Tim Leland: URL Shorteners and browser extensions | Laravel Creator Spotlight #19

We chat with Tim Leland about creating T.ly, a URL-shortening service. The discussion also touches on his experiences with building browser extensions and the impact of weather apps like Dark Sky on his projects.

Show Links

Tim Leland: https://timleland.com
URL Shortner: https://t.ly

Creators & Guests

Host

Eric L. Barnes

Creator of Laravel News

Guest

Tim Leland

Founder of https://t.co/uMTGCrevMI URL Shortener

What is Laravel Creator Spotlight?

Interviews with creators making cool things in Laravel

Welcome back to the Laravel news

creator series today

We're joined by Tim

Leland who is the creator of T.ly

which is a URL shortening service.

That's my had been in

business for a while now, but uh

Tim welcome to the show and you know, let

me know if I've missed

anything there in that little intro

No, that's that's a pretty good. Thanks

for having me. Glad to be here

sweet sweet. Yeah, so you've

I'm trying to think now you've been in

Laravel for quite a while, right? You got

started back in the early days

yeah, so

you know graduated college computer

science degree kind of

with that standard route and

You know worked a software development

job doing that and IT type

stuff and then started building

Websites on the side so I

built some like local businesses

websites and I started just you know

trying to figure out what can I use to

you know build a site and I

Studdled upon Jeffrey way and you know,

Lara cast but he was

doing I think it was net tuts

Code igniter tutorials way back maybe

like 2013 2012 and I watched like

everything he put out and then

He kind of switched over to Laravel and

that's when I kind of

followed him and just you know

Watched everything on Lara cast that he

put out and just pretty

much learned it from from him

I kind of give him credit for teaching me

a lot of the my early,

you know coding styles and

Get me into Laravel and

then you know, I'm kind of

grateful for that because it I would say,

you know, obviously if you're watching

this, you know, Laravel

saves you a ton of time and

all the advantages of it, so

You know, I took advantage of all that

Laravel had to offer back in 2014

That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah, he was you

know back in those days

It was like there was not a whole lot of

like really good training material out or

anything and he sort of

brought everybody on board

It was sort of it was it was really

amazing what he was able to do and

accomplish and then

you know going from that

Net tuts over to you know creating Lara

cast and now it's kind of the de facto

training resource for all kinds of stuff

so it's it's

That's one of the big reasons I think

Laravel grew in the beginning was because

of him that was awesome

Yeah, he just made it

really easy to learn

So I mean, you know obviously going

through school you learn some things

but then when you start actually doing it

in the real world how to get

a you know website hosted and

You know, I was early like

Laravel Laravel Forge user

So I've been I was actually looking at

that a couple weeks ago and I think I

signed up in like 2014

I don't I don't know when it was started,

but you know, I've been using that to

host sites and just

building side projects

learning

Trying to learn how to you know grow a

website or an app or whatever. It's a

marketing type stuff

Just that's kind of been my my journey

That's awesome. Well, so speaking of your

product is T. L. Y and

How did that come about like you just

like one day woke up and be like hey

I want to make a URL shorter or was there

like something that

driven you to create this

Yeah, so

You know a lot of developers. It's even

like a coding, you know challenge that

they do for like software in software

Interviews, so they'll say

hey, how would you design?

