In this episode of the Laravel Podcast, host Matt Stauffer sits down with Tony Lea, an open-source developer at Laravel, to dive into a range of topics. They explore the future of Laravel’s starter kits, the impact of community contributions, and the latest developments in Laravel Cloud. Tony also shares his journey into programming, his work on Laravel’s starter kits, and the evolution of his platform, DevDojo. Along the way, they discuss community feedback, the challenges of maintaining starter kits, and the realities of navigating criticism in the open-source world.
- Matt Stauffer’s Twitter
- Tony Lea’s Twitter
- Tony Lea on Github
- Tony Lea- DevDojo
- Laravel Twitter
- Laravel Website
- Tighten Website
- Laravel Cloud
- Suggestion Box
----- Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.
Creators & Guests
What is The Laravel Podcast?
The Laravel Podcast brings you Laravel and PHP development news and discussion.
Matt Stauffer:
Welcome back to Laravel Podcast Season 7. I'm your host, Matt Stauffer, CEO of Tighten, and this season I'll be joined every episode by a member of the Laravel team. Today I'm talking to Tony Lee, an open source programmer at Laravel. Tony, can you say hi to the people and just share a little bit about what you do at Laravel?
Tony Lea:
Hey everyone. Yeah, I am an open source developer at Laravel. I've been working there for about four months now, but there are a lot of steps that got me to where I'm at today, including my own personal projects. And I'll go further into detail about how that everything got up to this point. But right now I work on the starter kits at Laravel, open source stuff. I've been helping out with the Laravel.com website, a little bit of the docs and a little bit of everything. I think right now this position's kind of new, so whatever they have they throw at me and it's kind of just a really fun position to be in.
Matt Stauffer:
I love that. They're just still figuring it out as they go. And yeah, and I'll ask you the questions to kind of get us to your whole backstory and everything. So, but it's interesting to me, I didn't kind of prep you that we're gonna talk about this, but your job is listed as open source developer, open source programmer. And so are there kind of delineations within the Laravel world where some people exclusively or primarily work on the paid products and some people primarily work on kind of like Laravel the framework and Laravel.com and everything?
Tony Lea:
Yeah, I think there's a few teams. There's the Cloud team, there's the Forge team. We have the now kind of like an open source team. It's a really small team. It's me and Joe. And I think there's one other developer. I'm gonna, they're gonna, let me see. I actually don't remember the name, but he's been with, he's been Laravel employee, I think since day one or something. can look up what that was.
But yeah, so it's a pretty small team on the open source side, but they are separated with like the Cloud, the Forge, and then the open source team. There's also marketing and HR, everything else that you would expect in a typical company.
Matt Stauffer:
Sure. Yeah. I would guess Muir might be doing some open source, although I know he also does Nova. So Muir's probably there. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
Tony Lea:
Mior. That is him. That's Mior. That's the one that I was thinking of. I couldn't remember his name. Yeah. Sorry, Mior.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. He's one of the earliest hires. Mohammed was the first hire, I believe. But yeah, Muir was pretty early on too.
Tony Lea:
Yeah, him and I have interacted a little bit.
Matt Stauffer:
So, okay. I mean, he's cry no bone. Very few people actually know his, huh. Yeah. Very few people actually know Muir's name because he's just. He's been cry no bone on the internet for the longest time. those who don't know him, he, he runs Laravel Test Bench, which is a package that you can use when you're developing a package so that, when you want to run tests, it's sort of like quick loads a fake Laravel app for you, you know, without you having to actually install it in Laravel. So he's been around for ages. He works on Laravel does some, or Nova and does some customer support stuff as well. So.
All right, so you got that small team of the three, guys. So I want to hear about you. So let's imagine somebody's never heard of you before. They don't know any of your previous projects, haven't followed you from there. What got you into computers in the first place? Kind of what's your story? You know, we all have a different story of how we got to the point where we're actually even interacting with Laravel. So can you kind of tell our story of like what brought you up to your first interaction with Laravel?
