of the conversation, they may still disagree, but everybody had a good time.

And I find that to be very, um, I find that to be very fulfilling. It's a very welcoming and very kind community, and I think people are starting to join it, um, and experiencing that firsthand. So I hope you experience that while you're here. This community is a community of makers, builders, and doers. Um, and that leads me to, you know, my final, my final intro point here, which, uh, is you can just do things.

And that is a, that is a pithy phrase that has become very widely used and a little bit trite, but in, in that phrase, um, there's a key word that's doing a lot of work, and that is the word "just." Right? You can just do things. You don't have to get permission, you don't have to be chosen, you don't have to be anointed, you don't have to be special.

You can just decide, "Uh, I'm gonna d- I'm gonna do something." I've told my story, I've told my story many times, um, so I won't go into details here. If you want, Laracon Nashville, you can, you can learn more about that. But quickly, I decided several years ago, I'm ju- I'm just gonna start putting myself out there a little bit more. I was very terrified of doing that, and I decided I was gonna do that.

And so I submitted to Laracon online a few times, gave a couple conference talks that I thought went well, and then I reached out to Taylor and was like, "Hey, if Laracon comes back in person, I want to be your emcee." I didn't know Taylor. I just said, "I, I wanna do it." And he said, "Sure, sounds good." (laughs) I mean, like what? The worst that could've happened was the same thing that was happening, which is I wasn't the emcee.

And I decided, oh, we'll see what happens. And I asked him, and I said yes. And here's the thing. I'm not special. As much as my mom would disagree, I am not special, right? I'm just a guy who was like, "What if I tried to do something here?" And the community is full of people like that. I'm not the only one. Let's take Zuzana, for example.

Zuzana is, uh, the founder of Larabelles, which is a community for people who are underrepresented due to their gender. Okay? She's the founder of Larabelles. Do you know where Larabelles came from? Zuzana's brain. She was a, um, she got her degree in psychology, and was working with, uh, children and adults with disabilities and then decided, "You know what? I wanna change my life and go be a, go be a developer." And she joined the community and saw a bunch of people that needed a, needed a home, and she didn't wait for permission.

She didn't wait to be anointed or chosen, and she said, "I'm gonna start a community." And now the Larabelles community is thriving. She just decided, "I'm, I'm gonna make this from scratch, because I think people need it." We could talk about Caleb Porzio, who looked at the JavaScript ecosystem and was like, "Ooh, what if we didn't? What if we wrote PHP on the front end? Wouldn't it be cool?" Which, by the way, is the best way to start a project.

"Wouldn't it be cool? Like, wouldn't it, wouldn't it be cool if... Wouldn't it be cool if we could have PHP on the front end?" And you can listen to this whole story on his podcast for years, where he's just like, "Yeah, all right. Let's do it." And now Livewire, huge, thriving, wonderful. Same story for the Native PHP Boys, who Simon Hamp was like, "What if we could build iOS apps with PHP?" What? Shane Rosenthal came along and was like, "What if we could build Android apps with PHP?" Did everyone tell them

it was crazy? Yes. Why? Because it's crazy. It's a crazy idea. Did they do it anyway? Yes. Did it work? Yes. You can just decide, "Well, I don't know. We'll see. We'll see what happens." You could look at Pavelas, uh, or, or Geoffrey Way, right? These, these two guys, um, did one of the hardest things ever, which is to turn on the camera and then upload it to the internet, where people are mean.

And Pavelas has 155,000 YouTube subscribers. Geoffrey runs Laracasts for I think like 12 or 13 years now. Just two guys who were passionate about Laravel and started sharing their knowledge. Nobody, nobody gave them permission to do this. One of my favorite, um, one of my favorite "you can just do things" stories is... And this, I'm, I'm gonna pick one person, but it applies to like half of the Laravel staff.

Um, one o- one of my favorite things about, um, this "you can just do things" story is, is Joe, Joe Tenenbaum. And he doesn't know I'm saying this. He's somewhere. Sorry, Joe. It's gonna be good, I promise. Um, Joe, we all watched... If you were observing carefully, we all watched, uh, Joe get his job at Laravel. So he, Joe started by just tweeting out these crazy little, these extremely interesting little, um, CLI experiments.

He was doing stuff on the terminal and he was like, "Oh, wouldn't it be cool if you could put a webcam in the terminal?" And everybody's like, "Whoa, what? W- w- what if we did what?" Um, and he was just sharing them on Twitter. And he didn't like... Don't, don't assume he had some big audience. I think he had like 200 followers or something. He was just sharing them on, on Twitter, and we watched as he shared those. He did interesting things in public, shared them.

Uh, Geoffrey Way reached out and said, "Do you wanna do a Laracasts course?" And then finally at the end, Laravel was hiring and Joe has told this story on many podcasts. Laravel was hiring and Joe said, "Why not me? Like, I've been doing interesting things out in public. Why not me?" And he reached out to Taylor and Taylor said, "Cool. Sounds good. Like, you can come work at Laravel now." The, the, the point here is, the point here is that, um, this is available to you as well.

Like, I don't have time to go over all the stories of people who decided that something was gonna change. But this is available to you as well. These people, me included, not special. Members of the community. I don't even work at Laravel. Just a member of the community who decided to start doing something.

And so whatever that, whatever that weird project is, whatever that blog post, that video, that business, that podcast, whatever that is that is inside of you, my challenge to you is, is to get started, to start working on it. Yes, Laravel is, is a pragmatic place. Yes, Laravel is very kind and welcoming. Laravel is also a place where people who decide to do things can stand out.

Laravel is a place where your weird ideas and your projects are celebrated. And Laravel is a place where the work that you publish, people will be proud of you, even if you think it's imperfect. People want you to win, and they will cheer you on. So my challenge to you is, as you're listening to speakers, as you're talking to friends out there, I want you to be thinking, "What is that thing inside of me that I've been wanting to do? What is that? What is that thing that I have to

do?" And when you get home, or maybe even here, I want you to start. Take the smallest step and start. You don't need to be chosen. You don't need permission. You can just start, and you can just do things. Thank you. (claps) Woo.

Woo.