You know a link shortener so it's it's

kind of like a classic computer science

The software developer project that

people always like to build but what got

me started was a company

I was working for they needed an

application for like online

giving and it was going to be

through text messages so they wanted to

build a you know, send it a link and

In doing that the link the URL had to

have some encoding in it and some special

stuff to kind of like log them in

behind the scenes, so

They wanted a way to send that but the

URL so long so that led to well

We need a URL shorter and we looked at

you know, some of the options out there

and decided well, you know

We could just build our own

Use our own, you know short domain and I

think I built like a very

simple version and you know

Maybe over a weekend pretty much. It was

it was a few days. So

Built that you know kind of saw, you

know, we we found value

in it and then fast forward

I think that maybe was like

2016 2017 but fast forward

Google kind of announced that they were

shutting down their free URL shortener

and that kind of prompted me to

Build initially a browser extension. So I

didn't really plan to

build my own service

but I was building browser extensions for

like Chrome and Firefox and

It's just like a side project so I built

a link shortener extension and what it

did is it used all these other services

so like bit.ly tiny URL

in a bunch of other free ones and

Yeah, so that was kind of where I got so

I saw that, you know businesses needed it

Built the extension because Google

announced they were shutting down their

service and then the

extension grew just because

You know people were looking for

alternatives once Google

kind of shut their service down

Gotcha, yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, so

I've actually been using

it man for a few months now

My use case was you know, we send out

newsletters and then if we have sponsors

then they're like well

You know, can you give me you know stats

on all my links in your

newsletter and I'm like

Yeah, that's always annoying because then

I have to go to the

newsletter software and like pull up

You know that that campaign and and then

just try to figure out how many people

clicked and all that stuff

So I was like, well, there's got to be an

easier way and then so I

signed up and now I use the short

The T to a while links in the newsletter

and then I can share the stats

You know from your website over to the

sponsor and they can just look at

everything and see see, you know

How many clicks it got and all the other

stuff so that's it's been

really really handy for me

Just you know having that simple simple

way of you know, making everybody happy.

So I really like the

service. I think it's awesome

That's awesome. Yeah, it's always great

hearing you know people using it

You know if you do a lot of support

Usually only here like the negative stuff

and the problems but it's nice always

nice hearing the positives

And that's a great use case because it's

not really you don't really need the

links to be like short

And that's what people usually think

like, you know, obviously

You know short link

is called a URL shorter

But it's also great for if you just need

something to you know

Track engagement and like alright how

many people are clicking

on links and need that basic

information versus like having to spin up

your own software on your

back end to track clicks and

You know if you just want something quick

to track that and it's really useful

For sure for sure

You know, so I you know, everybody thinks

I know I'm probably the same

way is like oh, well, you know

We're just mapping two fields in the

database or whatever

but it's there there's way more to it

right behind the scenes like you have I

Assume you have to have like tons of like

spam tracking and all this other stuff.

Is that sort of accurate?

It's it's like way more

involved than you think

Yeah, so initially I built so I built the

extension this like link shortener extra

URL shortener extension and

It implemented it just used API's so that

was the very first version of the product

was just an API create a short link

And then on the actual like domain T dial

why it would just redirect

I didn't have like logins or you know,

any kind of interface

But then yeah as soon as you you know

that so that part is what most people

think of just you know

In a data base you have one table that

just stores, you know long

URL short URL and redirect

but yeah as soon as you

get analytics and then

You know just trying to like scale some

of that stuff and you get one URL that

kind of blows up and gets tons

Of traffic you still got to you know

Track all that you can't just you know,

cash it or something like that

You got to know that you know where the

users are coming from and how to scale

that so it gets more complicated for sure

and then like you said the spam thing,

you know, there's definitely a lot of

that a lot of automated bots and

You know, you got a build-in detection

for that type of stuff

Yeah

that sort of reminds me of

Just me personally cuz so to give

everybody a little backstory so I added

some of the short links to the website

and just for some of the

sponsors that we have and

They were getting just tons of clicks and

it was like this is a lot, you know

So I emailed Tim and I was like, you

know, what's going on here?

And he's like you got you've got a thing

hitting it. It was like certain IPs

So then I went to cloud

flare and it was like sure enough

It was like cloud flare was not blocking,

you know, these three IPs that were just

like, you know hitting my server so hard

So that I just create a firewall rule

block those and now

everything's back to normal and like

You know, I'm not

getting hit hit by all the

Stuff anymore

So, you know all that stuff's super

useful to have and to be able to you know

Track it down the way you you were you're

able to use, you know using your service

Yeah, so that's it. That's good to know.

So you were able to find that out

Mm-hmm, and they were hitting layer of L

news directly. So they were hitting your

service and then like

scanning all the links on there

Yeah. Yeah, it was almost like a like a

scraper bot type thing

Yeah, and so yeah, and then I was able to

block those and just the request just

went, you know way down

Which is interesting. I mean they

wouldn't actually I guess they weren't

using JavaScript so they

weren't making it to my analytics

So they're only coming in through I can

only see them in cloud

flare itself. Not through my own

You know site analytics. So

that was kind of interesting

Yeah, cloud flare is that's a whole

nother piece we can get into but like

what cloud flare does and

you know, I definitely use them

but you know their DDoS protection and

just all of their automated stuff to

Protect your site as

soon as you get a site that

Gets enough traffic. It's

just like a constant target for

DDoS attacks or

You know just automated scraping tools. I

think I had one time some

Automated bot I just had crazy analytics

logs that were just like well, this isn't

normal. What's going on?

ended up being some bot was scraping

every single short URL in my system and

just non-stop just

hammering my servers and

There's a lot of stories like that that

you know, you got malicious people and

then you got people

that are just you know

doing who knows what and a

Lot of times it's in all these other

countries. You're like, all right, what's

going on in Russia or

something like that?

Yeah, yeah that yeah that part's crazy

and well even the DDoS stuff is like, you

know, my website's Laravel news

It's like it's just a news website

Why you know and then one morning I wake

up in club where it's

like you had a DDoS attack

We have you know automatic automatically

mitigated this and I'm like, why would

somebody try to DDoS me? Like what?

It's just crazy

Yeah. Yeah, I I don't understand it, but

it's a problem. I'd be

curious to hear from other

other people I you know, I see it every

once in a while, but

I guess you know, that's cloudflare is

Pretty valuable in that you know to help

stop it. They do a pretty

good job with just detecting it

But then you know, you got to you know

customize and do

different things to prevent it. I

Could go down a whole rabbit hole of that

Some of the stuff I've had to do

For sure

So are you you're still hosting it or

using Forge to provision and do

everything for the for the

service or I know I still

So I still use Forge. I wish I knew

About Laravel cloud about six

months ago. I don't know when

So what I was running into is I was

adding servers and

then you know as you know

I'd start getting more and more traffic.

I was just manually

provision servers which work fine

But I got to a point

where I was like, okay

Let me see what I can do and I

use Forge with digital oceans

And that's what I've just always used for

you know, all these projects and they

digital ocean came out

with I think it's called

app platform, which

is like their automated

scaling system and

maybe six months ago I went through and

They added some new features and stuff

and I was able to migrate it to that so

that I have it to where it will

auto scale and

You know

You know as it needs more servers or

whatever if I get you

know, a lot of traffic one day

It will scale up scale down

I'm so I kind of migrated some of my apps

to it and but I still

use Forge for other things

Some of my other projects I do

Gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah

Yeah, see I've never had to deal with

really auto scaling at

all for for what I do

You know, I can run a cheap box and we

just cash everything

and it's pretty simple

So yeah, that's that's gonna be I think

that will be a really nice use case for

cloud is the auto

scaling and all that stuff

But I've actually not even on digital

ocean where I'm still using

Linode which got bought by

somebody and

So it but Akama I think might have bought

them but let's be working

fine, you know, it's just

Just a cheap server there

But you you mentioned some extensions. So

this this brings back memories. I think

the first time I interviewed you

You had a weather extension for Chrome

that was like crazy popular

And and the if I'm not mistaken the back

end was layer Vail, but then the front

end was just the chrome

Whatever you write chroma plugins in

Yeah, yeah, I think that was I

Think you were doing

gonna do a series like this

But on your on layer of El news and it

was gonna be focused on interviewing

people building stuff

So yeah, I started a weather extension

just for my own use case

I was in to building extensions and I

wanted something like a little icon that

shows the current weather in my browser

So, you know, I just

built it and put it out there

I think it was using the dark sky API

originally if you remember that app. It

was a really popular iOS app and

I think I had you know a thousand free

API request and I put it out there and I

was like this will be fine and

Real quickly, you know as it grew that

that ran out real fast

So then I was having to figure out.

Alright, how do I you know make money off

this thing because it was just free

So I what I realized is people were

donating money because they just liked it

So people were sending me money on like

PayPal for building

it to try to support it

So then I put like a upgrade button. So

It's still going it's out there

You know, I

Enjoyed working on it. I haven't really

done a lot of updates recently. It's kind

of been stable people

haven't been asking for anything

but

Yeah, if you go to weather extension calm

and you want to check it out

But it kind of you know

runs itself it covers the bills

I have like an upgrade on there

and

you know

It's built on Laravel the back in

But yeah, so it's one of the reasons it

was growing and then it got hit by

Once again talking about as soon as you

start getting any kind of traffic or

bigger it got spammed

by maybe a competitor

I still don't know to this

day, but it got spanned with

thousands of one-star reviews, so

It was like five star review people liked

it and then overnight Google

I guess they didn't have any kind of spam

protection on their stuff

You know, I went from five stars to like

one star like overnight

and once you get bad ratings, it kind of

demotes it and it doesn't

really show up and it kind of

Stop growing as fast as

it was and then you know

I started building other projects and you

know kind of moved on once I realized

most people expect the

weather to be free like

you know most weather apps are free and

You know what are ad supported and you

can't really do ads inside of an

extension super great

So I kind of moved on to something else

But is it was a fun project and you know,

that's that's type stuff like that

To then building other things

have all kind of built up my

knowledge base on how to

like keep a site like TDI

Oh I even running because of you know

The DDoS attacks or the spam attacks or

you know people trying

to steal your API keys

And all kinds of just malicious stuff

that you have to deal with

I've learned a lot from it. So

That's awesome. The yeah the dark sky

I don't know if you're listening if you

remember dark sky, but it

was awesome back in the day

It was like the best weather app and and

then Apple bought them

and then what shut them down

I guess they integrated it with

their current weather app maybe

What'd you end up having to switch to is

it like a government API you can call and

it's just free now or yeah

There's there's two you can if you if you

upgrade I think you get access to another

one. There's somebody built a like

Pretty

much the same

API in point and similar data sets and

They built it, you know to

kind of take the place of it

Well to come or several companies did but

I kind of integrated with two

of them and they have you know

Pretty good pricing

models and similar data

You know, but people the one complaint I

still get is people emailed me saying

your your extension says, you know

It's not supposed to

rain but it's raining

And I'm like, okay, I have nothing to do

with the weather, you know, I'm just

showing you the data and the API

So it's kind of I get blamed for weather

all around the world from this extension

which I just tell them

Okay. I mean, I don't

really know what I can do but

But yeah, there are there are government

sites and I debated on you know

well, maybe I could just build my own

weather API service in charge for it and

You know, I had this experience with the

weather stuff. So I

looked at that and then

You know kind of just decided to

integrate and move on to other stuff

But like, you know, you can for for the

United States at least

you can use the weather APIs

And I think that's what a

lot of these services are doing

They're just government APIs

But to build a service you really have to

integrate any if you wanted to work

worldwide you have to

integrate with all these

weather providers all

around the world and

kind of you take all of their data and

morph it into one single API that's just

like longitude latitude and then

Returned that and I just decided not not

to go down that road

but probably would have been a good idea

and then could have you

know sold it like like

Dark sky did they had an API that you

know was the the best that everybody used

for weather applications

Okay

This is sort of off topic from

L'Hareville or

whatever. But why do all the

local like news

Cast have their own weather apps is it

they're just selling advertising off of

that and that's how they're making money

Is that their whole thing with having

their own weather apps? I?

I don't yeah, I would imagine

they want their own, you know

Branding and a lot of it, you know, a lot

of those sites are all

Advertising like you almost can't even go

to them because the ads are so bad

without an ad blocker

Yeah, I don't really have an answer to

that other than they do claim though

like, you know, your

local weatherman will claim

He's accurate. Don't listen to like I've

seen things don't look at your weather on

your phone because it's not gonna work

And there is a certain

part of that but then you know

What's the one job that you can be wrong

50% of the time and not

get fired as a weatherman?

So

Anyways, I don't I don't know but yeah

the you know, the the

weather stuff is kind of you know

It maybe it'll get better AI may fix it.

Maybe AI will you know be able to read

the weather and make more accurate

Predictions I've heard of that stuff

But that's what dark sky was kind of I

don't know how they were

doing it what they were doing

but they were

supposedly analyzing radar and

We're giving you know, you're back in the

people don't wouldn't

be amazed by this today

but back in the day it was you would get

an alert that it's

gonna rain in 10 minutes and

They were pretty accurate with it and

nobody else was doing that. It

was it was it was neat though

What they were able to do

Yeah, that was awesome because you know

I like to play golf and I would always

have dark sky with with

the alerts on and you know

You'd be playing golf and be like it's

gonna rain in 10 minutes and then and

sure it was pretty

accurate almost every time

It was like, you know

we would run to the trees and hide or you

know run to the little

court board or something and

It was it was pretty accurate. It was it

was very rare that it gave me an alert

and it didn't happen

So I really liked that part

of the app. That was sweet

Yeah, yeah, it was good that's what

that's what got me interested in it with

was wanting that on my

browser in my browser and I was into

extensions and I built you

know a few other extensions in

That you know extensions and Laravel are

kind of what got me into

building, you know side projects

just I always like to build stuff that

got you know, I would get users and

You know, even if it was free just people

using my stuff. I

thought it was really neat

Yeah for sure the

Anything else you've

got out? I know you've got

I'm trying to remember I remember the

weather extension. Yes

We'll back up a bit because you talked

about my first interview.

Yeah, so back in the day

I created a series called the artisan

files and I would just send questions out

to people that were

building stuff in Laravel and

This is sort of like a

video podcast format of that

You know

Maybe I should have renamed this and not

call it the creator series

and call it the artisan files

But yeah, that brings back so many

memories now. I'm glad you

brought that up. That was fun

Yeah, I enjoyed, you know

talking about this stuff and

You know, like I said just putting a lot

most of my stuff was I put

it out there for free and then

You know if it blew up I

would figure out how can I?

You know make money off this or at least

pay for it and keep it going

That's just how I've

always done things. I I

Start what kind of got me into it is I

realized I made a blog

Tim Leland calm and I put a post out and

I guess I was just it was just pure luck

but the post blew up and got shared on

like some big news sites and an

Overnight I woke up and it was like, you

know made several hundred

dollars off of affiliate

Revenue from like Amazon

and stuff and then also

Once I put it like ads on there. I was

able to make money

off that so that kind of

Was like wait, I can go to sleep wake up

and have made money overnight

I was like, okay

Maybe there's something else here. I need

to figure out what else can I do and

that's you know, why I

just kept building stuff

Yeah, that's awesome. Do you like if?