Tony Lea:
Yeah, absolutely. So I got into programming because I wanted to create video games. I'm sure a lot of people kind of took that segue as I was a kid.
Matt Stauffer:
Nice.
Tony Lea:
Nintendo, Super Nintendo, I wanted to learn to create video games. So I got my software engineering degree and as I was getting my degree, they taught us C, C++, C-sharp, a lot of the more corporate Microsoft technologies. And I remember I learned about PHP and the fact that I could just open up notepad and write some text and then that could be parsed and it would get immediate output. Whereas when you have C sharp ASP there is some compilation time and if you're using a really heavy IDE it takes forever just to even boot up your environment to start writing code. So I went from my software engineering degree, learned C, C++, C sharp and then I really found a passion for PHP.
After graduating I moved down to San Diego, got a few jobs, did some freelancing. Obviously that included WordPress. I think you can't get away from WordPress if you're in the PHP world. Then I wanted to learn more about how you can use PHP a little bit more extensive. That got me into CodeIgniter. And CodeIgniter was my jam for about three or four years. And at about that time, Node and Ruby on Rails were coming out.
I really, started getting into Ruby on Rails and I kind of went, I had like a war, internal war with like, do I want to become a full like Ruby on Rails developer or do I want to stay with PHP? Cause that's what I'm most comfortable with. And I remember stumbling on a, it was either a Hacker News or a Reddit. And it was about this framework called Laravel. And I remember clicking on it. This was version three. I seen the homepage and they explained how you can use, I think they even had Eloquent at that point.
How you can get a user from the database by calling user colon colon first. And I was like, that is exactly like Ruby on Rails. So that brought me back to PHP and I've been with Laravel since version three. And ever since then, I've never looked back. I've gotten into other technologies too. I've gotten into Node, Golang, but my home base has always been PHP. And still loving it to this day. Love going to Laracons and everything about it.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. So one of the first places where folks may have heard your name was through DevDojo. Can you talk a little bit about what DevDojo is?
Tony Lea:
Yeah, so I bought this domain probably about 15 years ago. I was talking to somebody about, yeah, we're developer ninjas. And like, we work at the Dev Dojo. And I was like, oh, that would be a cool domain name. So I looked it up, somebody owned it. And I reached, I was like, hey, would you be willing to sell this? And they're like, yeah, I think they said like thousand bucks. I was like, okay, that's fine. I don't have that money. And they wrote back to like, how about 500? And I was like, how about 300? They're like, all right.
Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.
Tony Lea:
I got the domain devdojo.com. At the beginning, it was just kind of just my playground. I think it was first a blog, then I became an agency where I had maybe two or three clients. And then I started adding videos to it. So it became, you could think of it kind of like a Laracast. You could probably look on the way back machine. There were, it kind of looked like a Netflix. There were really nice thumbnails with videos that I created.
Matt Stauffer:
Nice.
Tony Lea:
And at that point, Laracast was already going really strong. And not that I was competing with him in any way, but I remember it was the Railscast website that I, when I started getting into Ruby on Rails, I seen Railscasts and I was like, that is a really cool site. How fun would that be to just create videos all day? So I started DevDojo became this video learning platform and it never really took off. I think at most I had about a hundred paying users at $9 a month at that time. So I just kept on experimenting. I created a few products. To this day, now I have about four or five different products. I have a Tailwind CSS page builder. I have a Laravel starter kit. I have some templates that you can copy and paste into any tall stack application. And I went full time on DevDojo for probably about two years.
This was a few years ago, I was doing that full time, had a few clients, and then Taylor actually, well, yeah, Taylor reached out to me on Twitter and he was like, hey, we have this open position, wondering if you would be interested. And actually, I should probably preface that.
Matt Stauffer:
That's awesome.
Tony Lea:
Yeah, I should probably also mention that I reached out to him on a previous role that Laravel had and said, hey, I'd be interested in this role. He said they already filled it, but he would get back to me if there was any other open position.
So sure enough, he got back to me on Twitter and asked me if I would be open to joining the team on the open source side, working on starter kits. And I was just so ecstatic. Now it's so fun that I get to work on stuff Monday through Friday that I would normally work on on the weekends. So super cool.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, that's very fun. And it's fun that you've done starter kits and you've done, cause some of your tools have to do with helping people build apps with less difficulty, right? They're, you know, it's about, click and drag, you know, Tailwind stuff. It's about, it's, it's a starter kit. It's about things that are easing the process. So you don't have to do that kind of repetitive pieces. So you, when I heard that you were going to do the starter kits, I was like, yeah, that absolutely makes sense. You know, he's the guy for that. So, you know, you joined four months ago.
Tony Lea:
Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
And your first project that you jumped in on was the Starter Kits project. And it's probably the biggest shift we've had to Starter Kits in quite a while. I think probably at least since the introduction of Breeze and Jetstream. What do you think the, or maybe if you just remember directly, like what do you think the motivating focus was for this being something that Taylor decided to happen? And kind of what was your initial pitch that you were given? Like, was it like, this is how you're going to do it, you're going to make three of them and they're going to be standalone repo? Or was it more like here's our vision, our goal, and then you kind of like ran with that?
Tony Lea:
Yeah, so Taylor tweeted out a message saying that he thinks that each of these new starter kits are going to be a separate repo. It will have React, a Vue, and a Livewire. And he got some feedback in that tweet. And when I started, he actually mentioned that to me. He sent me that and he said, hey, this is kind of what I was envisioning. So him and Joe Tannenbaum, they asked for my advice, like what I think about...
Matt Stauffer:
Okay.
Tony Lea:
how that will play out and what other features that I think will help this grow. And we'd also want to keep in mind that we're going to build additional functionality like Teams and two-factor auth into it. So there was quite a bit of planning and it wasn't just like a, this what we're gonna do, go ahead and build it out. There was a lot of back and forth. So it was a lot of fun. They were asking me like, what do you think about including the ShadCN view?
What do think about Livewire? Should we go Volt or just plain Livewire? And I know there was some back and forth on Twitter about why is it Volt instead of just Livewire components. I totally understand that whenever people are worried about new technology or something that they're not comfortable with right away because I would feel the exact same way. And I don't think you can get everything right all the time, but that was kind of how it happened. And
I've been pretty good with Vue for a while. I've been on the tall stack train for quite some time. React, I only spent about maybe six months doing React before working on these starter kits. So I had a little bit of knowledge of it and it's definitely growing on me. I like all technology. I like Node, I like Laravel, but Laravel is just my home base. And that's what I'm the quickest with. And that's what people always say is, whatever you're most efficient with, use that to build your apps, your side projects, and have fun while you're building it.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, for sure. So one of the things that's very interesting to me is because a lot of people have kind of proposed everybody should maintain your own, you know, Michael Durender will always say, you should have your own starter kit that you use, you know, so that you can automatically, you know, kind of have things out of the box, you know, every time you need to start a new Laravel app. One of the difficult things about that is keeping that starter kit up to date with the latest versions of Laravel. Did you have to build a whole bunch of internal tooling for making that happen or?
Is it something where you guys are just keeping it up manually right now?
Tony Lea:
Yeah, right now we're just keeping that up manually. And I think that's going to be something that every time a new version of Laravel comes out, we're just going to update the dependencies. But there's a few other factors that we have to think about as well that, you know, whenever ShadCN updates, whenever... So we're using ShadCN view as well, and that is not compatible with Tailwind v4 yet. So there are a lot of other open source projects that we kind of have to dive into and see what the progress is of it. The ShadCN version just recently came out with a Tailwind V4 stable. And as you know, Tailwind V4 just recently came out. So we were literally building the night before, two days before kind of scrambling like, can we get Tailwind V4 in? Can we get the latest version of ShadCN in? And funny enough, ShadCN sent me some updated components on Twitter.
It's just really cool that I get to interact with people who are really well known and just the nicest people too. I just reached out to him on Twitter and he was like, hey man, yeah, I'm at this point and if you send me the starter kit, I can give you some input. And it was just really cool to be able to interact with him.
Matt Stauffer:
That's very cool. Yeah, and you know, like the ShadCN guy, while being reputable in the whole internet, is originally a Laravel guy, right? So, that's cool. Okay.
Tony Lea:
Is he really? I did not know that.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah, he tweeted out recently that he learned, Laravel is where he first got started and everything.
Tony Lea:
Oh, that's awesome.
Matt Stauffer:
Okay. So when you first launched, you had your three kits. But you had so much conversation happened publicly around, you know, well, what, where is two factor authentication and what about an API starter kit and just a lot of other things. And like you said, like, you're not going to never going to get everything perfect on day one. But what I'm curious about is how much has the, the things that are yet to come in starter kit land been always like, yeah, of course we're always going to have two factors, something like that, and how much of them have been, let's just release this and kind of like see what the people are asking for and use that to kind of guide their direction we're headed next.
Tony Lea:
Yeah, I think that's what we're trying to do is we're taking a lot of the feedback. Taylor just released a non-volt version of Livewire, and that was because a lot of people were up in arms about why did we use Volt. So listening to what people say, but also we got to take into consideration what we think would be best. That also means when we build out additional functionality such as Teams or we also had possibility of creating a SaaS starter kit, we got to think about how we can build those features so that way they can easily integrate into each React, Vue, and Livewire stack. Because if we say eventually down the road had five features like Teams, 2FA, Billing, and we built each of them for React, Vue, and LiveWire, that's going to be a lot of maintenance on our end. So if we can figure out a way to build those so that way they can just kind of plug into each one of those starter kits, and we make one modification, and then it basically adds that functionality to all of them. That's what we're still trying to figure out right now. And it could take a few iterations, and I'm pretty excited about it because I think that creating kind of like a Spark version of some of those where it's like plug and play. Like you have like maybe like one route that you go to, and then it fires off events that you can then latch onto.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Tony Lea:
So making it easily for us to modify in one place and then submit those changes to all those starter kits is what we'll definitely want to keep in mind. But I don't know too much yet about how we plan on doing that and how we plan on executing. There's going to be some talk this week with me, Joe, and Taylor about how we see that happening. We're going to have to do some brainstorming and see who comes up with the best ideas.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, it's helpful to hear it's because it's a I think people have a definitely a perspective of well these are solved problems and so like it's.. Why did you just get rid of a thing? That's a solved problem. It's like well. There's a new architecture here and I personally have been Jet streams probably biggest critic over the years and I've I've in many a podcast talk whatever else I've said just use Breeze and this new way of starter kidding is much more in the Breeze direction It's very clear what files you're working with.
They are in your application. They're not hidden three, you know, nested levels deep in your dependencies or whatever. But that architecture change, plus of course having, you know, like more stacks can now make it more difficult to maintain certain features. Cause like you said, like people could say, well, I want teams. Well, okay. Do you want to do the work of not just writing, but also maintaining teams across three different stacks? And so it's like, yeah, we want to do it, but it's a technical challenge and it's very refreshing to remember that just because the Laravel team is full of brilliant people and led by a very brilliant person doesn't mean that it's just a matter of, oh therefore you can do anything. And if you didn't do it, it's because you don't like me. You know what I mean? Like it's like, no, there's, there are some things that are hard and I'm very excited to see what solving that looks like. I do, I hope I can get you back on after you all or maybe get you and Joe and Taylor or something, I don't know, to talk about, you know, how do you solve those things, you know, a month or two from now and you guys actually figure that all out.
Tony Lea:
I would love that. Yeah, I think that there's also..
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, go ahead.
Tony Lea:
Yeah, there's this mindset of certain people. And when I say certain people, I talk about a lot of the people on Reddit. And I actually enjoy reading some of those comments because these are people who can just voice their opinion without us knowing who they are. And no matter what you build, people are always going to have good things to say and they're going to have bad things to say. And the fact that Laravel is just getting so much bigger, you're going to have much more critics than you did before.
