Matt Stauffer:
All right, everybody. Welcome back to season six of Laravel podcast. I'm one of your hosts, Matt Stauffer.

Taylor Otwell:
Hey, I'm Taylor Otwell.

Matt Stauffer:
And today we're going to talk about a little bit of a grab bag of things. One of the things that if you don't know that we have a site at, I'll put it in the show notes, but I think it's suggest .gg slash Larvel podcast. But again, check the show notes where you can come in and you can ask for things that you want us to talk about. And so we have been getting lots of requests from people to talk about a few things that we're going to cover today. But before we do that, Taylor, I know you took a big trip out to San Francisco and you're meeting with a lot of people and having a lot of conversations. And I wanted to make sure that we had a moment to just talk about like what kind of what was the world there like and what conversations did you get in? Did anything get sparked or anything you want to kind of share with us about just kind of what that experience was like?

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah, it was really cool. I mean, I went to the lion's den basically, you know, of tech hype. But I was on an open source discussion panel hosted by Accel. So that was the reason for me being out there. Accel is a venture capital firm in San Francisco that funds companies like Versailles, Century, Linear, a lot of kind of companies that are popular with developers. So they were hosting an open source panel and trying to get together some of the big names in open source. So I was there.

Matt Stauffer:
Mm -hmm.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Taylor Otwell:
Evan You, the creator of Vue, was there. Guillermo, Next.js, Socket.IO, Vercel, Fame was there. Who else was there? The creator of Swift and LLVM was there.

Matt Stauffer:
Really? Okay.

Taylor Otwell:
And he was probably the most legit programmer there. There were some Python people. So the creator of Flask, the MicroFramework, which I looked at for inspiration when I was first creating Laravel. Flask came out not.

Matt Stauffer:
Mm -hmm.

Taylor Otwell:
very long before Laravel. It had probably only been out six months or a year, actually, before Laravel came out.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay. Wow.

Taylor Otwell:
So we came out kind of at similar times.

Matt Stuaffer:
I didn't realize that.

Taylor Otwell:
A lot of really smart people working on very interesting things. I would say the thing that stuck out to me the most is it seems like the city of San Francisco is consumed by AI, currently. That was my biggest takeaway. Even most of the billboards I saw were, you know,

Matt Stauffer:
obsessed.

Taylor Otwell:
AI powered platform for this, AI tool for this. Yeah, absolutely obsessed with AI. And I think you can see that a little bit permeating even into traditionally web companies like Vercel, which has recently also taken sort of like a very AI focus in some ways. So yeah, I mean, it was interesting to have a lot of conversations with really smart people and kind of catch up with them. It was also interesting that,and we've known this for years, right, that PHP and Laravel has never really infiltrated Silicon Valley in any meaningful way. Whereas across the rest of the world, it has gained a lot more of a foothold, I think. Kind of in your more, I don't know, in the working class of the web development world, Laravel has got a foothold. But in Silicon Valley, it is not.

What I found interesting though is like as I would talk to people, most of them had like heard of Laravel. And the interesting thing was in some of the conversations, there was almost this like implicit acknowledgement that yeah, that's actually a much more productive stack than what we're using. But, you know, it's just not used. And I think it's because of PHP specifically, right? So they would just, they're more accustomed to JavaScript either.

Taylor Otwell:
they're writing React on the front end and they want to write React on the back end.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
And so I even brought up to someone there, it was actually the creator of Resend. It's a new kind of mail startup. I mean, you could think of it as a competitor to like Postmark or Mailgun, something like that. I said, you know, like, I look at the JavaScript ecosystem and I just wonder how anyone builds anything because you have to piece together.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, got it, yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, how do you get anything done?

Taylor Otwell:
so many things and he said, yep, that's totally true. He was like, our whole stack is pieced together, you know, node libraries. I think they were running on Express, maybe on the backend. And he was like, you just learn to love the spaghetti. Like you just learn to embrace it and you start to like it after a while. So, which I found funny. And he said, you can even see like, if you look at the code base over the years, you can see like what was.

Matt Stauffer:
Popularity, yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
in season, you know, at the time. So, this is that era. This is this other era. So, you know, I don't know. I mean, I guess we can talk a little bit about one. I've wondered myself, like, how much effort should there be in sort of converting people into the Laravel stack? I think the other side of that that you could focus on would be like. Is efforts better spent maybe trying to capture back a little bit more of the top of the funnel as far as how people actually get started? Because I think that's the main difference. And I brought this up on my panel is that when I first started Laravel, a lot of people came into PHP at the top of the funnel. Either that was their first web programming language or whatever. But I think even when I first started Laravel, that was starting to shift. But now it has definitely shifted to where the top of the funnel is definitely JavaScript.

