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
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a customer actually and
Supporter of it. So so
go check them out for sure
Yeah, awesome. Thank you