In this episode of the Laravel Podcast, host Matt Stauffer sits down with Chris Sev, Laravel's new Director of Developer Relations, to explore his background and the evolving role of DevRel. They dive into exciting updates in the Laravel ecosystem, including the launch of Laravel Cloud, new starter kits, the VS code extension, and the redesigned Laravel website. The discussion also covers the importance of backward compatibility, upcoming community events, and the continuous evolution and support within the Laravel community.
- Matt Stauffer’s Twitter
- Chris Sev’s Twitter
- Laravel Twitter
- Laravel Website
- Tighten Website
- Laravel Cloud
- Laravel Reddit
- Joe Dixon AMA on Reddit
- 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:
Hey everybody, welcome back to Laravel Podcast Season 7. And I can't say welcome back to Season 7 because this is our first episode. So Chris, thank you so much for joining me. But I'm your host, Matt Stauffer. I'm CEO of Tighten. And in this season, I'm going to be joined every episode by a member of the Laravel team. So kicking off, I've got to get someone who's kind of really foundational in helping the Laravel team be interacting with the rest of the world. And you know, there's been this kind of history of sometimes where people are really well known and sometimes there's people who doing great stuff and nobody knows who they are.
The bigger the team gets, I think the more likely that is the case. So of course I want to be talking to Chris Sev, the Director of DevRel, developer relationships at Laravel, trying to kind of get us all connected there. So Chris, say hi to everybody and share a little bit about yourself and your role at Laravel.
Chris Sev:
Hey everybody. Yeah, my name is Chris Sev. I just hit my one month Mark at Laravel. So really exciting. Thank you.
Matt Stauffer:
Congratulations.
Chris Sev:
And yeah, it's, it's been a fantastic, I get to join the DevRel team. I get to join the marketing team, which is kind of getting built up at such a fun time. Like I joined and I'm wondering like, what's onboarding look like? Well, you got Laracon EU that we went to, two weeks ago. We've got the Laravel Cloud launch next week, along with VS Code Stable, the starter kits, Laravel 12, Laravel.com redesign. So yeah, it's just an exciting time to join.
Matt Stauffer:
It's a lot going on. Yeah.
So your title is the Director of DevRel. And I think that two of the things I want to make sure that happens in every episode is that they know the person and they know the role. So I do want to talk about the person in just a second, but let's talk about the role. DevRel means a lot of different things depending on the ethos of the people running the project, almost the generation. I mean DevRel has shifted a lot over the years. But also, I just think that DevRel means a different thing depending on the section of the industry that you're in. You know, DevRel at a developer or tools company might be different than DevRel at an agency or something else.
So what is your kind of like overarching, and some people have never even heard of DevRel. So like if you want to talk about like DevRel, what does being the Director of DevRel mean? What is your overall goal at the company?
Chris Sev:
Yeah. So a lot of people look at DevRel and like you said, there's so many different ways to slice it. So many different tactics. I think one of the core things that DevRel does, and if we focus on just the tasks themselves of what like a daily DevRel looks like, you can call them the four C's. So that's Code. You help out building landing pages, writing code, writing sample apps, stuff like that. There's Content- written or video.
Which I think is probably where we'll slot a lot of our time in. Community as far as just like doing outreach, making sure people in the community are happy. And that goes backwards, right? Like making sure that anything from the community gets back to the team as far as feedback, especially with all the things coming out soon. And the other one is the fourth C is kind of like the Consulting C. So if anybody inside of the company needs help, like creating a small video for a release or something, uh, that's what DevRel does is like the four C's.
Matt Stauffer:
That's very helpful.
Chris Sev:
Now, yeah, as far as how DevRel looks at Laravel itself, I consider my job very lucky and very, I don't know, easy is not the right word, but like the Laravel community itself is so strong and so tightly knit for such a long time that coming in here, I think DevRel just has to continue the great things that are already happening. With that regard, like, I just look at the history of it. I look at everything that Taylor's ever said, that the community's ever done, and just try to continue.
Matt Stauffer:
I love it. You keep up the same vibes. You're like, hey, this has already been going. I'm just now getting paid to officially facilitate it continuing to happen.
Chris Sev:
Yes.
Matt Stauffer:
That's cool. Well, that's a very natural transition of the conversation of kind of like, what does your background look like? And I know that, you know, in some ways, you know, a lot of us have known who you are for a while, but, for quite a while, but also in some ways you are a little bit of an outsider with the ability to bring a perspective of like looking out from, you know, looking in from the outside, but now you kind of are bringing that in. So can you talk a little bit about like, what's your history of relationship with the Laravel community and also just kind of like with what led you to being a DevRel today?
Chris Sev:
Yeah, yeah. I look at my history and my career and I started coding when I was 14. Somebody just gave me like a bootleg version of Dreamweaver and I learned that way.
Matt Stauffer:
Nice. Love it.
Chris Sev:
Yeah, and pretty early on, know, a lot of PHP, that's just what people learned back then. Went into CodeIgniter and then eventually got exposed to Laravel and Laravel version 3, I think. So from there, that's kind of like... Everything that has happened in my career. I think has groomed me for this position, which is really fun.
So I built a blog called scotch.io on Laravel, grew it to about 4 million page views per month. And that like that alone taught me so much about scaling Laravel, building with Laravel and really honed in my love for it. And we got that project acquired by Digital Ocean. like in my mind, I owe a lot to Laravel, right? And I think a lot of the community has that same feeling that we're wherever they were when they joined Laravel it like you hear so many stories and when you talk to people at Laracon and it's just really cool to see how the community has grown.
And yeah, I joined DigitalOcean after that. Also in education space, like we got those tutorials up to about 15 million page views per month. A lot of Laravel content. I did a lot of streams and content on deploying Laravel to DigitalOcean. So that kind of like now with things moving into like Laravel Cloud, Laravel Forge, a lot of that experience grew me for that. And then I did a year at Sourcegraph, which is an AI coding tool.
And like all of that put together, I don't know, it kind of helps me have a perspective on Laravel being like in it, having personal, professional projects on it, and just knowing the community for a long time.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, that's cool.
When you mentioned you mentioned kind of a lot of the things that are happening, they're very exciting right now. And I know that within the Larvel organization, this is a really big moment because the hype around next week, I guess, at this at the time this comes out is the hype around today. It's really big. And it's fun to me because sometimes hype is just hype. Right? There's a marketing push and certainly the marketing push is going on. Right. Like the marketing team wants to make sure they do their job, making sure people know this is all coming. But also sometimes the hype is a very personal excitement. When I've talked to Taylor about how he feels about Cloud, especially in the early days, he's just like, this is something I've always wanted to do and I never could have done before. I'm really happy for it to be happening.
So as you are looking forward to the launch that's going to happen at the day this drops, and as you were reflecting backwards on where you and I have both been joining Laravel and Laravel 3 and having gone through a lot of things before we got to where we are today, what are the biggest shifts that you've noticed? If you have any that you can think of, that are really kind of the move of the early days of Laravel through to where we've been, probably for the last five to 10 years, moving into this next phase. The next phase is the team growing a lot bigger, the next phase is Laravel Cloud, the next phase is improved relationships, I think, with Laravel and a lot of the front-end communities, stuff like that. There's just a lot of things that are shifting. And I do think that this day that we're celebrating that is gonna be next Monday, and for listeners, it's today, is maybe like a
Chris Sev:
Yes.
Matt Stauffer:
big milestone in that, like, how do you look at that shift? What does it feel like to you?
Chris Sev:
Yeah, I think...
As with me, like talking about DevRel and the community, a lot of it is, you see the shifts happening over the years. Like Laravel started in, you know, 2011-ish, right? And then you get to like the point where Laravel Forge gets released and then you can kind of have like this nice hosting experience, right? So then you get to the point where like the front end frameworks start to get a little bit more dialed in. You get Livewire and Inertia in 2019 pretty close to each other, which is wild. But yeah, you kind of see it as like a continuation of everything that's come before, but also like a beginning. So to me, and Taylor's talked about this in a couple different streams, is that when I started, it was PHP, right? And the world has moved into these JavaScript type tooling, libraries, all that good stuff, and it makes sense because it's easy to get started. You have...