And I remember back to when Taylor released Forge and people were like on Reddit were saying, oh look, now open source, he's starting to monetize. And I'm like, I could not blame the guy. Like he created the greatest open source framework and he's trying to make a little bit of money so he can work on it full time. And I think the thing behind that is just you're not going to make everybody happy, but that's probably 0.001 % of people.
All the other 99.99 % of people are super happy with Laravel. Love everything that's going on, including myself.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah, and I really appreciate what you said there about the value of Reddit. One of the things that I love about Laravel is it is a intentionally friendly, positive community. But one unexpected downside of that is people are a little bit less likely to be critical when they think there's something wrong because they don't want to mess up the vibes. Ya know, like everyone wants to be positive, encouraging, and positive.
And so you're just less likely to get people to, ya know, on, especially in like Twitter and a lot of relationships that are really healthy. But then there's like a lack of health of just like, yeah, but nobody wants to have a hard conversation. I don't love Reddit. I don't love Reddit, Laravel. I don't love Reddit PHP because it is way too far in the opposite direction. But to your point, you do have the benefit of at least it's a place where, you know, you can kind of measure it together with some of the... It's not toxic positivity at all, but some of the unwillingness to criticize or unwillingness to be fully transparent. So if you take the wonderful happy positive world of Laravel on the internet and then you take just a couple drops of Reddit or any other place where people can anonymously be jerks about free software they're getting on the internet, then hopefully you can kind get yourself in a healthy space. So that's a great point there and I appreciate that.
Tony Lea:
Yeah. Thanks. Yeah, the concept of open source has drastically changed over the last 10 or 15 years. Back in the day, people would be like, whoa, this is free? You're offering this for free? That's amazing. Now when people offer it for free, they're like, well, what about this? You don't have this? I want this. But that's just how things progress because open source has gotten a lot more popular than it was 10 or 15 years ago.
Matt Stauffer:
Yep, yeah, entitlement is a real thing and having children teaches you that, right? Like you want to give your kids everything but you don't want them to be entitled jerks and it does, you know, it's the same thing on the internet, so.
Tony Lea:
100%. Being a parent is a selfless job. I was the same way as a kid. I wasn't grateful for a lot of the things that my mom did, but when I got older, then I'm like, okay, now I see.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, for sure. All right, yeah, so the questions we got from Tighten are primarily about the future. You know, the one, you know.
Several folks at Tighten really really love the API starter kit So the one person said I know I'm a pain in the butt But can you tell me when the API starter kits gonna be launched and I'll ask you that in a second. But the other one was we've had several folks at and around Tighten talking about community starter kits. So Tony Macias who works there put in a pull request to I don't know what repo it is to basic but Laravel installer to say you know, can you pass in custom flags when you're running the layer installer to say use a one-off starter kit instead of one of the built-in starter kits You know like a third party starter kit.
And I know that Ed Grovener has been talking about potentially collecting all of the community starter kits somewhere and stuff like that. I think the two questions are A, like, do you have a timeline on the API starter kit or any other of the next round things you're working on? And then B, what is your thinking around the conversation around starter kits that are not made by Laravel? Have you guys been talking about that at all? Is that something you know that it plans to support or is that still kind of up in the air or is it definitely not going to be supported?
Hey, you guys can build those if you want, but you handle installation of them on your own.
Tony Lea:
Yeah, I'll mention the API starter kits first. And maybe this is something that you can help clarify. I had seen a lot of people mention this on Twitter. And the one thing, the main functionality in each of these starter kits is authentication. Then you have your dashboard and you have like a user settings. And the dashboard and the user settings are pretty simple pages. The main guts of every starter kit is the authentication that you get with login, register, forgot password. But we do have Fortify, which has a full API system. So you can use Fortify and just hit the end points to log in or register. So that's kind of what I've been telling people. If they want an API starter kit, you could use the React, Vue, or LiveWire. You could take out the authentication routes and you could add in Fortify. Maybe that is something that we need to discuss a little bit more because you're right, the API Starter Kit has come up a lot. And I think that that is one good solution is to strip out the authentication from the Starter Kits and then include Fortify and use the API endpoints that that provides. Do you know any more? Can you give me a little bit more insight into maybe what it is that people specifically are looking for with the API?
