Creating Laravel: Solving Real-World Problems as an Average Developer

Creating Laravel: Solving Real-World Problems as an Average Developer

As the creator of Laravel, Taylor Otwell shares his journey from building open-source software as a solo developer to leading a VC-backed company, offering insights on building tools that make a huge impact and staying true to your core community.

• * The speaker is Taylor Otwell, creator of Laravel, an open-source PHP framework for building web applications.
• * He started creating Laravel as a way to build web applications faster and it was not his original intention to make it a big popular open-source framework or community.
• * The community around Laravel has grown tremendously since its release, with thousands of developers from almost every country in the world using it to build applications.
• * Otwell grew up in Hot Springs Arkansas and was always interested in computers and the web as a kid. He built his first website when he was 10 years old.
• * College was a good experience for him as his professors were very old school programmers who taught him core foundational programming concepts that apply across all languages.
• * After college, Otwell worked as a software engineer and always gravitated towards building tools for other engineers at the company to make them more productive.
• * He needed a toolkit to build web applications more quickly and decided to create Laravel as a more modern take on how to build web applications in PHP.
• * The speaker emphasizes the importance of listening to the community when building open source software, and not straying too far from one's core beliefs and what one thinks the product needs to be.
• * He advises trying to solve a problem that one has themselves, as those are the problems that one will understand the most deeply.
• * His second piece of advice is to do the hardest parts first when building a new product, as this is where most web developers fail by procrastinating and building easy parts first.
• * Otwell sees himself as a very average developer and builds tools that help the average developer do their job quickly, which he believes is a good thing because there are a lot of average developers

Source: EO via YouTube

❓ What do you think? What is the most significant factor that has contributed to Laravel's success, and how can other open-source projects replicate this success? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments!