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Tech insights: Taylor Otwell on how he Decides what PRs to Merge into Laravel
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Taylor Otwell on how he Decides what PRs to Merge into Laravel

13 September 2022, by Anne Gonschorek

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Here, Laravel creator Taylor Otwell shares how he decides which pull requests to merge into Laravel.

Transcript

So for the first couple of hours of my day, I would say between seven, 39 30. I’m dealing with all the incoming emails, all of the incoming pull requests.

Merging PRs is something that can be stressful, but it’s a lot of fun because you’re interacting with a lot of people, but it always hurts to like, turn down a PR or reject a PR.

But a lot of times someone will propose something and it may not really like, click with me, right? Then I’ll be like, “Well, I’m going to like, set this aside for now and close it for now.” But then it like keeps coming back up like someone else says, “Hey, I think to be really cool if we have this or I think this is not working the way it should,” and once I hear it like a few times and like, “OK, maybe there’s something there” and I’ll revisit it and you know, something will get merged.

I try to keep it a fun vibe and keep people excited about it because I just because I lead the project like I need all of those people’s input still like I need all of their ideas, all of their criticisms, all the things like, I’ll ask people, what sucks about Laravel?

Like, you know, I’ll ask people, “What’s the worst thing about Laravel that you can think of? Like what? What really annoys you about the product?” I need all these people to give me all of their feedback good and bad so that I can sort of like, see what are the common themes I’m hearing?

Like, I’ve heard this from 100 people. I’ve heard this from 200 people like, I need to look into that. So even though I’m the main person making all like the final decisions on the project I love having and need all of those thousands of people that give me feedback on like good or bad.

Taylor Otwell on how he Decides what PRs to Merge into Laravel

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