Matt Stauffer:
The best I know is that, so Nico who works at Tighten is one of the people who was, the first people who asked Taylor about an API specific ones. And so he kind of sent a message in Tighten Slack this week and he said, with Breeze we had the ability to create a purely backend API Laravel project. So when we ran it, that the API installer, it would create the auth endpoints, it would bring in Fortify, it would scaffold the basic application, but then it would also get rid of things we didn't want to use. So we would get rid of the, the JavaScript and the CSS and the views and the package.json file and the VEAT config file. He actually even showed me a kind of a PR of all the things that it changes. So I think the API Starter Kit is not about that it has a lot of its own unique code like the Starter Kit is, but more it is a set of steps that are operated on a base Laravel install to configure it for that.
And that's the way I think that things are a little bit different. Cause like in the past, all of the starter kits were just a set of commands being run, right? Require this dependency, remove this folder or whatever. And now the starter kits are almost like, like they're an app, basically it's an app template. And I, you know you could create an app template that is the API starter kit. But it almost feels like it maybe makes a little more sense in the old way, where if you're gonna do the API version, you're gonna run Laravel new, and then you're gonna require Fortify, you're gonna add a couple endpoints, and you're gonna delete certain files. And so that could be its own starter kit, it could be a different part of Laravel install, you guys could not do it at all, but I'm pretty sure that what it really just means is setting up a new Laravel app configured for Fortify with the endpoints already connected with a whole bunch of unnecessary for API files deleted.
Tony Lea:
That actually helps. I think that could be a possibility is that each of the starter kits, so as you go through the Laravel installer, it sounds like what people want is they want the Fortify API endpoints and then they don't want, like you were saying, all the JavaScript and everything else that's included in there. So that could be something that we add to the installer. So good thing for bringing that up because I can talk to Taylor and Joe and see if that's possibly something that we can build in. I don't have a timeline right now.
I feel like I would shoot myself in the foot if I said, yeah, maybe a few weeks we can have it. So no timeline right now, but that does help a lot. So that way I can talk to Taylor and talk to Joe about how we could possibly integrate an API starter kit. So yeah, thank you. That's really good to know. I will talk on the starter kits.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, and.
Tony Lea:
Okay. Okay.
Matt Stauffer:
I'm sorry. I'm going to send you the PR that Nico made showing the diff for the API starter kit so that you have access to it when you guys have that conversation.
Tony Lea:
Okay, yeah, that's perfect. I appreciate it. Hey, we're doing work as we're chatting too. That's cool.
Matt Stauffer:
Love it.
Tony Lea:
So I'll talk a little bit on the starter kits. I think it would be really great to have community starter kits. And one thing that I was envisioning is say that you run the Laravel new command and you have no starter kit, you have React, Vue, Livewire, and then possibly we have another option that is just say like community starter kit. So once you select that, maybe it could then have like a multi, like a select box that then could maybe like fetch an API endpoint.
Matt Stauffer:
Guess search or whatever, you know.
Tony Lea:
Yeah. And then it could list out all the community starter kits. So that could be an option. I like the idea of us having Laravel.com slash starter kits contain the stuff that we build as well as anybody else from the community. I think the hard part on that is we will...need someone almost full time to manage that because you know how people will release a starter kit and they may not create additional updates to it or they may just release it and then not work on it anymore. And at that point, do we want to continue to show it in the like the marketplace or the starter kit marketplace? And then also quality too. I think that I know people will be upset if they submit something and we say, sorry, it's just not up to par right now with what we're going to include in the marketplace.
Matt Stauffer:
Yep. Yeah.