Matt Stauffer:
Yes, all the boot camps, all the classes, yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
A lot of the young people doing stuff, there's like JavaScript starter kits, you know, and they themselves are in a Frankenstein of libraries, you know, for working with different things. So yeah, we can riff on that a little bit, I guess.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. And one of the things that people had asked in the suggest .gg was, you know, what does it look like for PHP to be more attractive to outsiders? And I've, man, I really tried to run down that line for a while. I mean, I bought domains and made websites about why people should use PHP and examples of how PHP can be possible. And I just realized that's a done deal, because when you look at PHP, you see all the old stuff, you see the old website. We've been trying to modernize this website for years, you see all the old head programmers who want things to stay the way it's always been like, PHP is not sexy and will never be sexy. However, Laravel is sexy. And if Laravel is a valuable thing that happens to be on PHP, that still has, we're still losing out. And I can tell you, talk about that in a second, but like we at least have the ability to say, don't worry about what it's based on. Your productivity can be multiple times what it is in this other thing, if you choose Laravel.

And it's sort of like, you know, the whole jQuery JavaScript. What do you learn first? You mean jQuery and JavaScript? Like, don't worry about PHP. Don't worry about your concerns about PHP. Don't worry about the nerdiness of PHP or their website. Just do Laravel. And unfortunately, I would love it to be a together thing, right? I just don't think it's gonna happen, you know? And you mentioned, like, you know, they don't even think about it. One of the reasons why I want us to make this change, and I do think it's worth doing some effort here, is because we will talk with clients all the time, and somebody in the client was like, look, I know the way for us to build this app to be productive is Laravel, and I've seen it happen, I've built the app with Laravel, so we get called in, and the owner or a board member or something like that has friends in the private equity startup, you know, Bay Area world, and that person says, don't use it, you gotta use JavaScript, don't use it, you gotta use Rust. And sometimes they're saying don't use PHP, but more often than not what they're saying is you must use blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so until those people there have an understanding, and again, I think it's gonna be easier to convince those people that Laravel is cool, then tell them PHP is not as bad as you think it is, right? So I feel like if those people have heard of Laravel, if they're like, yeah, you know what, I know ex -sexy startups on Laravel, I know that I saw Taylor Otwell at this thing in San Francisco or whatever else, that no matter how many people we're converting, there's always somebody with higher level access who's gonna be like, no, don't do it. And the number of projects that we have gone far down the road with, and because some board member or whatever else is like, gotta be JavaScript, gotta be Rust or whatever, we just, and then we've lost a result of that is crazy. I also strongly agree with you that the the biggest thing that made this all happen is the entire world, including many of those people that are now in positions of power, learned at boot camps or whatever else that were full -stack JavaScript. And the hard part about it is I've spent years trying to convince bootcamps to consider using Laravel, and that's why we built OnRamp is because I couldn't. I couldn't get them to agree to it, largely because they're like, well, the jobs are in JavaScript, so we're gonna do it in JavaScript. And I'm like, yeah, but it's because you, you know, it's just like one of these self-fulfilling things, but they also say we want them to only have to learn one language. And if we want to teach people as quickly as possible, what we gotta do is teach them JavaScript and then be like, here's React, here's Node, right? They just love the idea of this full stack single language education. And so their question is less, how do we teach people how to build apps productively? And more, how do we teach people in a way that is as easy as possible in our particular setting? So unfortunately, this is sort of like short -minded or narrow -minded, you know, like short-sighted, like focus on what's easy to teach versus what's valuable for people. So yeah, I think we should definitely work on it.
How do we get there though? That's the hard part, man. And I do think that you getting all these networks is a really big step for you going out being like, hey everybody, being productive is this. And you know, there've been a couple of moments lately where Aaron Francis develops a relationship with people outside of the Laravel world and then he says something and then suddenly the whole JavaScript world's like, wait, you can do that in Laravel? And we're like, yes, more of these moments, let's do that. So I don't know, man.

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah, I'm like sort of of the mind that it's very hard to convert people once they're entrenched in a language to another language.

Matt Stauffer:
Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
Because it is, it's just like a pain to learn another language. Like I don't want to have to relearn everything. So I would like to try to recapture a bit of the entry way. I don't know what that looks like. I think we can do better on our end. I don't know if it's like a start.laravel.com. I mean, I think it's basically our boot camp was attempting that but I think it needs to be more holistic than that of like a really snazzy site. Here's Laravel Herd. Here's some really slick videos that get you started. Here's like an even cooler starter kit than Laravel Breeze Something and Laravel Jetstream like I think there needs to be another evolution of that. I hate to say it people, but it's gonna have to happen. And then also I think you know on the deployment side we're working on things there I think to

Matt Stauffer:
Mm -hmm. Good.

Taylor Otwell:
take that to the next level too. Because I think even things like Laravel Forge and Vapor, great robust services, they can be intimidating if you have never really used PHP, if you have never really used Laravel. It's not as simple as just Netlify or Vercel. I know there's, in some ways, deploying a front-end framework, at least a basic static site is much simpler, just conceptually, than

Matt Stauffer:
Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
Deploying something with a cache and a database and a queue and sending email. But still, I think that whole story can be better as well. So I think in my mind, it looks something like that to where someone is relatively new to programming. Maybe they've tried something like Next or Nuxt and Supeabase or whatever. But they're not fully entrenched yet. They're just kind of dabbling and getting started. I think something like that, we do have a chance to actually convert.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
If the onboarding process is good. I think once they've been entrenched for four or five years and they've kind of got what they like, that's very hard to capture back.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, and to your point, I mean a lot of the people who were having those conversations about like, Laravel can do that, or even the guy you were talking to, they're like, yeah, Laravel can do that, but it's way too late for me, right? Because if you are a tech influencer in the JavaScript ecosystem, even if you see that Laravel's great, you're not gonna switch to Laravel and try to build yourself back up from scratch there, Taylor Otwell:
Right. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Let alone people who are just trying to build and ship apps. They're like, look, I spent all this time learning this. So yeah, we have, sorry, go ahead.

Taylor Otwell:
I was going to say, I think that's totally true. And I see other ecosystems that look really cool. Like, OK, Elixir and Phoenix, that looks really slick and great and performant. Am I going to try it? No, I'm not, because I'm already too deep into my world. But hats off to them. It looks great. But yeah, once you're in, you're kind of in in many ways without a change in job or a change in career literally forcing you into another ecosystem because your employer uses it or whatever.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
So yeah, I mean, that's my thinking. And I've been thinking about it a lot the last few weeks, just as we hire these new people here at Laravel. At least one or two of those people will be helping me with open-source. And when I say open-source, I sort of mean like the ecosystem, let's say. Like thinking about the ecosystem as a whole on the open-source side and how we capture people. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
I love that.

I just talked to a friend who hadn't seen OnRamp before. For those who aren't familiar, onramp.dev is a site that we set up at Tighten. The goal is to say, here's a list of all the things you need to know in order to be a functioning Laravel programmer and go get a job. It's not our own resources that's linking out to external resources. Like, this course, here's a thing you need to learn. You need to learn databases. Here's some places you can go to learn that. This person has a course, there's a Laracast here, whatever. I feel like it paired together with bootcamp, with Laravel's bootcamp, which is a really powerful, here's A to Z of actually how to build an app, can get you there in general, but I really like the idea of what you're talking about, which is A, it's kind of both of those together in one, but B, it's not just like you have to click through the things, it's the sexy like, here's some code, here's some videos, here's a really easy deploy story, here's a starter kit to start with. So like if somebody were to come to me and say, hey, you know, what do I need to do to build an app? I would say go learn HTML, CSS, and then kind of walk through this thing or something like that. You know, like it's a really,and maybe they need to know just some JavaScript and PHP, I don't know, but it's a really, once you hit these really basic minimum requirements, you walk through this thing and you're gonna be like, that's all it takes and then I can take people's money to deploy a thing? That's amazing. And no matter how many times we might try to make Forge easy or whatever else, even people who've been doing PHP for five, 10 years still often come to me and they're like, so what's the deploy story? And it's so weird because to me, I'm like,

Taylor Otwell:
Mm -hmm.

Matt Stauffer:
Do you understand how easy the deploy story is compared to what we did before Forge? But it still feels like a big learning curve for them. So.

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah, I agree. Like I think another interesting trend I've noticed, if we would just want to keep riffing on random topics. And I don't want to be like too negative with this, but it does bum me out a little bit. And I would like to see the tide shift is, back when Laravel first came out and Rails was still honestly, you know, very much in its prime back then,

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
I would say in 2010, 2011, a lot of the, let's say side projects that people were hacking on were much more robust, much more complicated, and much more featureful than what I'm actually seeing being churned out these days. I think people are building cool stuff with some of these newer stacks, but they're typically like the most minimal of minimal startups, like a single page. And I think the AI stuff plays into this a little bit,

Matt Stauffer:
That's what I was thinking, yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
like the photo AI stuff. And people are making money with this.

Matt Stauffer:
Mm -hmm.

Taylor Otwell:
I just like wonder, I miss some of the more like robust things that people were building that were not just like a sign up page and then a single page and a buy button. I think that's cool. And I actually salute that as like, and I'm really happy that people are making money that way and that it's so accessible for people to build businesses online. I think it's just a symptom of Laravel and Rails give you the structure that you need to actually build complicated apps, like to build something like a Forge or to build something like a Postmark or an email sending platform. I think that's very unclear how to do in like the current generation of full stack JavaScript frameworks like Next or Remix because they're just not the opinions in them for the layout, the architecture, the

Matt Stauffer:
Mm -hmm.