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Chris Sev:
The Netlify is the Vercels that you can just like one click deploy. And I think it's really exciting to see what it would look like if we could get more people on board to Laravel and kind of like say, we are trying to be the most productive way for you to ship something like real. So yeah, I don't know. I don't know if I could say shifts, but I don't know phases.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, no, that's makes sense. Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, and it's fun because PHP, like you mentioned, when we started PHP, was just what you do. And PHP has not been just what you do lately, which is fine because we've known that Laravel's this incredibly productive ecosystem to work in. And so I do think that one of the things I enjoy seeing as a focus of Laravel, the organization lately is a return back to people, more people seeing PHP is the way you just, of course, you know, and it's that one click deploy.
It's, you know, like really a stronger emphasis on the ability to go from idea to shipped, you know, more quickly. It's like the more people that say, well, if I'm to build a web application that needs to ship, of course I'm going to go with Laravel. It's nice to kind of like be able to see a return back to that. You know, PHP and especially Laravel, we have a little bit of an underdog, you know, ethos, you know, it's sort of one of those like, you know, people don't know how great we are, but we're going to make it. And so it does feel like, this is kind of like the beginning of the redemption arc or whatever it is, you know, like the people seeing that we've been here all along or whatever. So yeah, that's fun.
Chris Sev:
Yeah, yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
Okay, so next week.
Dang it, I keep saying that. Today, dear listeners, today you guys got a lot going on and Laravel Cloud has kind of been one of the biggest focuses of that. And so I do want to kind of talk a little bit about your thoughts and your experience of Laravel Cloud. But I also kind of want to talk about the other things you guys have going on. And I know that you probably have not been the decision maker when it comes to a lot of like the here's the timing of the things and everything. But I imagine that you've been a part of those conversations to the point where you can kind of speak to how do you see the facilitation of all these things coming out at once?
Can you give us behind the scenes a little bit of the strategy? Why are we launching a bunch of things at once? What is exciting about it? And you can tell us, of course, the line of, well, it's exciting because here's all these things you can do, which we want to hear. But also, what's the thinking behind this big push? And what are we trying to accomplish together as a community here?
Chris Sev:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think Laravel Cloud was the base of it, right? And that's always been the base of it. We've been working towards that. And they were working towards it before I joined the team, right? And what's cool about that is I deployed, I created a brand new project, deployed it to Forge, and I'm on the outside. And then I got access to Laravel Cloud's beta, so super exciting for me. Got it deployed in like four minutes.
The Forge side took like 55 minutes and I like tried to time myself.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Nice.
Chris Sev:
Yeah, and I like have done it enough times that I know kind of the flow and how things go and it still took that long, right? But yeah, I think Laravel Cloud was always the basis of it. Inertia and VS codes extension, those were always kind of being built and then it kind of got to a point where it's like, look.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, that's exciting. Yeah.
Chris Sev:
Time kind of works out, right? Yeah, so that one's cool. I think it is amazing to see how many things started getting stacked on top of the Laravel Cloud launch. And I think the other one that kind of had to happen with this is the starter kits. Because if we want a really easy, great way to deploy a brand new application with auth all that good stuff, it kind of makes sense to have it be with the Cloud Launch. Yeah, but then it's funny, Laravel 12 release came out on this day as well.
And yeah, I don't know that one to me, I wasn't entirely sure when that was happening and it was just like, Hey, it's, it's today.
Matt Stauffer:
There you go. Yeah.
Chris Sev:
So, yeah, there you go. And then the level 12 or sorry, level.com redesign also, kind of made it to today. And I think the thinking there is it's very much like, look, we want this to look like... to be a new beginning, like a next phase of what Laravel can be. And yeah, like it's funny in Slack, Taylor has called it like the biggest Laravel day in history. And I think just that phrase alone, along with all the other things, it kind of like had to be this way.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, for sure.
And so on the podcast, I've gotten the chance to talk to Taylor about Cloud a couple of times. We've talked a little bit about VS Code, although maybe cover that a bit more. I don't think the starter kits have come up at all as topic of conversation. So I know that other mediums, people talking at Laracon things like that, the starter kits have been covered. But let's say that someone knows a little bit of the history of Laravel starter kits, right? Like we've got the original auth tool and then recently we got this whole more complicated kind of like Jetstream versus Breeze and on the podcast last season we covered a lot about when do you choose Jetstream, when you choose Breeze, Matt's personal preference that Breeze is better, you know, all these things, ya know, lots of this.