Tony Lea:
And that sounds harsh, but Envato actually does this themselves. They make sure that the stuff that they submit or allow for submission is of really good quality because that reflects on them as well. I think eventually that would be something cool to have. That would be community starter kits. And I would love to be the person to check out all those starter kits because I love seeing whenever people are building out new things like that because I've done that for the last three or four years. So hopefully in the future, we will have community submitted starter kits. If there are some starter kits out there that you guys want to send, hit me up on Twitter, make sure that you include a link to the repo and I would love to check it out. And maybe that can help us push along this community submitted starter kits.
Matt Stauffer:
Awesome. I love that. Like I said, Ed Grovener had just said something a couple of days ago about how he was trying to find a way for people to kind of collect those all together in one place. At Tighten, we saw the same kind of a problem for Nova when people wanted to build Nova packages. You know, how do you find them and how do you know if they're any good? So we built Novapackages.com, which is just what you're talking about. And we even built an API to it. So if Laravel wanted it. And so I can imagine that if you have difficulty doing it inside of Laravel because Laravel doesn't want to officially put a stamp of approval on something. One option is to allow the community to do it and then the community can vote up or down or flag ones for suspicious behaviors or whatever. So there's also maybe some potential there. Once I talk to Ed a little bit more, I'll reach out to you about this as well.
Tony Lea:
That's true.
Matt Stauffer:
But for now, it sounds like the best next step is for some of these package authors to at least reach out to you and say, hey, I got a starter kit, get you to take a look at it even as we figure out what distribution looks like in the future.
Tony Lea:
Yeah, I think that would be the best. And then we would probably have to keep something like on the page that says, you don't stay up to date with the latest version, say that goes to Laravel 13, Laravel 14, and if they don't make updates, then we may eventually remove them from the community submitted starter kits. A lot to think about,
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Tony Lea:
but still very cool to think about us having like a starter kit template page where people can submit stuff and then...because I would be down to use a lot of the starter kits that the community's building as well.
Matt Stauffer:
I love it. That's very exciting. This is a very productive podcast. Normally they're not this productive, but we're just getting to it.
Tony Lea:
That's awesome.
Matt Stauffer:
I love this. Okay, so time to start wrapping it up a little bit. One of the last things I wanted to ask you is we've talked only about starter kits today and maybe the majority of the focus of your time at Laravel for now is going to be starter kits, but is there anything else, whether at work or not at work, that is on your plate right now that you're excited about, that you're looking forward to?
Tony Lea:
I think you said it right, the Starter Kits is my main priority. I think I'm super excited about all the things that's coming in Cloud. I have a ton of ideas that I want to submit, but I'm still trying to figure out the dynamic of Laravel. But there are a ton of things that I'm excited about, like the possibility of the future down the road with Cloud is being able to even go into Cloud and say you don't even have a repo.
Say that you want to select a starter kit and then you say deploy it and then it deploys your application to like a URL and then but it will have a little warning that says like, hey, you you need to link this to a repo and then you can link it to a repo and then you can make changes that way. I think there's just so much room with Cloud and I've been playing with Cloud the last few weeks and it is just so simple to get going. Like it's just really, really mind blowing that it will take you 30 seconds to get a Laravel application up. The Laravel.com website is also, it's gonna be a constant iteration. There were some people when it first came out saying that, you know, something's broken on mobile, some of it's not functioning correctly. And when I was talking with David about this, David was saying, he's the main designer at Laravel and really, really talented too. He was saying that this is just gonna be the first step.
He said, we're gonna continue iterating. We're not gonna release the website and then Laravel, you know, 13 or 14 come out and release a new website. He said, we're gonna be constantly changing this website and fine tuning it to make it really, really good, something that we're really proud of. And I'm like, that's true. People think that whenever you just release a new website, you're like, okay, it's done. This is gonna be something that we're gonna constantly be working on. And I'm gonna be a part of that as well, which will be really cool.
Matt Stauffer:
That's very cool. Yeah, I know that Jason, I think it was Jason, thanks for saying he got to be a part of building out the website. So I was curious who all on the team gets to work on that. So it's fun that you get to work on that as well.