Speaking to developers that maybe like

want to get into creating their own

products and stuff

like that. Is that sort of

You know looking back is is that sort of

what you would recommend is like just

build stuff that you like and

See if it takes off and if it does figure

out a way to charge for it versus going

the other route of like spending

Six months and be like, all right, this

is paid upfront, you

know things like that

Yeah, I think so. I mean because you're

gonna build stuff and

You know if you put a ton of time into

like planning it and you know

I would talk to people and they'd be

like, yeah, we're gonna start a business

and they would you know, go get a

business plan and they would go make an

LLC for the business and hire lawyers and

they haven't made a penny and

I was like, I'm just gonna build the

thing put it out there and

if it picks up traction then

You know figure out the next steps

Because I've you know, maybe you would

get lucky on the first one

But I've built so many small little apps

and just put them out

there and just kind of you know

And a lot of them like you said are

things I was interested in so the weather

thing I was interested in because I

Wanted a weather extension in my browser

and I want to learn how browser

extensions work because I was you know

I used a ton of

different extensions and then

you know t.ly was created because I saw

Google shutting down their service and

you know, I thought it

would be a neat project and

Originally built the extension

and then so I built the

extension and it grew to like maybe

200,000 users and I was like, okay, you

got 200,000 users if just 1%

converts to paying then you know, I'll be

doing pretty good and

You know, that's just kind of how I've

done things. It's just

you know have an idea

Build it put it out there

And just see you know watch it and see

how it grows if it doesn't go anywhere

You know, I eventually kind of just kill

it off and and then

move on to the next thing

More recently though since I've been

focused on t.io. I've

kind of quit some of that

Because I've you know wanted to make sure

I stay focused on it. But

before this I was you know every

Every week I was

building something different

Yeah, we developers have that problem I

think we we get in this mindset if we got

to keep building stuff building stuff

building stuff and not

focus on the actual business that's

actually working and then and then we

You know that we just kind of let it fail

because of lack of

attention not lack of how good it is

So that's that's a

really good reminder there

The that it sort of reminds me of the way

I started, you know in the whole

development thing was

You know it my first product was actually

a classified script you could

buy it and like run your own

Craigslist I guess but this was way

before Craigslist was a thing and

It was all because you know

I was working on a motorcycle dealership

and people would bring their motorcycles

in to try to trade them in and

We're like we can't

take your trade or whatever

and but you can go here in place, you

know put it on my

pre-loved motorcycles website and

So then you know, I just I was like well

I could probably sell this and then it

just kind of picked up steam and you know

lasted a few years made some money

so it's always fun when you build

something that you actually

Are passionate about and enjoy because

that actually keeps you engaged over the

what it's gonna take to build a

successful product. I think

Yeah, that's funny. You say that I one of

the first projects I

built with Laravel was

like a

Craigslist but the goal

It was gonna be you

know, Craigslist was popular

But people were like posting that they

were being like kidnapped and you know,

they would meet up to buy something

So I was like, how can I integrate this

with like social media or something?

so I created a like a Craigslist, but it

required Facebook login and

And then it was gonna be like oh I could

see your Facebook profile and

then I could see your friends with

somebody that I know and

kind of build that trust and

You know, I built it and it grew and it

was you know, a neat project and then

about like, you know

Six months after I built it and it was

and working on it Facebook launched

Facebook Marketplace

Which was pretty much what I built and

that that was kind of the sign. Okay

let me go ahead and shut this down real

quick because you had

Obviously Facebook Marketplace kind of

took off and what it was

pretty much the same idea. So

At least it validated what I was what I

was thinking people wanted. So

Yeah, the even today. I think marketplace

is now taking over Craigslist like I've

Everybody up, you know, everybody locally

is always like Facebook Marketplace and

I've never I don't think

I've heard Craigslist in

years

anybody using it so that's

Yeah, that was pretty that was actually a

really good idea cuz that was a

Unique use case back then when all that

it didn't exist. Yeah, I like that

Yeah, yeah, I'll be interesting what

Craigslist if you look at their traffic a

bit. It's on a just constant decline, but

I think I made money off of selling maybe

like job postings and I'm guessing people

are still doing that but

Yeah, those sites are crazy how like they

haven't updated it in or at least

visually in 20 years

It's a interesting

Thing that they just don't I guess don't

care that's just the business model but

I kind of like it just the nostalgic

look. It's kind of like

the other that news website

It's been around man since the 90s drudge

report, you know, it's just it literally

looks like it was built in front page

It's just like when one page and they

just update links on it all day long

It's like, you know, it's kind of the

novelty is kind of

cool. I kind of like that

Yeah, those are I mean that's the type of

thing like if you could build

I mean be hard to build that today, but

build something that could just get

constant traffic and

Imagine are there ads on there? That's

probably how they make money either that

or like sponsor posts or something

but you know you build something and

That's what one thing if if you could

build something that doesn't require

like

paying users that's always a

Bonus if you can figure out

how to build like, you know

One of these free online tools that you

know are sponsored by

ads or something like that

Those are those are you know, always a

interesting business model

where you don't have users

you don't have a ton of support and

You don't have to worry about all the a

lot of the problems that come with it

true

so to switch gears back

to layer veil like what's

What's your I'm trying to

think of how to word it to kind of

Do something interesting like what's your

favorite level feature? Like what's

What's one thing that variable provides

that you can't live without?