Chris Sev:
I'm on Team Jetstream.
Matt Stauffer:
Oh my God. Okay, we might have to have a duke it out. But before we go to the Duke out, can you tell someone who understands that backstory, who hears the phrase new starter kits and doesn't know what that means? Can you talk through a little bit of like what's going on there and what changes can we be looking forward to today?
Chris Sev:
Absolutely. And I think this, we might get into it when we start the head to head, right? Is there's just different ways to adjust your application in Breeze. There's a different way to do it in Jetstream through like actions and all that good stuff. And I think the dichotomy there, I think there's like a lot of decision paralysis that happens, especially like if you look at the Laravel bootcamp or like if you just do Laravel new, it kind of has like.
You have to decide five different things before you start. And I think that's one of the things that. Like if we're moving forward, we want to make things a little bit easier, less decision paralysis. So the starter kits now are just cloneable repose that live on the run. So there's like a starter kit for Livewire. There's not like a Jetstream starter kit and a Breeze starter kit for Livewire. It's just Livewire. And there's one for, Inertia React and there's one for Inertia and Vue and it, it basically looks like as if you had created it yourself, right?
You're not like installing a package like Jetstream and it's not hiding things in random places. It's, it's like you made it yourself and it's your starter kit. And I think the thinking there is moving forward it'll be easier to one not have people choose one or the other. And then, you know, friends like you and I have to fight each other now.
And then the other thing, which I'm really excited for is to push beyond these three starter kits and get to a point where there's like a starter kit section of Laravel.com where there are, let's say a SaaS starter. There's like, I know we have Spark, but we can get like a SaaS starter that you can clone, have Cashier all set up, maybe a blog starter in a couple of different flavors, but build a directory. I think that's one, is easier for education because then people can kind of just clone it and dig through, find out how things were made. And two, just be easier as far as picking what you want.
Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I'm on this team which is one of the reasons why I love Breeze because I think that a starter kit that leaves you with all these hanging dependencies that you don't always fully understand and you have to hook into and customize like Jetstream...
Chris Sev:
Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
It can lead to lot of difficulty customizing things, difficulty adapting things later, and also just people who often don't fully understand how it works when it's just sort of like the magic hooks. Whereas I love the idea of something where every file that something is bringing in is your file, right? And so with these new tools and with Breeze and with the Auth Tool in the past, every file that gets published when it runs now becomes a file in your application that you're playing around with. You're not integrating with all these vendor files.
Chris Sev:
Exactly.
Matt Stauffer:
But the first thing that came to my mind was, God, maintaining those three repos is gonna be miserable. Do you guys have an automated kind of build system where every time there's a new release that modifies the core of what happens, it's gonna rebuild all those? Or is somebody just maintaining parity between the framework core and those repos?
Chris Sev:
Yeah, I don't know about any build system like that, maybe in the future, but right now I'm seeing Tony and Taylor, Tony Leia and Taylor just having at it and just, yeah, yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm. Manually keeping it. Yeah. OK.
That's great. Yeah, I know a lot of people in the community have espoused the idea that every person should have their own personal starter kit.
Chris Sev:
Yes.
Matt Stauffer:
And the problem with that has historically been your starter kit gets out of date. And so we've toyed around with some tooling that I built a while back that basically allows you to like say, here are the set of scripts that I want to run against a new install. So instead of maintaining your fork, you maintain the set of scripts so that you can take any version of Laravel and it just says composer and call this and copy this here, whatever. So that's kind of the direction I'm seeing. And I'm curious where Tony and Taylor land on that. But I'm gonna ping both of them about this, because I love the idea of building tooling and networking, everything like that, and conventions around enabling someone to have their conventions. Because we at Tighten, I'm just sort of like, oh well, every new project should have this particular code style and configuration. And there's no easy way to do that. So I'm going to build a package for that. Well, you don't always have to build a package if we have tooling built for here's the first things you want to do every
Chris Sev:
Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
single time you spin up a new project. So anyway, this has got my brain running a lot of really fun ways. I'm very excited about it.