Taylor Otwell:
on the back end like that something like Laravel or Rails or Django or these kind of more mainline full stack frameworks have traditionally had is just another trend I've noticed that I find sort of interesting, you know.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
I don't know.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I mean, it's very curious because one of the things we're talking about here is like if you catch people at this early level of their learning, then they're gonna bring that familiarity to later level. And similarly, one of the frustrations is if you've got people who are just doing a little piddly thing, and that piddly thing is significantly easier in one tech stack.

Then they're going to bring that tech stack to the big thing when that tech stack is not really a good fit for it, right? Like those those little startups are perfectly fine with a single page with no back end complexity. And then you try to bring that to a big stripe. And now, like you said, we're cobbling things together. We're reinventing the wheel. Each one is completely different. And it's also the flavor of the week with the JavaScript ecosystem. Whereas if you built that thing in something like Laravel or Rails, it's just sort of like, yeah, this is how things go. This is how it's done.

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
You've already got best practices and design patterns, stuff like that baked into the thing. And it's just like, how do we bridge that gap so that people are willing and able to use Laravel at the earlier level with those piddlier things and those small font side projects so that those people have awareness and knowledge of the full framework when they really need it most. Because yeah, like you don't need the full Laravel I mean, it'd still be great, but you don't need the full Laravels and as much to just throw a one pager up, you know, that.

Taylor Otwell:
Mm -hmm.

Matt Stauffer:
that's basically just a front end for a Python script running an AI LLM or something like that, you know what I mean?

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah. And I honestly appreciate both and want to cater to both. I think the Folio Volt story is a great story for those smaller apps where you just have a few pages. It's kind of an MVP that you just want to get out really quickly. And then we have kind of the more robust structure and options. If you want full React and inertia and quite a bit more structure around your app, you can build something much more complex and robust. So trying to kind of cater to both those. I think a lot of the sort of like social media influencer side is more on those MVP small things. And it makes a lot of noise on Twitter, whereas the bigger stuff's a little bit quieter. You know, like I think like Transistor FM, you know, Justin Jackson startup, Rails app.

I don't know what it is on the front end. I don't see people building startups like that

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
with only a JavaScript framework.

Matt Stauffer:
Full stack JavaScript, yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
Maybe they do. I don't really know. But it's just not something I see a lot. Whereas I used to see people building those kinds of things all the time, it felt like.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, well the people who are building with full stack JavaScript in my experience are private equity or venture capital backed with dozens to hundreds of people. And so yeah, if you throw that much money at something, you are eventually going to get an app. But do those stacks enable an individual to build or one or two people to build something like Transistor? And the answer is traditionally not really because it's so much work. And so that's the biggest bummer is like, man, if you threw all that PE and venture capital money at a Laravel app, like see how much further you could go, but it's just like that communication has not happened. So, well, obviously we can talk about this all day, but I would say the idea that you're bringing on some people who have a history of being DevRel type folks, I mean, you've already got Christoph and you've got Mohammed and you've got Josh now, is really exciting to me because, like it or not, Laravel has done an incredible job of telling, I don't want to say marketing because that's what people use pejoratively, but like,telling a story publicly about what you can do, what your life can be like, how it can change your life. And you often, from the earliest days, you've been like, one of the things I love is I go to Laracon and people tell me about how they're able to build our life for their families with Laravel that they weren't able to do before Laravel. And so my hope is that we can have a concerted effort to tell people the story of, hey, you're learning JavaScript right now, you're learning, or whatever, you're learning the program right now, this right here is the way to do it. This is the way that you can go from, I don't know anything, to I have a published app that people can sign up for, that they can use if I want, I can charge money for. There's no better story for that, for you as an individual, and then also for you as a large company, and just really hone in on that. Like we already know that we've captured the minds of existing programmers who are like, wow, no, Laravel really gives me what I can, you know, like if they're willing to touch PHP they see the value in Laravel. So what does it look like for us to tell that story for people who are getting started and raise the profile of Laravel as an ecosystem that is worth them learning from scratch because of what it enables them to do. So I'm excited to see where we go there.

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah, I mean, other, I don't want to beat a dead horse. You know, other insights I found interesting from this trip were I was talking to a couple of Python people and, you know, they actually saw the PHP ecosystem as extremely healthy and vibrant compared even to, in many ways, their own ecosystems, it felt like, or other backend ecosystems, which I find interesting. I think,

Matt Stauffer:
Mm -hmm.

Taylor Otwell:
I mean, I have to salute the Laravel community to a large extent on that.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
I don't think I can definitely not take full credit for that. I think just so I just wanted to tip my hat to the Laravel community that I think we have sort of built a vibe of building cool things, innovating, shipping, doing things that is actually noticed by other language ecosystems

Matt Stauffer:
Love that.

Taylor Otwell:
that are traditionally more respected than PHP. You know, and I think in many ways the Laravel community, again, I don't even want to say myself in this regard, is honestly keeping PHP relevant.