Hmm so I

Mean there's there's a lot that I'm

trying to I could say it go with but I

Think it's just if I want to build

something. I'm trying to think I

threw up a website not too long ago and

Yeah, if you just want to

build a site and you want

authentication and

You want to connect to a database like

not having to rebuild all that

Scaffolding, I guess is is the reason

that I've always used Laravel because

I've worked for you know

software companies where everything is

built in-house and it's like

If you were to build this application

you'd spend, you know

Six months building the groundwork and

I'm like they could just

use Laravel and skip, you know

Six months of work and they're probably

doing it, you know, not as not as good as

how they're you know

If they're building

their own authentication

The the bugs and the

security issues that come with that

So I think you just being all like build

a new application real

quickly and you get all that

Groundwork already done to where you can

just get it and put it live

but some of the stuff I mean I take

Advantage of this is just like the

caching how easy it is to cache stuff

And then obviously like the database and

queues so jobs just I've worked for

companies where if like, okay

We're gonna put this on a job and it's

like this complicated process versus in

Laravel. It's just so easy to do

That's that's I guess my

main reasons for going with it

Makes sense. Yeah. Yeah the

What are you using?

You know anything sort of unique or wild

in any of your apps that you know

We might not know about like do you have

a go-to package that you

always use or anything like that?

Go to package

No, I guess it depends on

you know

The application I try to you know limit

any packages I pull in just because I

know that you know, you add dependencies

I

Mean I think I always you know, I try to

keep it pretty stock

Laravel and not you know build anything

crazy to where if you go to you know

upgrade versions, it's not as difficult

Hmm I guess if you were to

do payments you could you know

Say like a Laravel spark would be the

biggest one. So if I were

to build a new application

You know obviously the

latest version of Laravel

Go with their you know

What I know the the one trouble I've had

recently is if I'm not building something

new and then staying

up to date with like all

The changes that are coming with like if

I just want to you know

build a new application

You you go to install it and gives you so

many options and then you're like, okay

I got a research all the different front

ends is now supporting

My favorite time was just when you would

build it and it was using

like view I'm a big view JS fan

But you would build it it was a view, you

know, that was the one

Front in and then it was using

Laravel mix for you know building your

assets and compiling them

It just seems simpler

But maybe it's just because I was doing a

whole lot more new projects versus now

there's so many options

it feels like I

Don't even know all the options

Think it's like five or six, you know,

you know, it steps through everything,

you know everything from

what database, you know

You pick your front-end scaffolding you

you know, and then once you pick that I

think you then you pick

What do you want live wire view or?

Alp or not whatever the other thing is

But yeah, yeah, it's it's definitely

grown, you know from that standpoint

You know having to pick through all the

different things as you as

you go install a brand new app

Which which is interesting,

you know, it's it's sort of I

Don't know if there's

a good way of doing it

You know from a create like from a layer

of L standpoint because they want to

offer all these things

and make everybody happy

It's like, you know, how could you

simplify all that but

maybe in layer of L12?

They'll they'll come up with something

ingenious and we won't have to

even think about them anymore

Yeah, sometimes less options is better

Just make just go with it and then figure

out that one and then not you know not

have to make a decision

That may be an interesting way, but yeah,

I liked it when I just you know could

spin it up and it was

You know, I knew I knew

what I was getting out

I I think like even now you

can like pick don't install

Authentication which I guess makes sense

because there's not

always gonna be authentication

not all applications are

gonna be needing off but

Yeah, it's tricky I read sometimes where

Taylor will post, you know, whatever

You know, he's trying

to make this person happy

but then this whole group's gonna be you

know upset or he wants to have these

different front-end languages and

Yeah. Anyways, it's a tough job

Yeah, yeah, I don't envy that that part

of building a very successful framework

it just seems like it's

No matter what you do

somebody's gonna be mad

You just had to make a decision and go

with it. Yeah, and they get feedback and

then maybe maybe adjust

or pivot in the future

but yeah, that's

Very true well

Well Tim what anything else that maybe

we've missed that you want to talk about

before we close this thing out

uh

No, I'd be I think you posted something

about Laravel cloud. That's something I'm

kind of interested in

You know, that's it. That's a neat

Feature coming or you know option coming.