Chris Sev:
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. mean, even if you think about like, what would like a Laravel Shift look like for the starter kits themselves? I don't know what that looks like. Yeah, there's a lot of different ideas to play on here, especially you see a feature where there's maybe 20 starter kits. You know, we'll see.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Well, I'm excited to see where it goes. I do know that one of the main reasons that we historically have ever considered JetStream is because there's a few features that JetStream had like Teams that Breeze didn't.
Chris Sev:
Yep, that's my main push for JetStream.
Matt Stauffer:
Okay, so what we end up doing is we say, we think Breeze is better, we'll copy the JetStream Teams functionality into Breeze for you. And if we didn't know the new starter kits were coming, we would have just made a package that is basically JetStream Teams for Breeze. So I'm still curious to see whether the Teams functionality Jetstream gets pulled out as a first party and if not first party any of us can do a third party but like a package is basic because the team's functionality is so key. It gets used so often and like you said, it's it's the reason to use Jetstream. So just put a little bug in your ear.
Chris Sev:
Yeah. Yeah. No, I don't know. I believe it. I'm building something right now and it's, it's, I went with Breeze because I know that's kind of like, I don't know. I have all the files in my stuff and I'm working on it. And then I did Marcel's teamwork package, which adds teams. And I'm like, I don't know exactly how much this package goes into depth. And I've already found a couple of things that I might add to like throw a PR in at them. But then it's like, I also need roles and permissions.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Chris Sev:
And then you get to this whole level of what is my app turned into? Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah. And if somebody builds a package that has all those things, first of all, it's one of those things where like everybody needs a little bit different. And second of all, that package becomes so bloaty and heavy that you're like, wish I had just kind of written this myself. It's team's roles, permissions, accounts is one of the unsolved mysteries of how to do it in a way across all your projects that serves the unique needs of all of them in a way that it's not just rewriting from scratch every time.
Chris Sev:
Yeah, yeah. I think the way I'm gonna have to go is just put a bunch of if statements in the views. Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
Absolutely. In fact, why are we even using views at all? We should have single PHP files. That's clearly the direction this is all heading.
Chris Sev:
Yes, yes. That's definitely where we're going in the past couple weeks. Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
About.php, look, I saw Kent C. Dodds say that people in the Laravel world should be accepting single file components and to me, about.php is a single file for a single page. So I'm like, that's clearly the direction we're headed.
All right. So that was starter kit. So let's talk about VS code a little bit. Obviously, it's been a while since that announcement. So most folks who listen to the podcast have had a chance to hear us talk about it. But I actually even personally, because I don't get to write a lot of code these days, I have not kept on top of how the VS code has shifted since the summer when everything was announced at Laracon. Is there a lot new or is it still mainly just kind of PHP IntelliSense and kind of completion, a lot of those things? There's a lot of other new stuff happening too.
Chris Sev:
Yeah. And I don't want to like do the sweeping. There's not a lot new because I'm sure there is. I haven't caught up with it myself. Sorry, Joe T. but I do drop into that Slack channel every once in a while. And the amount of stuff that's going into it is stuff that I would have never caught myself. Like for my use cases, there's a lot of like, you know, like how does the VS code extension work on windows with WSL, all these kinds of like edge cases and
Matt Stauffer:
Yep. Yeah. It's like we got the thing working 80 % and now we've got to spend the next eight months doing the remaining 20%, right? Which is, you know 20%. Yep.
Chris Sev:
Yes, yeah, yeah, those bug fixes, the memory leaks, all that good stuff, but like, it worked great for me out of beta. So, yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, great. I love it. Okay. So we've got those. The new Laravel site, I assume, is kind of what we heard with the whole design Laravel talk.
I'm guessing that you probably can't talk much about this, but if you can, does the new Laravel site reflect any, maybe you can because by the time they hear this, it's gonna be live, right? I keep forgetting this. So can you tell us, jeez, I'm sorry everybody, can you tell us a little bit about what the new Laravel site reflects of any new future or kind of shifts in thinking about the identity of Laravel, the organization? Is it the exact same organization and hey, it's got a, new skin of paint, know, with maybe a little bit of information architecture changing around, or does it reflect any kind of actually shifts at all?
