If you haven’t already heard, I’m extremely excited to share that I’ll be speaking at Laracon 2025 in Denver, CO! If you would like to learn more about the conference, please visit the official website:
My first Laracon was back in 2019 in Times Square, NYC, at the PlayStation Theater. I can still remember and feel all of the excitement and charisma that was in the air as Taylor Otwell took the stage in that underground theatre. For almost 4 years, Laravel was on a 6-month release cycle. During this time, all of the new versions followed the 5.x versioning scheme. With every release, the version would increment (5.1, 5.2, 5.3, etc.) and for those that follow semantic versioning, this was a bit confusing. For you see, these releases were really large major releases.
At least from the outside, it looked like Laravel was slowly improving, when in fact with each release there were many significant changes made to the framework. So this was the year where Laravel 6 was to be released, a true major release, that started the new versioning scheme, new branding, and a moment we can all point back to as a pivotal shift for the framework.
It was truly an amazing experience, and I’ve really wanted to go back ever since. In fact, I was planning on attending Laracon 2020, which was supposed to be in Atlanta, GA, my home state. Unfortunately, the world got sick, and the pandemic made it impossible. The following years were also difficult to attend in person due to family and personal commitments. So, fast forward to today, and this year things have lined up perfectly for me to not only attend but also share a talk!
The title of my talk is: “You should reinvent the wheel.”
This will be my first time speaking at Laracon, and I’m extremely excited to share the stage with some of the brightest minds in the Laravel community. I’ve learned so much from many of the speakers and feel honored to be included in the lineup. There was actually a time where I thought I wasn’t good enough to contribute to Laravel, let alone speak at the flagship conference. But here I am, and I’m grateful for the opportunity. In my talk, I want to share some of my journey, how I’ve been battling imposter syndrome, and what I’ve learned along the way.
I’ve been thinking about giving a talk for a while, and initially I did not know what topic to cover, but I was sure something would come to mind. Once CFPs for Laracon US opened up, the pressure to come up with an interesting talk started to build. I think I left the tab to the application open for like a week (if you’ve seen my browser tabs, this is a normal occurrence).
One morning, I randomly woke up around 3 AM bursting with ideas. I immediately pulled out my phone and, in that moment, typed a full outline in Notes. There I had it: on paper, was a good reflection of what I had been working through over the last several years in my professional career and worthy of sharing. My hope is that this talk will land well with a majority of the community. It is going to start off as a soft talk and, midway through, will ramp up into a technical presentation.
What I hope to be the energy level of my talk over time
If you checked out my talk at PHPxATL last month, you may have heard that I’m working on a SQLite database server that communicates over HTTP. I actually got the idea for this project after attending Laracon in 2019. While Taylor was shipping Laravel 6, he also announced another amazing product: Laravel Vapor. With Vapor, you can deploy a Laravel application to AWS on Lambda for a serverless experience. After giving it a try, I was immediately sold on the idea of serverless applications, or more so the idea of being able to easily ship an application without having to worry about managing servers or how the application will scale.
However, at the time there weren’t many options for serverless relational databases, and I wasn’t really attracted to some of the available options. I’ve also long felt that SQLite is a strongly capable database option, so at the time I explored many different ideas on how to access my SQLite database from cloud applications. Several years ago, I arrived at where many solutions are today. I’ve continued to shape my concept, further improving it.
Today, Laravel has pretty strong support for SQLite, and over the last few years, the sentiment around SQLite has improved significantly. Architecturally, I see Laravel as a distributed systems application framework. Between Laravel’s support for multiple application servers, queues, caching, and task scheduling, there are many points of entry into the application, and they all need to work together, sharing some common state. SQLite works well for Laravel if you have a single server, but once you need to scale out to multiple servers, you’re left with a challenging situation that falls outside of the scope of SQLite. This is where my SQLite database server comes in, and I’m really excited to show it off.
I’m now looking at the code base, and I’m dang proud of how far this project has come. While I’m filled with excitement, I’ve also been trying to mentally prepare myself for the pundits that will quickly cry “Just use PostgreSQL!” or “Why not just use MySQL?” or “Company XYZ is already doing this.” To that I will say, “Those are all great options and you are free to use them!”
I plan on sharing more details about this project, so please do stay tuned. You can sign up for my newsletter and follow me on Bluesky for updates.
If you’re attending Laracon this year, please leave a comment on this post. I’ll try to find you and say hi!