That's a little another

thing of where to host it

but

No, I don't really have

anything else to share

Gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah the I got to

speaking of Laravel cloud. I went to

Upstate PHP, which is in Greenville,

South Carolina last night and Jason bags

did a demo of Laravel cloud and

It's pretty sweet it's it's got a lot of

the the Forge feel to it, you know

You can kind of do everything you can do

in Forge this this is

from my point of view

I'm not a I've only ever used Forge so I

don't know the differences and all the

the you know, all

this cloud stuff, but uh

But yeah, and then it spins up servers

can hibernate on can

do all the other stuff

So it's it's really sweet and the of

course the UI looks really good. I'm I'm

sort of interested on

What they're gonna do with it in the

future because I think I don't know I

just get the vibes like you

You're gonna be able to

do so much more with cloud

You know like Laravel new

Probably that can integrate with cloud

and then you don't even have to make half

these decisions anymore cuz it's just

gonna automatically upload it

And you've got your site and and you

know, it just defaults to

whatever they liked the most

So I don't know I'm sort of interested

with the next year year holds

I know cloud supposed to come out

sometime this quarter so that that should

be pretty interesting and sweet

Yeah, yeah that will be

neat just to make it simple

Like, you know, somebody wants to build a

website and there's so many steps to

getting a website

built and putting it online

But making you know making it easier to

word that all that's

kind of working together

It's definitely definitely neat

But yeah now this were go ahead no,

that's that's kind of it I was

What was I gonna say

Yeah, I don't know

that's that's really neat

Yeah, it's always

speaking of all the steps though

You know, it's it feels

like there is a lot now

But like if you think back into like the

early 2000s, it was like a whole lot of

steps and now it's it's you know

With Forge and all these other things.

It's it's pretty simple

But it still is still is a lot of steps

and it seems like all

that should be streamlined

So I'm like in the future

that we're all headed into. Oh

Yeah, yeah, it will be interesting what

they do with I see a lot of like

Malicious links with the TDI. Oh, I so I

deal with that but like

vercel and

cloud flare like

their workers pages those are

constantly targeted for like

Malicious links and stuff. So I'm curious

of how how Laravel is gonna

handle that I imagine they're

Already know that's gonna be a problem.

But I think they're gonna

if they give you a way to see

You know, if they're

doing the hosting themselves

I'm curious of how they're gonna handle

that because before with Forge they

didn't really have to handle that

They kind of just offloaded that to like,

you know, like Linna or digital ocean

But that that's gonna

be a challenge for them

That's very true. Yeah, that's something.

Yeah, I haven't even thought about that

but yeah, that's because you could spin

up any spam site off of a

Assume they give you a subdomain or

something and then just be like, yeah

That's usually how it is

I think I've seen that on their platform

to where it will be like a subdomain and

that's nice because it's you know

great you could just you know create a

new layer of a lot put

it out there and then

Get a URL back that's you know live

But then with that like

we were talking earlier

It just comes the the the bad side of the

internet the malicious side of the

internet comes out. So

Yeah, the well this that sort of reminds

me. Do you remember github pages?

You know you could host

your own pay, you know

You're on site with pages and back in the

day you could it was actually I think a

subdomain off of github.com

But then they found out there was a

security issue where you could actually

steal cookies or

something from the the main calm

So now then they switched everything it's

not it's not off of

github.com. It's off of something else

And you know all that it's super

interesting all the the ways, you know

the cat and mouse of you figure out

something cool and then they just figure

out how to break it and

scam people and

Yeah, and they probably switched the

domain because the github domain was

probably constantly getting

Flagged and that's the whole topic we go

down. But the you know domains get

flagged and they get put on these

Blacklist and then you know browsers

block them. It's all kinds

of crazy stuff happens. So

Anyways, yeah, yeah deep deep dark rabbit

hole that we can go down for a day

Yeah, we do a follow-up sometime

That sounds good. Well T. M. I don't want

to hold you up all day

But man, I appreciate you taking time to

come meet with me and you know, talk

about everything you're building

You know if you're out there and you're

looking for a nice

URL shortening service T

ly is the way to go. I'm

a customer actually and

Supporter of it. So so

go check them out for sure

Yeah, awesome. Thank you