Matt Stauffer:
Yes.

Taylor Otwell:
I think that if the Laravel community was not how it was, PHP would be in a very different place right now.

Matt Stauffer:
Agreed. Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
And it would be a much worse place, I think.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. And one of the things that I, you know, while I said all the things I did at the beginning about the PHP, you know, world, I do think the PHP website sucks. I think PHP marketing sucks. I think a lot of PHP speakers and conferences are stuck in old bad days and I don't like that. And I've tried to change that for years, you know, for years and years and years. And I've in some ways just kind of gotten jaded. However, I do think that there's people working on PHP in PHP, doing the what are they called, the pull request to PHP things that...

Taylor Otwell:
Foundation and stuff. The RFCs.

Matt Stauffer:
No, but when we're, yeah, the RFC, some of those RFCs, people are in there doing work to try and make PHP better. There's active conversations of people who want to improve it. And I'm really grateful for them. And then, like you said, there's the PHP Foundation. And like Roman at the PHP foundation wants PHP to be better, friendlier, more modern. I like that guy, I respect that guy. And I'm really excited about the potential to work with them to try and make PHP actually shift. But I've also had a lot of hope over the years. You know, so it is really helpful to hear the outside world looking at PHP in a way that my jaded self is like, nobody's ever going to see it because it's we've tried so hard and like, no, like people are seeing what we're doing. And the Laravel community is the good things we're doing is reflecting well on PHP, even if I'm frustrated with PHP itself. So it's just kind of like a good reminder to hear that from you.

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah. I mean, spicy take, but I think if you're doing PHP, you need to start rallying around Laravel and like help us out. I think we, we, as in you, the listeners, the Laravel community are honestly carrying the torch for PHP right now. And we need people to get on board and like help us keep PHP exciting and relevant and fun.

Matt Stauffer:
Yes.

Taylor Otwell:
And I think the time for like, being a grumpy PHP old timer is over, that is irrelevant, that is done,

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, amen.

Taylor Otwell:
and it's time to move into the future and keep PHP fresh.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, and for anyone who's hearing that, if you have any feelings about that, like Taylor and I have both offered time, money, and energy to PHP to do great new features, sexy new websites, whatever else, and like our money is where our mouths are. We're not pointing at the PHP world and like do better, and then be like sitting back and be like, why don't you do better? Like we are actively excited and involved in the process of trying to help PHP do better. So yes. Come rally around, but also like allow us to rally, right? Like we are very interested in making PHP look sexy because it helps us all.

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah. And I think there's always been space for that. You know, like even back in the day, let's say 10 years ago, I invited people that were very vocally against Laravel to speak at freaking Laracon. You know, so there was always like an olive branch there. I think the people that really, you know, held out against that, you know, I think like it's time to like put that aside and unify together around Laravel as...

Matt Stauffer:
Yes. Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
honestly like a beacon of light in the PHP web development world in the framework space at least. I know PHP is a big world and I can't speak to like WordPress and all of that. I feel like those are kind of sort of separate ecosystems in many ways. But in the framework space,

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
I'm excited about what we have going on over here and I welcome all to help us take it to the next level.

Matt Stauffer:
Love it. Said with love, Olive Branch, we're all friends here. All right, well, let's, so we spent our first 26 minutes on that. I think it was a good 26 minutes, but we do have at least one other big topic. But before we get there, is there anything else that happened, whether it's in all this hiring that's going on or in your trip to San Francisco that we haven't got a chance to cover you wanted to address?

Taylor Otwell:
You know, I mean, we've hired a handful of great people now, both on the developer side, the infrastructure side, support. And we're building some of the most exciting things we've ever built, the most challenging things we've ever built. And I think it's really going to be like, make it or break it in the next couple of years, you know, as far as if we can deliver the kind of things we think the Laravel ecosystem deserves. I think we're going to deliver. I know we will ship this stuff.

I hope that people love it as much as I think they will. So I'm excited to get it out there.

Matt Stauffer:
That's fun. I know that you're at a place, I mean, one of the things I've been talking to a lot of agency owners is when a lot of agency owners get to the 10-year mark is where they sort of like, they're gonna show one of two responses. And one of them is like,
Man, I'm at 10 years, I'm tired of this. I'm going to start kind of ramping down. And the next one is I'm at 10 years and now it's time for like my next round of energy and excitement and everything like that. And I know your past 10 years, but like it's, it's very fun seeing you like have this breath of fresh air and this kind of new energy and new excitement and new investment into Laravel.

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah, I think the influx of new faces into Laravel helps with that. I mean, a couple of our hires are relevant in this regard, like Josh, who's been putting out some Laravel YouTube content. Joe Tannenbaum, we recently accepted an offer from Laravel. He's been doing a ton of really crazy stuff with Laravel prompts.

Matt Stauffer:
The CLI, that's crazy.

Taylor Otwell:
But people like that that just sort of bring some fresh energy and fun and just excitement into the ecosystem also helps keep me excited because it feels like it's not just me and you, you know, for 15 years and it's like, is anyone else interested in this thing? It doesn't feel stale. You know, as much as I like all of the OGs, you know,

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
I think we need the newcomers to like really keep it feeling alive.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I feel that same way. And we just hired a new guy at Tighten who, his just energy level is super, super excited. His name's Omar. And like, it's fun having somebody in the ecosystem, but it's also fun. Like at Tighten, every time we hire a new person, they bring this, like this new excitement and this new energy of whatever they care about. And I mean, this is not special to Omar. Every new hire does this in a different way, but I've just, just, he just joined last week, but I'm just like, like,
Yeah, that is an exciting thing. And yeah, that is something I want to and you know, like he'll he'll really focus his energy on something. I'm like, man, I remember when that just hyped me up every day to be able to work on and I love you bringing that because it kind of brings me back up and I get excited about it again as well. So yeah, it's fun. Okay, so our second topic is completely unrelated, but also not completely unrelated only because I just talked about like your you know, however, 13 years in.
13, 14 years in and you're shifting your responsibility set. And similarly, I took over as CEO of Tighten 12, 13 years into the company and really shifted my responsibilities from CTO to a much broader set. And both of us as a result of that are in places where we're having to figure out like a different relationship to a broader set of work. There's different elements of delegation and different elements of prioritization. And we had gotten a whole bunch of questions in our suggest.gg about delegation, are there tasks you wish you delegated sooner? Any sacred cows that you'll always make time for? Some questions about our email inboxes. What does your email inbox look like? Do you have automations? Do you even use email at all? Do you use rules? And just all these things around, and I know that we've addressed some of these before in the podcast, but it feels like it just keeps coming up where people are asking, what are we doing with our day? What are the things we like doing? What are the things we don't like doing?

So I don't want to like re-ask the exact same questions I've asked you before about what are you always going to hold on to. But I am super curious for you, if you had, and maybe you're not far enough down this road yet, but like if you were able to see the things that you don't have to do today as a result of these new hires, are there any of those things that you're no longer going to have to do where you're like, man, I should have done that 10 years ago because what I could have done if I had delegated, hired or whatever in that way 10 years ago.

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah, I mean, there's some basic stuff I don't have to do anymore, like customer support, which like that's something you can definitely delegate. I mean, in hiring in general, I feel like I've always said, I feel like I should have hired a little bit earlier than I did. I can't remember when I first hired Mohammed. It was like in the 2016 range, maybe. And it was just a huge benefit at the time because I was literally doing everything myself. And I do feel like I put that off a little bit too long. I will say when we hire,

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
We try to hire people that I feel like are pretty self -directed and autonomous because the way I've historically delegated work, and I'm not sure what this will look like in the future with these kind of more complex projects, is I'll give a few paragraphs of like a feature that I think would be great for Forge. And really it's like up to the developer to run with it from there. Like I don't even have a mock-up in many cases. So we try to bring people to the table that I think have good ideas, can carry something from start to finish on their own. Of course, I'm there to give feedback and answer quick questions. But they bring a lot of ideas to the table themselves. So that's kind of how I've delegated stuff. My email inbox is actually pretty lean. I don't get a lot of legit, real emails that I have to actually respond to. I might only get a couple of those a day. And the rest are just kind of like junk. So.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
That's kind of what it looks like for me. There are some things I've never delegated, like for example, GitHub pull requests on the framework. That's something I still do every single morning. I will never delegate that. I don't care what anyone thinks. If we want to keep Laravel curated, I think it's important that I do that.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's... One of the things, I was just reading something this morning from a guy about, he's like, I'm trying to remember his name, Shawn...Blanc, I think it is. And he's been around on the internet for like 20 years. And I remember following him a long time ago when he was just talking about, you know, here's the equipment you should use. But lately a lot of his stuff has been to executive CEOs, people who are starting their own company. And it's all about time management and stuff. And I just skimmed over his email this morning as I had already kind of like planned delegation was what we're going to be talking about. And he was talking about these three kind of top tips for your email inbox. And I wish I had it up in front of me right now, but it basically either like he was like,

Delegate, delete, and automate or something like that and it was very curious to me because my email inbox is an absolute garbage fire and part of it is because the moment you change your title on LinkedIn to be CEO,people scrape that stuff and they just send you like just the most automated crap ever and I'm literally at the point where I'm like I might just pay a virtual assistant to just scrape that crap out of my email inbox before I see it because I just waste so much time and energy doing that.

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah, I get that too.

Matt Stauffer:
There's notifications for services and tools and all that kind of stuff. And for that, I'm like, can I move as many of those into Slack as possible? I mean, the number of legitimate emails I get a day might be in the, I mean, it's more than four, but it's probably under 20.

