From Tire Shop to Solutions Engineer with Devon Garbalosa

In this conversation, Devon Garbalosa shares his journey from working in a tire shop to discovering his passion for web development, highlighting a pivotal moment when he discovered Laravel. He discusses the ease of connecting to databases and implementing authentication, emphasizing how frameworks can significantly enhance development efficiency and effectiveness.

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----- Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.

Creators and Guests

Host

Matt Stauffer

CEO Tighten, where we write Laravel and more w/some of the best devs alive. "Worst twerker ever, best Dad ever" –My daughter

Guest

Devon Garbalosa

Father, Technologist, and Gamer. Obsessed with US National Parks. Solutions Engineer @ Laravel.

What is The Laravel Podcast?

The Laravel Podcast brings you Laravel and PHP development news and discussion.

Matt Stauffer:
Hey, welcome back to Laravel podcast season seven. I'm your host, Matt Stauffer, CEO of Titan. And in this season, I'll be joined every episode by a member of the Laravel team. Today I'm talking to Devon Garbalosa, a solutions engineer at Laravel. Devin, can you say hi and share a little bit about what you do at Laravel?

Devon Garbalosa:
Absolutely, Devon Garbalosa, Solutions Engineer at Laravel. Basically, I do the technical part of our sales process for mostly Laravel Cloud and some of the other products that we have.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, and I'm looking forward to talking more about that, but you know that before we talk about that, we gotta talk about your journey to come to work at Laravel. So, what's the story?

Devon Garbalosa:
Absolutely. So I'm going to, I'm going to kick this one way back. So when I, when I started my career, uh, I worked for my dad when I was like 14, he owned a tire repair shop for, uh, tractor trailers. And so it's kind of what I knew. And I was like, man, cars, tires, things like that's what I'm going to go do. So I worked for a company in the past there called Town Fair Tire. It's a local kind of tire chain place. And I went in there slinging tires, doing stuff.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, love it.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Devon Garbalosa:
I ended up dropping out of college because I got a nice opportunity to become a service manager and an alignment technician there. And I was like, okay, this is cool. And then I was like 19 years old and I was like, man, my back hurts every day. I probably should not feel this way at 19 years old, right? So, so then I was like, let's see what else is out there. And so at the time I was living with a buddy of mine and his step mom worked at a retirement company

Matt Stauffer:
At 19. That's rough.

Devon Garbalosa:
and they were hiring for their call center. And I was like, well, you I think I could do that. And so I basically applied for that job. And little did I know at the time that I would have to get like financial licenses and pass tests. And I was just like, what in the world am I doing? And so I ended up going into customer service, which is actually where I met my wife. We were in the same hire class. So it's pretty, pretty interesting. Yeah. It's kind of kind of a little side quest here.

Matt Stauffer:
That's awesome. Yeah.

Devon Garbalosa:
The moment I walked into this higher class, I started a week later than everybody because I got the job offer late and everybody's like introducing themselves. And as everybody's going, they're like, oh, hi, I'm Ben. Hi, I'm so, my wife walks up at the time. Don't know who she is. Right. She goes, hi, I'm Karen. And I was the first Karen here. So I'm the better Karen. And the first thing in my mind was like, I like you. Yeah. So exactly. I think I'd like.

Matt Stauffer:
Love that he's like I like your energy.

Devon Garbalosa:
like within days I was like, I hope I marry somebody just like that someday. Like spoiler alert guys, I did. Yeah. So, so started kind of in customer service. In retirement services, you kind of have a few different levels of like who the, who the client is. So for, you know, obviously the people all over the world watching this, this kind of resonated a little more with the Americans, the 401k and things like that.

Matt Stauffer:
Love that for you.

Devon Garbalosa:
When you have problem, you need to take money out, you've moved employers, you need to roll it over, something like that, you got to call somebody and kind of handle that. And so that's what I was doing in kind of the early parts of my career is just, hey, thank you for calling. How can I help you? that's just a wild experience. At a certain point in there, I kind of did what's called asset retention, where people are trying to, I left my employer, I want to move this. It's like, hey, that's awesome. There's going to be a huge penalty.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Devon Garbalosa:
Like, so how do we how do we kind of make sure that you're doing the right thing for you and that and that so that was kind of like the first time that I got into I would say like soft sales is really kind of in the beginning of that in there and so kind of work through that moved up my way through there and then I basically was like, hey, I think I really want to go into sales and so like the dream at the time was hey, I'm going to go out and I'm going to be this external sales rep that sells life insurance and just makes a lot of money and just is that guy and I was like...

That was my dream. And mind you, at this time, I'm like 22 years old. I have no idea what I really want to do with my life. But like this is this is where we're at. So I get this job on the sales desk as a sales support engineer. And kind of what I'm doing there is making PowerPoint presentations for sales pitches. And it's kind of templatized. I'm like filling in the little things and kind of doing that. And the other major tenet of that job was pricing the plans. And so

Matt Stauffer:
Yep. Yep.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Devon Garbalosa:
I worked on a product that was kind of what we'll say is the core product there, which is kind of like very on rails, right? Like they could have trained a computer program to do this, but it was easier to have people do it. And so when I first joined there, the way it kind of worked was you had, if you're the assets of the total retirement plan, which is like the employer, right? So Titan has a retirement plan. Tighten is the customer at this point, not Tighten employees having their individual accounts.

So if the total number of people that had money in that retirement plan was between X and Y dollar amount, it was this much BIPs percentage for cost. And then if it was between Y and Z, it was very linear, kind of like that. So they're, at the time they're like, hey, we need to get a little more competitive on pricing, et cetera. And so they're like, we're going to introduce this new model. And this new model is going to be kind of that same linear progression except for we're add breakpoints for the average participant balance. So now it looks kind of like a multiplication grid. And I looked at this thing and I'm like looking at the sheet that they gave me and I was like, I am gonna get fired because I'm gonna mess this up. Like what in the world is going on? And so I'm like racking my brain at the time and we had just created some weird solutions using Excel and VBA and like the buttons that go in there. And I was like,

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Devon Garbalosa:
I think I could do something like this. And so I kind of started being like, how can I do something here? And so this is where kind of technology enters into like my career progression here. And so because Excel VBA was like, wow, I'm a programmer. This is great. My wife had convinced me to go back to college at this point. And so I'm going to school full time at night for finance. I'm working all day in finance. And I was just like, this is awful.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Devon Garbalosa:
like all I think about is finance and finance and finance. And so this, this Excel project kind of ignited something. I was like, yeah, this is like computer programming. So I literally go home, not talk to my wife and I changed my entire degree plan from finance to information systems with an emphasis in database. And it sets me back from being like a second, second semester junior to a first semester sophomore.

Matt Stauffer:
my gosh.

Devon Garbalosa:
I was like, here we go. We're just starting over. because, know, Excel is so easy that this, this software engineering thing, breeze, let's go for it. Spoiler alert, I was wrong. So back to kind of where this, this multiplication grid comes into play. I'm kind of learning some things at school and I'm like, I think I can like download like visual studio community edition. I think I can like do this and like real VB. And so I started creating this for little project.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah.

Devon Garbalosa:
on the side of like, how can I not get fired by making this automated? And so as I'm starting to do this, I'm like, this actually could be something like, I wonder why we've we've tried not gotten to something like this. And so I started talking to some of the sales reps, I'm like, hey, how would this help you? And what's some of your pain points? And where's this kind of like, and just kind of trying to get ideas. And so kind of fast forward to six months later, I rolled out this tool. And it was I call it total opportunity request center. And essentially what anybody in the sales organization could do is they could come to this tool, they could enter all the parameters that we were required to use to price a plan, and it would give you live calculations of that plan, which was revolutionary. And this is like 2017, guys. This is not like, this is not like early, this is like really late, for this to be revolutionary technology was wild. So

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Devon Garbalosa:
So the nice thing is that now took this process that took like five days of like, hey, we've got this client, here's their details. We want to try and get them a price. And then to get them that PowerPoint, it took like five business days. We've got it down to they could do it live in front of the customer. And so it was kind of like a shift right of responsibility because now the sales reps had on rails way that they could do this. And so this became something that was like.

Matt Stauffer:
That's amazing.

Devon Garbalosa:
very clearly obvious that I was really passionate about and like I was capable of. And so it was it was kind of like really cool to like dive in there. And so this is kind of where the story takes its its its split. So I actually have not worked in sales for the last eight years of my career. I've only worked in technology. And so this is where this kind of happens is I applied for a desk sales desk job that wouldn't make me an internal sales representative for the company, which is kind of like a natural progression from where I was at.

I apply for the job. I go through all the interviews and my mentor at the time was the sales desk manager who was hiring this position. And so I'm like, I've got the inside track. Like, this is really great. Like I love the sales thing. And so after he schedules a meeting with me, I'm like, this is it. He's going to offer me this job. This going to be great. We sit down and he goes, Hey man, you're the best candidate for this job. And I was like, yes, this is great. And he goes, but I know that this is not what you're passionate about. So I'm not going to hire you.

And I was mortified. I literally did not talk to this guy for like two or three years after this happened. I was just like, how do you tell me that like I'm the guy you want? And then like, it's just gone. Like, and so serendipitously, there was a posting for a job for this in internal business intelligence team, and they were looking for somebody to do data management kind of stuff. And that's what my degree was in. So it kind of made sense. And I was like, yeah, the sales thing is cutthroat.

I really got the worst of cutthroat here. So maybe I don't want to do this. And so I kind of applied to that job and I demoed the same tool that I created and they were like, this is exactly where we're trying to go. Like we want you. And so I ended up taking this role on this business intelligence team. And a lot of what I needed to do in the beginning was like, we get these Excel files from all around the company. So how do we kind of get those in one place? I wrote like a little VB script that would go and go and grab those out. This one's actually kind of funny.

I have a problem with naming tools in like weird ways. I, the last probably five years of my career, everything was named with some God name like Heimdall or Olympus or like, like everybody would be like, this guy literally has a God complex or something. Cause there's just like a thing. But early days they were like the dumbest names you could come up with. And so this one was the copy report and paste tool or affectionately known as the crap tool.

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.

Devon Garbalosa:
and had the brown pudding emoji as the icon on everybody's desk. Yeah, nothing like working for a Fortune 100 company. That's tool on your desktop. Total rabbit trail on that one. So I kind of did that. Then I'm about a month into this job and the two lead engineers, one's kind of like the visualization tableau engineer and one's more of the ETL engineer, they decide that they want to go seek other opportunities and it's just me.

Matt Stauffer:
God, I'm sure they love that.

Devon Garbalosa:
I'm like, I don't even think I'm four weeks on the job, to be honest. Like I think it was actually like three weeks in, they announced that they're leaving like a month in is when they actually left. And I'm like, I just don't even know what I'm doing right now. And so kind of was an interesting opportunity where I got kind of just thrown in the fire of like, you got to just figure it out. Like this is it. And like, nobody's actually expecting you to be successful right now. But if you are, how cool would that be? Right. And so I'm just learning these things. And so we start, we start doing all these ETL things and

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Devon Garbalosa:
Essentially what business intelligence does is finds, especially in a large company like that, is tries to find all of the opportunities where you're spending too much money or you're leaving money on the table for different opportunities for kind of your ongoing business and making sure that things are going correctly, like making sure your processing times are effective. So as we're trying to kind of like build this, the goal is to get to being able to kind of

have this data at your fingertips so people can do that. So the ETL process that was in place at this time was for the month end of every month. And it took 10 to 11 business days into the month to close that database to be like, hey, we've got everything we need to report on last month to kind of go forward and do this. And so one of the things that I got really kind of obsessed with is like, why? And so I did a whole bunch of documentation of like, we get this source file from here and this one here and these ones close here.

Matt Stauffer:
Wow.

Devon Garbalosa:
And within a couple of months, I was able to get that from 10 days down to two business days. And that was like the first like flex that I was able to kind of pull out there. And it was just like, just just trace it back. Right. Like it was not like this crazy thing. And it had to if you never got to the 10 day 12 day version of it, you would have never gotten to the two day version. So it was very important, but it was really cool to kind of do that. So that kind of propelled us forward of like, OK, what

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Devon Garbalosa:
what of those things are necessary on like a daily feed versus a nightly feed versus a weekly feed or as update. And so that was kind of the next task I took was how do we make this so like we just close with the best available data at the right time. And so at that point we were able to get the ETL process for kind of all the data that changed daily down so was ready by 9 a.m. every morning. And so it was like OK so why don't we just do this daily. And so we undertook that project to just say OK let's let's let's kind of move this and let's.

Let's get this daily. And so that became kind of this really awesome thing that we were able to build. And so from there, the next step that we had is net cash flow reporting, which in retirement industry is massive. There is you have the participant, what money source, what investment, all the underlying funds. And then when the actual contribution came in, because you have to track that from like the age of it, especially in the Roth. And then

of just goes down to this really like low granularity. And so like if you take just like your average person's retirement account, you're talking one day's worth of just investment trades is like 100,000 records in a database at the lowest granularity. And so this becomes like interesting. Yeah. And you're like, okay, so how do we kind of track this over time? And like the whole point of net cash flow is like, I'm a dollar, I enter the system, where do I go? And how what's my life cycle? And this kind of helps you analyze like, where you have to

Matt Stauffer:
What?

Devon Garbalosa:
focus your efforts for automation and other things and kind of that. So we're coming into 2020. This is like January 2020. And they're like, we need to come up with this thing. And I was like, okay, so let's take a look at this. The kind of the thing that was weird at the time is the company I worked for bought a company who had bought a company and they had three different record keeping systems now. And the three different record keeping systems didn't have the same information on there.

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.

Devon Garbalosa:
So how do you start to reconcile what's the same and like functionally under the hood, the company operated and this company is no longer doing this business. Spoiler alert, this comes in a minute. So it wasn't feasible. And so you basically had three companies under the hood operating under the flag of one company. So like literally there was like, hey, who do we talk to about this? Like, that's this person. No, that's this person. And so you kind of got to go around.

A lot of what I did was make assumptions from the business knowledge I had gained from being in customer service and being in the sales teams and kind of working with those. Like, listen, no, I know what a withdrawal is and what it looks like on all three systems. So I'm to create like a lookup that's like, hey, if you're on this system and you have these three identifiers withdrawal, these one withdrawal and kind of make this mapping, which I think was kind of interesting at the time is I had the experience to be able to do this and the technical skills to be able to do it. Right. And so.

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.

Devon Garbalosa:
It was kind of like right place, right time. So obviously 2020, we all know where this goes. COVID comes, they send us home. We're kind of doing this. And a lot of companies are at the point where they're like batting down the hatches. This net cashflow became even more important for them to be able to keep on their promises of not laying off and all of this. And so I'm literally just sitting in this exact office, heads down every day, just trying to figure this out. And it's big data. So I had to teach myself kind of analytical databases or OLAP databases at that point and I'm looking at there's the Inman model, there's the Kimball model and like what's the right one. So I eventually settled on the Kimball model and I created a data warehouse that basically would allow us to pipe in this data from the record keeping systems again daily because we figured out how to do it with the other data. So why not? Net cashflow, you get the best reporting possible. You can kind of see where things are going. And so we create this warehouse, we pump the data in and then we layer on top of this.