Tony Lea:
Yeah, Jason helped out with, I built the starter kits page and there were times where Jason would just come in and just out of nowhere, like submit a PR and fix a few things. I'm like, oh man, that is amazing. And he's really good too. I think he did the Cloud homepage and he's really talented.
Matt Stauffer:
That's great. The Starter Kits page is very nice, by the way. Really good work on that.
Tony Lea:
Thank you. Thank you. David was the one who did the design. I just put them together. Tailwind v4 is amazing. Whenever you see the little fold of those, the layer of the three applications, that's using the new starting style by Tailwind. I don't know if you've had a chance to play with it, but it's just amazing that you can say, I want you to have opacity of zero. Then once the page loads, I want you to go to opacity of 100. It's as simple as that. Like you say, starting colon opacity dash zero.
Matt Stauffer:
That's it.
Tony Lea:
Opacity 100. When somebody reloads the page, just goes from zero to 100. Yeah, man, kids are spoiled today. Think about like how what we had to do back in the day with Photoshop and rounded corners and now you can use AI to just completely remove something.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah. And not to mention it. Animating the opacity of something would have been a completely different story back then. That's, oh my gosh. Well, I think we probably need to wrap. Is there anything that we didn't get a chance to talk about that you wish we had?
Tony Lea:
No, I think I just want to say that I'm super honored to be a part of the Laravel team. I think I still am blown away that I work with this incredible team and that this framework that I've been working with for 10 plus years that I get to be a part of it and at a really exciting time too, because all the people working there are super smart. And the fact that Taylor and Laravel has the VC backing is just going to explode in popularity. And not only because of all the talent that's on the team, but I've worked at multiple companies where they were VC backed and the VC would say, we want you to use this technology because they are part of our group. And now that Laravel is in the VC world, a lot more companies are gonna be pushing for like, we should build this in Laravel.
Before this, people would probably say, no, we want you to build this with React or Vercell because we're a partnership with the VC that backs them. And I was working with a company that they were telling us we need to use React for this because their partners backed some company that was with React. And now the fact that Laravel is taking this and what Taylor said too about
he feels like he would be selling out if he didn't take this. I think that's a really, really good way of explaining that if he had just coasted all the people who had dedicated all of their lives to PHP, like that would be as good as it gets. But now with this backing, it is just gonna get so much better and it's gonna be so much more fun to build web applications from ground zero. So super excited to be a part of the team and yeah, excited for the future.
Matt Stauffer:
And that's a, I know we're wrapping, but I just want to, that's a really great point. The number of business development calls I have been on just in the last year where the CTO and the founder and anybody else wants to use Laravel and somebody somewhere says, no, we've got to use XYZ, whether it's because they invested in it or because their startup buddy told them that that's the only way to build applications. And not only do we lose the project, but the CTO or Lead programmer or whatever also loses the ability to have Laravel in their project because someone was there. And I always thought, you know what, like this private equity coming in is the biggest value we're gonna get there is just that they're gonna wanna tell other people about it. But I didn't even think about the fact that this is going to significantly increase not just the awareness people have of Laravel so they stop poo-pooing it, but actually increase the number of people who are gonna say, oh no, you should use Laravel because...some other thing I invested in or some other startup I know about is using Laravel. So great point. I love that. Thanks for sharing that.
Tony Lea:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you so much for hanging out with us. Thank you for the work you've done in the starter kits. We look forward to everything you're doing there and the rest of your work at Laravel ongoing. And hopefully we'll have you back pretty soon to talk about Teams and 2FA and everything else you do there.
Tony Lea:
That sounds great. I would look forward to it. And thank you for having me on. I've been a fan of this podcast since season one, back when it was just Taylor and Jeffrey Wei. So to be on this podcast is truly an honor. So thank you.
Matt Stauffer:
I love it.
Appreciate it, man. Thank you. And everybody else, thanks for hanging out. We'll see you next time.