Taylor Otwell:
I literally have an email filter that just tags all emails with the word unsubscribe in them with newsletter and puts them in a folder. It is a little bit overzealous. There are some emails that get put in that folder that I need to see. But since that folder is actually bolded and has an unread count, I do actually go in there. But I at least just don't prioritize it as high.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. It's nice for your actual just like vanilla inbox to be as close as possible to just useful stuff. You know, I use the Gmail...

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Primary promotion social updates thing. I don't know if you've seen that but it like by default it kind of splits them out and that's one of the only reason I can even touch my email inboxes because I make sure that like for example there's a lot of newsletters that I get that I really like but I don't want a newsletter being my inbox to feel the same level of you should do something as you know, I got an email from a client or a prospective client or you know, whatever. I'm like that's so yeah, I spent a stupid amount of my time every day Just trying to get my email inbox to the point where I don't have to spend a stupid amount of time in the future.

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
constantly trying to build rules. And it's funny because I've started taking over all the bookkeeping at Tighten. When I took over as a CEO, I started taking over the bookkeeping and I ended up realizing that the best way I can book keep is to build as many rules as possible so that when expenses come through, the system's as good as possible saying, that's already should be tagged as a web services, that should be tagged as a hotel, whatever. And so I've just realized that like...things are always vying for attention. Things are always trying to like get in our space and say me, me, me, me, me, me. And you have to be intentional about choosing which things are worth you spending your time and energy on, even if that means paying or whatever somebody else to do some work to like filter it. And it reminds me of this whole like only do what only you can do kind of thing, which is a approach a lot of people use for delegation, which is like.

Taylor Otwell:
Mm -hmm.

Matt Stauffer:
If somebody else can do it, especially if that somebody else can eventually be a rule, a robot, or whatever else, you should definitely let that somebody else do it. Do you find yourself, I would say, do you think that over the time of the company, the list of things that you would say only Taylor can do has gotten smaller. Obviously you just said like managing the PRs is going to be a thing that only Taylor can do if you're gonna have the level of consistency you want. Do you think that like building the company has allowed that list of things that only you can do and have to run through you and if you're on vacation doesn't happen, you've been able to kind of shrink that down?

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah, it is definitely shrank down. I think we could try to shrink it more. So like one thing we recently like unlocked was the ability for other people to make a Laravel framework release without my assistance. So like, for example, Dries in this case, but anyone at the company could technically do it. We've kind of automated the framework release process through GitHub action scripts and workflows that he's written.

Matt Stauffer:
Hmm. Okay. Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
Which triggers off like the tag on the framework the tag on all of the sub components like the illuminate components all of that.

Matt Stauffer:
Nice.

Taylor Otwell:
So we've unlocked that you know as we've been hiring we've definitely tried to unsilo some of that stuff some of it's very practical stuff like just moving to like a shared one password vault so that other people can log into things like Cloudflare, Digital Ocean if they need to make an emergency DNS change, which previously was definitely things that only I could do up until you know a couple months ago, honestly.

Matt Stauffer:
for you. Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
There's not a lot left, I would say, that in a true emergency someone else couldn't figure out, you know, using either the one password vault and going in and digging into stuff. So I think we're getting away from that. The only thing that's really still remaining, I would say, the main thing is that pull request stuff on the framework. And I think other, it's not that they don't have permission. Like there are people that have permission to click the button.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, technically they could do it.

Taylor Otwell:
Like the button will work on GitHub. But it's just not done, you know.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is it scary to you to get to a point, like for example with passwords and stuff, is there anything that makes you nervous around opening up a bunch of passwords where someone, if they just decided they are angry with you, they could just go shut the whole site down or you're like, no, that's just a part of doing things? Or a little bit of both.

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah, I mean, we definitely have a couple different vaults in one password. So there's like an engineering management vault, which has some of the more sensitive stuff. And then there's more of like a generic engineering thing.

Matt Stauffer:
I have the same one. Yep.

Taylor Otwell:
So like, for example, if we're playing around with, let's say, planet scale or some kind of service, and we're just kicking the tires, we might throw the password in the generic engineering vault for the time being so that people can play with it. Or if it was ever something like very serious in production, we move it to like kind of the management vault to kind of segregat off that way.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Okay. Same here. Yep. Yeah, mine is literally called engineering management or engineering leadership. I wanted to be able to disappear on my honeymoon or whatever else and know that Keith, my director of engineering, could be the person people turn to. Because for the longest time, one of the things we've done for the longest time is say there's no need to give everybody permission to everything, even if it's not a trust concern, but just like it makes offboarding if somebody leaves a lot harder if everybody has access to everything. Or people could make more mistakes. So it's just sort of like not a trust issue,

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
I was like, you get access to what you need and then that's it. But I did realize that like...

there's two benefits to me handing off some of that stuff. One of them is so I can take a break. And one of them is so that I can build repeatable systems in the company because the more things that have to run through me, the more it's me and my company versus a functional system that I can then go out and do creative things to bring people's attention to Tighten, or I can take a break, or I can spin up a little mini startup for us or whatever. I can't do any of those if every day-to-day operation of Tighten requires it to go through me. And it's as a kind of...