Tablo and we're like, okay, what is this going to look like? And every day was about one billion records for all the different transactions that would happen across the three record keeping systems and all that. So anybody who hears Tablo and one billion records is like, all right, so I'm going to go get my coffee. I'll be back. Probably go make lunch. Yeah. And so a lot of what it comes down to is you have to create kind of aggregate levels of what you want to do.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I was just going to say I didn't know Tableau could handle that much data.

Devon Garbalosa:
And so Tableau has this trope that they use called hot, hotter, hottest, hot, hotter, hyper, I'm sorry, cause they're hyper extracts or whatever. And so it's the same concept of like, have, you have data and at a certain point, you know, like what the cross grain is going to be. So say like, I care about all the withdrawals at like that level. I don't care about the individual transactions that roll up to it. I just want the money that would be marked as withdrawal.

So you basically create a view of the data in the data warehouse that collapses and sums the data to that level. And so now that's pre-canned and you basically can put that in there. And so this is all kind of behind the design of how you like create the march and things. And so we create this dashboard and you could click on it and move from like one view to the next. And it was instant. People thought it was like fake. They were like, so you guys like recording to me? I'm like, no guys, this is, this is like the coolest thing. Like when you actually figure out how these databases work, like you could do just massive things.

Matt Stauffer:
huh.

Devon Garbalosa:
that are awesome. So mid 2020, this is happening. The company that I work for, there's, we're in like July, all of a sudden a Reuters article comes out and says that this company is potentially for sale. And I'm just like, what? Huh? What is going on? This is wild. And so it goes into this thing and they're like, no, we're not for sale. You know, this is at the other, you know, we're, we're investing in all this technology is what it is. And so mind you, I'm

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.

Devon Garbalosa:
kind of already said this, they're operating as three companies under one. We're in the heat of COVID, you know, it's wild. Like it wouldn't surprise me if you're looking for an out at this point. So Labor Day comes and we get an email the day after Labor Day from the CEO, hey, we've entered in a definitive agreement to sell this retirement division from this company to the next one. And I'm just like, that's it. This other company is much bigger. Obviously they're buying us.

This is going to be like a weird thing. Like they've got business intelligence. They don't need me. What kind of do I do next? And so as we're kind of going through this, now I've got to start helping with how do we make these data feeds go to this new company and how do we kind of kind of get this out the door there? And so that's that's kind of where this is at. So, man, I almost forgot this is the Laravel podcast. I got so excited about this. We got to we got to go to how Laravel layers in here because this is where we're at. So.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
We'll get there. Yeah.

Devon Garbalosa:
Sorry, we'll come back to the acquisition. It's important. Pre-acquisition, another thing that we made out of these Tableau dashboards and things is we created tools for the business. And at the time they were in .NET with C Sharp that they could have on their desktop and had the revenue and expense information. And basically you could say, hey, Tighten, we're about to hop on a call with them and here's their retirement plan. Here's all their things that go into it. Here's how we make money. Here's how they pay expenses, all that.

And it would basically look at that and would say, Hey, Tighten offers this fund on their plan and this fund has a fee of X, but we only make, you know, a kickback of Y. If we asked them and work with them to move to this fund, it performs at the same level. They would pay X minus five and we would make Y plus one. So, Hey, relationship manager, go talk to Matt and team and like talk to them about this and give them the benefits and kind of.

It was this kind of forward thinking like, how do we start to target message revenue opportunities that are mutually beneficial? And so this tool, it's on your desktop, right? It's Windows forms, it's great, it does what it needs to do, connected to the databases. So somebody who obviously did not have insight into how these people were doing their jobs every day was like, our field reps need iPad Pros to be in modern technology. And I was just like, why?

So, you know, I kind of, this time I'm still kind of getting my degree. I'm still working there. So part of this degree, got information systems with an emphasis in database. I had to take a technology elective that was not in the database. And so I somehow was just like, intro to web development. Yeah, let's do that. And so I'm literally like, intro to web development, sorry.

Matt Stauffer:
It was called internal web development. intro to web development. was like, that's an amazing class. I'd be very curious. Okay, so intro to web development.

Devon Garbalosa:
Yeah. Yeah, that would have been an awesome one. We should should we should make this one. Yeah, awesome. So yeah, so intro to web development. So I'm like learning HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and they're using PHP in this class. And so it's kind of like here, here's how you do this and whatnot. And so this first thing that pops to my mind is like, I don't know anything about building, you know, phone apps or iPad apps. And like at the time, you know, early, early 2019 2020, like nobody's building iPad apps like they are today.

Right. And so it's like, what do we do? Like, we're going to have to get MacBooks for everybody. We're a window shop. Like, this is going to be like crazy. And so I was like, wait a second. What if we like made a website that like could do this? Like, is that like a thing? Like, and so I kind of started doing that. And in my brain, I'm like, PHP connected database. Right. Like, so I'm like just trying to figure this out. And then all of a sudden this guy who also worked at the same company at a different team that did business intelligence, but for like the life insurance side of the house comes over and he's like, what are you, what are you kind of working on? And I'm like, I'm trying to do this web thing. And I'm, you know, I'm using PHP. He's like, you ever heard of Laravel? And I was like, what are you talking about? And he's like, like, I heard of PHP yesterday. And he's like, dude, check this out. And he literally, we do hit a Laravel new and get this thing going. And all of sudden I'm like, wait a minute, I can connect to a database. It, it like has authentication like.

