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Here, Laravel creator Taylor Otwell share how Laracon came about and grew across the US and Europe:
The transcript:
Yeah, so Ian Landsman had the idea to have a Laracon conference, which I thought was something that we couldn’t pull off - like, I didn’t think people would be interested enough to come to the conference and he thought we could do it.
He thought we could have a small event, maybe just a hundred people. And so we actually pulled it off, thanks to his sort of vision on that.
And going forward, we’ve pretty much had one every year. And after we did that first one in the US, some guys over in Europe, Shawn McCool and some of his team reached out and said, “We think we can do a nice event here in Europe. There’s a lot of developers here all over Europe, and we think we can have a cool event here in Amsterdam.”
And I said, go for it, you know?
So they took care of organising that whole event, and I just got to show up as any other speaker. I didn’t actually have to do any of the event organisation or anything, which was really cool.
And they’ve always thrown just like really top tier awesome events over there, too. And every year, you know, it just keeps getting bigger and bigger until the last Laracon we did in the US had almost a thousand people in Times Square. And it’s just become this big, amazing event that we have every year, both in the US and Europe and now Australia as well.
Which was nice, because we were already prepared like when Covid happened, we had been doing Laracon Online for like years.
So Ian, had this idea, you just have to do an online conference for Laravel so that we could involve everyone around the world at a much cheaper price than actually flying to New York City or flying to Amsterdam.
And he manages all of that with Eric at Userscape. And now we have thousands of people that can attend this online event. Learn from all the same Laravel speakers you might see at a typical in-person event and also hear a keynote from me.
But, you know, from the comfort of your own office and for a much more affordable price that makes it super accessible for anyone around the world to attend this event online and have a live chat and you get to interact with people, and it’s just a really cool event.
More resources
- Laravel Origins: The Documentary by OfferZen
- Why OfferZen is Making Documentaries about Open-source tech
- Taylor Otwell Tells the Story behind Laravel Forge
- Taylor Otwell on how he Decides what PRs to Merge into Laravel
- Jeffrey Way Tells the Story of Laracasts
- The Story of Tailwind CSS feat. Adam Wathan
- Nuno Maduro Tells the Story of Pest PHP
- Larabelles and Inclusivity in the Laravel community
- PHP Isn’t Dead ft. Jeffrey Way, Erika Heidi and others
- Taylor Otwell Explains his Coding Style
- The pros and cons of open-source feat. the Laravel Origins cast
