Yesterday the returning Laracon online conference took place. A gathering of developers who are fans of the Laravel platform. We thoroughly enjoyed the online videos and livestream.
Laravel is the platform we use at SevenLab as a solid foundation for our backend applications. The platform is scalable, nice to work with and moreover based on a programming language that most developers know well.
For the writing of this blog we spoke with Niels Kramer. Our senior full stack developer and Laravel specialist. In this article you can read what we learned.
What do developers discuss at a Laravel conference?
This time, there were great speakers again. The Laravel godfather Taylor Otwell was of course also present again. From 8:00 to 18:45 there were talks on the following topics:
- Event driven applications
- Writing less complex and more readable code
- Real-time applications with Laravel
- What's new in React (a JavaScript framework)
- Laravel 5.8 (the new version)
- Laravel & blockchain
- Database optimisations
- Practical solutions to known user interface design problems
- New way of webstyling: Tailwind CSS
These are all interesting topics for a developer. At SevenLab, we are already working on them.
What did our developers find most interesting?
Niels was one of the developers who followed the conference online. As a Laravel expert and fan, it is interesting to know what he thought of the conference and what he will take with him to use in SevenLab's projects.
1. The new Laravel (5.8)
The new version of Laravel has a number of interesting features for handling queues. Also, a number of extra security measures have now been added by default.
2. React features also available in VueJS
This presentation was given by a top person. Although we at SevenLab are not currently using React, it was nice to know that it has a lot of common ground with VueJS (https://vuejs.org/); in the sense of features from React also coming to VueJS a few months later. And we also use the latter framework because it works very well in combination with Laravel.
3. Semantic frontend code with Tailwind CSS
This relatively new CSS framework can be used to give a website or application a look and feel. By implementing this framework, you can see much better how a screen will behave in the browser just by looking at the code. The advantage is clear: you can better predict what the result of your code will be for the end user. A disadvantage is that you have to learn a lot more by heart.
Attending a conference?
SevenLab is organising a Laracon viewing party later this year. Sign up and we will contact you by then!