It just works. Like this is I just figured out the gold right here. Like I'm gonna I'm gonna fly with this. And so I like just start creating stuff. And so I hop on Laracasts and I think at this time it's like six point seven or something. I somebody's gonna have to fact check me on what late 2019 version of Laravel would have been at the time. But it was like OK this is just amazing and take you know go through the course that they have the like.

Which by the way, if you haven't taken it, it's one of the best things if you're getting into it. It's like the, Laravel, Laravel freshers, something that like walks you through like how you build a whole Laravel application from like beginning to end. And they refresh it like every year with the new updates. So it was definitely like the way I learned how to do everything at Laravel.

Matt Stauffer:
Yep, I know what mean. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I think it's Laravel from scratch, maybe. Yes. Although you can't look right now because CloudFlare is down right now. But by the time you're listening to this, CloudFlare will be back up.

Devon Garbalosa:
Blair Bell from scratch. That's the one. Yeah. Yeah. So.

cloud flare. go Laravel from scratch. Go check it out, especially if you're new. is gold, absolute gold. So as we're kind of building this application, this is where I'm like, OK, I think this is where I kind of want to go. Like, I like this a ton. And like, this is where it's kind of at. But we're still kind of going in the in the data warehouse thing here. So jump portal back. I've found Laravel. I'm kind of working on the side learning on this app.

We're now for sale. I'm working on data pipelines and things. I'm like, they're not gonna need me. What do we do here? And so I'm just like, I don't know. And so my manager at the time was like, dude, you're really passionate about this. Like, unless it has to do for the migration, I want you working on this for you. And I was just like, sure, yeah, like this is awesome. And so we, I'm just like.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, that's amazing.

Devon Garbalosa:
doing stuff off the side of my desk, figuring out like at this point I figured out how to set up an IIS server because we were Microsoft shop. So IIS server, SQL server, bucking the whole system of all the Laravel ways to do it. Like how do you even serve an app like SFTP into with Filezilla or whatever to get the files up on the server. And so.

Matt Stauffer:
You said this is what, 2021, but you're living like the 20, 2005 life. Yeah. You're living even that old school life. Yeah.

Devon Garbalosa:
This is 2020. Yeah, 2020. Exactly. So it's just wild. So we're kind of making this work. so come to find out they were in the acquisition period here. And as we're kind of going through, I get into a meeting and one of the leaders of the team at the time that was selling the company is kind of giving information about this net cashflow. She kind of makes this trope of like, hey, all this data that you use to make this acquisition came from this team here and like just points at me and my team. We were just like, well, that makes us feel terrible. We felt like we did this awesome thing that made this. And now we're all sitting here wondering if we have jobs tomorrow because of all this great work and like whatnot. And what's awesome about that is what we didn't know at the time is acquisition was actually for the people, not for the business. They wanted to kind of grow their ability to have talent. And they thought that the talent at this company was awesome. And so they ended up

Matt Stauffer:
Got it.

Devon Garbalosa:
retaining 87 % of us after five years. So it was pretty good for us. But obviously in the heat of the moment, you don't know that, right? So we go over to this new company and day one, I'm like, I don't want to do this data thing anymore. I just want to do web development. Like this is where it's at. Like where do we kind of go? And I started hitting the ground. And at this point, they're an AWS centric shop and they've got this mission to be like the first retirement

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, wow.

Devon Garbalosa:
company to be fully on cloud. And so it's like, okay, what is this cloud thing you speak of? Like I have zero idea, like, We're FileZilla three days ago, what's AWS?

Matt Stauffer:
Gotta learn.

Yep, yep, yeah, this is a fast learning process.

Devon Garbalosa:
And so, yeah, so we're kind of going, I start reaching out to people and I was like, hey, how do I get access to this AWS thing? How do I, know, where can we do this? And kind of go and so I'm still kind of in the back of my head, like they don't need me, right? Like this is... They've got business intelligence. They've got people that do this. And so I meet this one guy, his name's Fletcher, and he ended up being my boss for the last five years of my career and one of my really good friends and mentors to my career. And he basically gave me the space to get to where I am today, which is awesome, which we'll kind of get into. And so I reach out to Fletcher, I'm like, Fletcher, like, how can I do something here? Like, I want to do this thing and whatnot. And he's like, listen, I've got this problem and I need a solution. We've got this Excel file that's on this LAN server that people go into and they enter in like a plan number and then every two hours we run a batch and we create this PDF output about like all the features of the plan and then we send it to them.

And so they've got to open this Excel file, they've got to put in the plan number, they're going to put their name, they've got to put their email address and then they've got to remember to close it because if they don't close it, nobody else can get in there. And then the batch can't run.

And he's like, so like, I need to solve this. And I was like, Hey, have you ever heard of Laravel? I can make a web application that could do this into a database. And he was just like, that's awesome. How do we do this? And I was like, I don't know. What's cloud? What is AWS? Like, and I was like, I'll figure it out. Like, let's, let's try it. And so we scheduled this meeting and this is kind of like my first introduction to like how you do things in like, in the cloud, which is kind of crazy. And so.