Taylor Otwell:
Mm -hmm.

Matt Stauffer:
Charismatic frontman thinker whatever it can be and also just as an owner like it can be scary to let things happen that you historically would have always kind of put your eyes on and then be like now those things are happening and they don't have to go through me and so I just have to trust a lot but in the end like if You're not gonna trust then it's always gonna be on you. Have you ever have you read the E-Myth Revisited?

Taylor Otwell:
No.

Matt Stauffer:
I have it, I'm listening through it right now. I don't know if I'd recommend it or not. It's one of these classic business books, but one of the things that's happened so far in what I've read is he's basically talking about the story of like, every business starts with it's just you and you used to do something else and that you know and obviously not every business but like the classic business and then at some point you realize you need help but then at some point the people you delegated to do a bad job and you jump in and you try to take everything back over and he's kind of walking through this this maturation process and he and many other business books I've read say the end goal is get to a point where you have a healthy system that operates without you so that if one day you want to retire or if you want to take a vacation or whatever else you can..

So I think what's been most interesting for me is like finding people, systems, structures, and expectations so that I can trust that the name of this business that I've built and that is so important to me can be like, you know, have a good reputation and be maintained at the level I want on something that I have never seen in my entire life. Like can a project happen the whole way through without me touching it all? And I don't know.

Taylor Otwell:
Mm -hmm.

Matt Stauffer:
I don't know if that's anything that's ever gonna happen with you, right? Because you're involved at some point in the creation of everything that you guys do.

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah, yeah, it's hard to say. I think like if you're starting a company, it is actually good to just do this from the beginning. Like you don't want to over complicate your company too early, but a lot of the stuff I think we're talking about is actually not that complicated to set up. It's more just like getting some basic processes and structure in place where you assume it will be more than you at the company. So even things as simple as like not using like Taylor at Laravel.com to create your cloud.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.

Taylor Otwell:
account or whatever. Use like an engineering at Laravel.com account. It may sound like too overdone at the beginning, but it's actually so easy, right, just to do it like that way. It costs you nothing, but it actually does make your life just so much easier later. Same with like the one password stuff. Just set it up as if people were already there. If you're going to have SSH access, go ahead and just put some basic process in place for who can access that. How is it done? Is there an audit trail? Even if it's just like,

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Mm -hmm.

Taylor Otwell:
A simple crud database that people type why they're SSHing into the server and it puts it in the table, blah, blah, blah. There's just very basic things I can do that I think you could do that if you just set aside like a week at the beginning to just get it sorted out. It would just pay off so much more later.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and I mean, I'm not someone who says every time we ever do anything at the company, we have to create an SOP or a standard operating procedure document. But also there are some things where I'm like, we've been in business for 13 years at this point, and some things that we do on every single project we ever work on still live in the heads of the project managers. And I'm just like.

Taylor Otwell:
Mm -hmm.

Matt Stauffer:
Wow, so every new project manager that joins, and they're just one example, there's tons of these, but every new project manager that joins has to absorb bit by bit. And so we've been working on not SOPs, but sort of like handbooks for each of the sections of the company. Like every time we start a new technical project, every time we hand off a project, every time we start a new business development call, and every single time we hand off from business development to project management, all these different things, what are the things we're gonna do? And we're trying to keep it simple, bullet point lists and everything like that. But it is a delight, it's hard work, but it is a delight to feel like people, just like in code, like each project now has less to do with like relearning the same things every time. And it's more like, here's what we do every time. And now we can spend our energy in what's unique about this project, similar to framework where it's like, if you're building off every time, you don't want to write off every time. From a process perspective, if you're doing these same three steps on every single project, then just write them down and then now allow your creative energy to go towards what's unique about this project.

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah, makes sense.

Matt Stauffer:
Alright, well we're at 45 minutes, I can't believe that already, but is there anything you wanted to cover on any of these topics that we have not gotten to today?

Taylor Otwell:
No, I think that was a good little episode for our listeners.

Matt Stauffer:
I love it.

Taylor Otwell: It was fun.

Matt Stauffer:
And I put out a tweet this morning asking people to ask more Suggest.gg ideas and we've gotten like eight new ones. So thank you all for contributing. If you have not done that and you have something you want us to talk about, please make sure you check it out. Again, link will be in the show notes and let us know what else you're interested in hearing us talk about. And until then, thank you all for hanging out with us.

Taylor Otwell:
See ya.