All we had available to us was Lambda and S3. And so I'm just like, I'm sorry, where's the IIS server in files? Like, how do we do this? And so I'm just like Googling my butt off. Like, where do we go? How do we do this? How do we go? And so we ended up kind of making this node Lambda function that could connect to a Postgres RDS database and could write this in. And then we were able to create basically a small little React JavaScript app that we could host on the S3 bucket that could

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Devon Garbalosa:
basically invoke the Lambda function, pass the data, and then write to the database. And it took us like a day and a half of just like Googling and three people on the phone. And it was just like, this is amazing. And this is like revolutionary for the side of the company and on the business side. And so we're like, this is awesome. So Fletcher reaches out to my old boss and says, hey, can I just have Devon work on this? And he was like, yeah, as long as there's not stuff for the migration, like I don't see why this isn't great for him and kind of his career-wise and whatnot. And so.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Devon Garbalosa:
That's kind of like what I started doing. And so now I start doing a little more research. found Elastic Beanstalk. They've got pre-made AMIs for PHP. You just got to like zip up the file. And like, I was like, okay, so I built this little Laravel app that I got out there and I got it out and you could visit it. And it was just like, hey, here's this. And so we go from literally this Excel file archaic to like just a basic Laravel app. And everybody's just like,

What? How do you do this? And I'm like, I literally feel like the most powerful person in the world right now. I'm like, I did this 10 X. Yeah. And so from here kind of comes where it, you know, obviously acquisitions, you get to the point where they're like, okay, we've now have two business intelligence teams. How do we formulate these? How do we make them specialize or whatever? And so the team I was on at the former company, the that we that sold us over, they ended up spinning off the team and going into like the finance section of the company as like finance business intelligence. And then I got absorbed into Fletcher's organization, operations business intelligence. And so we kind of, that's kind of where the fork is. And so for a year and a half, he basically was like, I want you to do nothing, but figure out how to make web apps at scale inside of the company and just figure it out. And you need to go through all these things. And at the end of this, we are going to have to go put this in front of security architecture and enterprise architecture and get this like blessed before we could actually move it out for people to use.

And so for about 18 months, they gave me a blank AWS account and just said, go figure it out, throw stuff against the wall until it sticks. And so I'm building stuff in Python, Lambda functions, ETLs, data all over the place. I'm just learning kind of everything. I've also learned how...

Matt Stauffer:
Figured out, yeah.

Devon Garbalosa:
about 500 ways not to use DynamoDB if you don't want a big bill. So when somebody figures out the right way, we should talk. But I know a lot of really bad ways to use it. So then all of a sudden where we're at here is 2022, July-ish. My daughter, first kid is gonna be born in September.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Devon Garbalosa:
And we're like, okay, we need to kind of do something with this. How do we build something that's going to like give the business something that they could kind of look at? And so the process between here and there was, okay, how do we help Devon get resourcing to like help this? So we kind of, hired a person in India to help us out, but they were kind of like a spring boot developer that was kind of kind of come over, but they had react skill. And then it was like, but we're kind of using Livewire and we were kind of finding ourselves. And so then.

part of trying to get it in the business is PHP is not in this company's stack. And so that was kind of the big buck there. And so we're trying to figure out how we fit it in, how we do this. And so we did a rendition of the first application. This is one I mentioned earlier, it's called Olympus, where it was like just create React app host on S3 with Lambda functions that are firing in Python. And then we're like, but then the authentication doesn't work. And we kind of...

Matt Stauffer:
Of course it is.

Devon Garbalosa:
Looking back now, I could have figured this out with like Cognito and other things out there, but I just had no idea what I was doing. And so then we're like, okay, well, this guy in India, no Spring Boot, let's try that because that is kind of the company stack. And so there's a little more resourcing for that. That kind of didn't work. And then we're like, Django, let's try that. And in the back of my mind this whole time, I'm like, I literally know how to do this with Laravel. But PHP is like the long pole in the tent here. And so we get to this point where we're like, okay,

I'm about to go out on parental leave. We need to have something like we need to choose the stack that we're just going to build in and we need to go present it to enterprise architecture. And so I spend two days on the phone showing them this Django app with this with this react front end that we created. And I was like, but here's the dumb thing. Every time you click a button, it loses state of who you are. And I could not figure out like the glue. And I was just like, listen, I'll give them react, but I can't do this back end. Like, I just don't know how to do this.

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.

Devon Garbalosa:
And I was like, I could do what I, what I've just took the last three days and walked you through and Django and React. I could recreate this in Laravel in four hours. And they were like, really? And I was just like, yeah, actually. And so we set up a meeting for the next day and we hit a Laravel new and we just go ground up. We had a little bit like there was React assets that we ported over, right? Like my text boxes didn't have to be rehand rolled at this point, but.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Devon Garbalosa:
You know, we hit inertia. We go with React instead of Livewire at the time because that was kind of like our olive branch to the corporation was like, you guys are react. We'll use it too. You know, and so in literally the four hours we have the app that we were trying to build up, but better. We have cash in there. We have the ability to actually keep the state. had socialite off working for the single sign on. Like it was just like, this is the way. And so we're like, all right, this is what we're going to go forward on. And this is what we're going to do. And so we.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

Devon Garbalosa:
We go to enterprise architecture and security architecture. We kind of demo this app and we're like, this took us four hours and they're like, what? And we're like, yeah. And so they kind of were like, you guys seem like really like gassed up about this. Like we're going to give you the exception for PHP. Like, and I was like, all right, here we go.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, love that.

Devon Garbalosa:
So my daughter's born. I go out on leave for a few weeks. I come back. And then there's this big problem in the business. And so I'm going to use an acronym from finance world here that I'm going to define it real quick, but you're just going to hear me say it all over the place. It's called NIGO, which means not in good order. And so basically if somebody wants to take money out of their retirement plan for whatever reason, they fill out paperwork, they forget to sign it. It's NIGO, right? And so that's kind of the gist of it. And so we get this phone call and they're like, we've got this thing called

Matt Stauffer:
Got it.

Devon Garbalosa:
hardships and hardships are a way that you could take money out of your retirement plan if you are still working for the company for like seven different reasons that the IRS allows. And so they're like medical expenses, funeral expenses, like you're literally having the worst day of your life and the IRS is like, all right, fine. You could take some money out of your retirement account, right? So the hardship team comes to us and they're like, we're underwater.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay.

Devon Garbalosa:
And this process that we have is like 98 % NIGO to try and do this. And the IRS is now allowing what's called permissible withdrawals where you could basically claim it over the phone, say it, and you don't have to provide the supporting documentation for it for like the first occurrence in a year. It's kind of like the honor system to try and speed that up. And it was a facet coming out of COVID, right? Cause people needed to get access to money and things. So they're like, we need higher 10 people or we need some way to control this. And so we're like, we could build an app for this. So we get to work. This is December, like 20th. They're like, we need this as soon as possible.

We went live with this application and launched this app, the major application on January 20th. And we just created the smart form that basically was like, what is your name? Where do you live? And like, as you did that, it would figure out what fields showed up underneath so that you could only, you know, choose your own adventure, but you could only choose a valid adventure.

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.

Devon Garbalosa:
And if you ever ran into something where it was like, hey, this is not right, the phone rep talking to this person who's having the worst day of their life could be like, hey, you can't do this because, and it was right there. And so it created just a better process and kind of just this flow and whatnot. And so this becomes where we really showed out because in a month we were able to create a full blown application that would have taken a year for a lot of other teams, especially large broader teams.

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Devon Garbalosa:
And we took the NIGO rate of these phone calls for these over the phone requests from 98 % down to zero because you couldn't do it wrong. And now the processing times were faster. Everything was done and it stopped us from having to hire a whole bunch of people in that area. And so we basically just took the success of this. And at the time it's me and one other guy that's my peer that we're working on this. And we were just like, this is amazing.

Matt Stauffer:
That's awesome.

Devon Garbalosa:
Like, how do we do this more? And so we started going on a road show around the company of like, what crazy things do you guys have that are not good? What's all this? And so we just started getting this pipeline of just, hey, all these people need help. And like the problems that they had were tough, but they weren't impactful enough for like IT to make a major project to go do this. And so it was ended up being like our wheelhouse as we were saying, kind of the trope we would use is like IT every year goes after the boulders.

We're going after the stones. And at the end of the year, we're hoping we add up one, you know, one stone to one, all our stones to one boulder, right? And like, that's how we were measuring our success. And so it just becomes this thing where we just start catapulting through and we're, building this app and we're building that app and we got this one out and we got that one out. And now the team's up to five people and we're, we're just cranking these things and just going through this like growth that's, that's insane. And I'm kind of like the architect and the lead and the main developer on it. And so,

we're bringing these people in and I'm training them up and I'm like, okay, well, I really need your help with this data pipelines over here. So you're going to focus on that. And I really need your help with like the infrastructure part of AWS. You're going to focus on that. And so essentially I'm like building this team without even realizing it just because I'm like, I just can't do it all. Like, so how do we, how do we start getting the right people in place? And so coming out of this, I ended up becoming the manager of this team when there's five of us in the U S including myself, so four direct reports and then two people in India that report to me. And we just keep kind of growing this massive machine. And as we're doing this, like the expense savings and revenue increases that we're doing is like in the tunes of millions of dollars for this company. Like we are very successful and this is all on the back of a mainly Laravel application that we're doing. And so we create this whole process and as we're kind of going,

So building all these great apps and things, leading this team, I've gotten this exposure to being able to talk to kind of like the C-suite and talk about, here's how we can add value to the business from inside. Here's how you can kind of do this through technology, business automation. And then I'm also in the weeds, right? Like I grew this application, I've helped build all of this. And so super technical, but also how to learn kind of like the business and the politics level of kind of leadership in this.

I'm at PHPXNYC at an event and I'm talking to Joe Tannenbaum and I'm talking to Dave Hicking and I'm like, hey, you guys work at Laravel. You guys are the coolest people that have ever like walked the earth. How'd you guys get hired there? Like, what is this? And like, and they're kind of like, you know, there's this, you know, everybody's kind of got their own story. Joe's like, I was just working on stuff in public and I kind of got picked up. And then Dave's like, I've been working around here forever around like a lot of people at Laravel. So I kind of like recorded this video of like what I do and like where I think I could add value and that kind of like got my foot in the door and then became a conversation. I was like, okay, so I go home and there is a post for solutions engineer at Laravel and I'm looking at all the tenants that they want and they're like somebody who could talk to C-suite somebody who can build applications somebody who knows technicals. I'm just like this looks like exactly what I want to do and like I like I love what this company is doing. I built my career off this company. Like this is this is awesome. And so I was like I think this is it. And so I applied for the job and kind of got that over and started kind of networking through that and had some great interviews and stuff.

And this is right when my son's about to be born, who was just born on July 28th. And so I'm having these interviews and we're like, okay, I don't know how to make this work. Like, Laravel, the opportunity is at this point, but I still have like my old job with my old team. I'm about to have a baby where do I go? And so.

Kind of funny is I walk into my last interview with Tom Crary, the president and COO, and I'm just like, Tom, I have to withdraw my application. I just don't know how to make this work. And I'm coming from the world where like two weeks makes a difference. And they're like, we're just growing this company and like the right people at the right time. Like we're willing to work with that. And so he's, like, I don't want to waste your time. I'm sorry. And he's like, no, no, no, no, you're not wasting my time. Let's keep talking. And we kind of go through that. And so.

It became this thing of they were like, we're going to figure this out because we think that you have the skillset we're looking for. And like, you've clearly got the passion behind Laravel. so Trey, Trey calls me after that and like three days before my son's born and I'm like, okay, I'm in, like, I'm so in, like I wanted this, but I didn't want to slow you guys down. And so we kind of get there. And so my son's born, we're kind of thinking, you know, maybe a couple of months from now, we'll pick back up the conversation, see what's happening. And I look at my wife literally four hours after my son's born and she looks at me and she goes, go for it. And so that's kind of how we got to Laravel, was just kind of building that and being able to kind of grow that career through and here we are.

Matt Stauffer:
Here we are. And so obviously we are at time right now. So we've got to wrap. So I can't ask you all the questions, but I do want to ask one question. I've asked a few people who are kind of in your position of what does it look like to be a solutions engineer or a sales engineer or whatever else. And so I think that the thing that's most interesting to me is business intelligence. The idea and the world of business intelligence is something that a lot of us as Laravel developers are asked to do for our clients, but don't have a lot of training out there in the world.

Devon Garbalosa:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
So if somebody were interested in learning not just, you know, how to program, not even just how to be empathetic to the folks in the team, but actually to learn more about business intelligence, to learn about, I mean, you were just throwing out even phrases like ETL, like a lot of people have never heard ETL before, right? So like, where do they go? Where's, where's the best place for somebody to learn about that whole world? If they're like, I want to be the guy that does, you know, Laravel stuff in that space. I want to be the one who everybody comes to when they're like, I'm my Excel thing is stuck like

Devon Garbalosa:
Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
What does it look like to kind of get that place?

Devon Garbalosa:
Yeah, absolutely. So I think there is a there's a video that Chris Christoph Rumple did recently about how to like ingest like a million rows out of Excel. I think that's a great place to start. And a lot of it is like if you would do this via a pivot table in Excel, you could probably do it better with real technology behind it. Right. And so it's kind of how do you do that? So I don't I don't necessarily know. I kind of lucked in the learning business intelligence from people that were kind of already doing it.

Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.

Devon Garbalosa:
But I think there's a lot of good resources out there if you kind of look for visualization tools. I think it's actually probably the better way to kind of do it. Like if you're really into how do I make data look pretty, that's where you'll start to find kind of the vector of where you get into business intelligence and how to use that.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Okay. Cool. Well, I could ask you tons of questions about that. I would say that if anybody is interested in following you and learning more about what kind of stuff is there any, you sharing anything on the internet or anything like that? Are you active on social networks?

Devon Garbalosa:
Yeah, so I'm on X, Dgarbs51 underscore because some guy has Dgarbs51 and forgot his password. So yeah, Dgarbs51 underscore on X, I'll post stuff there and that's my main social right now. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Noted.

Matt Stauffer:
Well, thank you so much for sharing your whole story, man. It was kind of wild. And again, I have very seldom heard somebody doing the level of BI stuff that you're doing in Laravel. So I'm really excited to hear that that's out there and to give other people the hope that, like, yeah, I could do something like that in Laravel too if I kind of work my cards right and show people what we can do.

Devon Garbalosa:
Yeah, it's definitely an awesome experience and anybody listening out there that might be from the BI world wondering how you get into Laravel, it's just a super ergonomic tool. And it makes, I feel like Laravel is really the 10x behind a lot of 10x developers in the space because it really helps make you so productive so fast.

Matt Stauffer:
That's a quote right there. Laravel's the 10x behind a lot of the 10x developers. Awesome, Devon, thanks for hanging out, Of course, the rest of you, we will see you next time.

Devon Garbalosa:
Yeah. Awesome. Thanks a lot. Great chatting.