Chris Sev:
Yeah, I think the design itself kind of leads to the composability of Laravel. I think there's like, David showed like a section of, oh Laravel is here. You can kind of throw a React, Inertia, Livewire, the build, deploy, monitor sections of your app, like compose that as you want, right? So I think using all the colors and using that kind of like cubic style.
I'm sorry, David, I don't know what to call it.
Matt Stauffer:
That's what us normies call it, okay David?
Chris Sev:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, like having that style, think leads to Laravel being very much not...
I think a lot of people might look at Laravel and say like, it's like this giant monolith thing. I have to take it all as is, right? But if you look at it, every single piece can be composed. Like you can choose Resend or you can choose whatever email. You can, Livewire, Inertia, React Vue, all that stuff. So there's like, I, I really like how that's cubic things. Sorry, David is coming together. And yeah, I think, I think a lot of it has to do with just bringing forward that ethos that, Taylor said at Laracon EU, we must ship, right? And so in that regard, I don't think there's too much as far as saying like, this is a different Laravel, it's just kind of bringing a lot to the forefront of how we think.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah. Things aren't changing. It's just there's an emphasis on really identifying. I'm just tell me if I'm phrasing you wrong.
Chris Sev:
Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
But it's not that things are changing is that it's like, here's a way for us to focus on something we've always done well in a way we want to really make sure that people get it. OK.
Chris Sev:
Yeah, yeah. And I think, I think in my mind, Taylor really wants to just, as he always has, focus on excellence, right? And you see it in the framework. Now we're kind of like applying it to all the, all the places. Because now we have like the head count for it. We have a lot of people that are dedicated to fixing and focusing on certain things. And yeah, like, I almost did it.
Matt Stauffer:
Mm-hmm.
Chris Sev:
I was going to say, you'll see the Laravel Cloud landing page.
Matt Stauffer:
Right?
Chris Sev:
But yeah, that landing page, David has done a great job there and given Cloud its own identity now. And a couple other pages that are released today as well. The Starter Kit's landing page has a really, really cool look to it. Yeah. Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
OK.
I'm jealous. haven't seen any of this. All you listening, you have access to things that I don't have access to.
Chris Sev:
Future Matt.
Matt Stauffer:
Um, okay. Yeah, exactly future Matt will be will be on all that so speaking of the people who are listening Let's say somebody has not been because the one of the things I like about the podcast is there's people who listen to the podcast who are not the perpetually online Twitter, know Blue Sky folks like we are so i'm like, oh, yeah, everybody knows about these things. No, no the vast majority of the Laravel community does not live on Twitter does not get their nudes from the latest greatest fire hose But instead gets things at a relatively normal pace, you know, somebody mentioned something that's been out for six months and you're like, I'll check that out or a lot of people who listen to podcasts will come up to me at conferences and stuff and say, you know, like, my gosh, you know, you're the podcast guy. And I'm like, didn't you find the podcast through me? And they're like, I have no idea who you are. I just listened. And I'm like, right, right. OK, cool. There's people who don't live in our world. So anyway, those folks may not be even realizing all the things that are going on today. So again, we've already covered Cloud and we've already covered starter kits. But like if you are a Laravel programmer who's not perpetually online, who's not been trying the betas of everything and everything like that.
What do you think Chris that the first thing that you would go do today if you're seeing all these announcements that are happening? What's the first thing you'd go do?
Chris Sev:
Yeah, as, if you're too busy shipping to follow all the things, right, I would say Cloud is probably the thing to look at.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Yeah.
Chris Sev:
I know the starter kits, I'm really excited about the starter kits, but like if you already have your projects, you're not looking to start a new project today, then yeah, go to Cloud and see how long it can take to like ship a current project, right? And...
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
Chris Sev:
I think there's a lot of cool things that I mess with on Cloud. I took a couple of my other projects, brought them over. How easy it is to kind of pull together like a database and a cache. And if you have used Laravel Vapor, does kind of what Vapor does. It does like invariable injections. So as soon as you just click add database, you automatically have those environment variables in your app. And I know it's like a small thing, but as far as setting up, it just feels...
It makes sense. And I don't know. I was, I was kind of, I wouldn't say traitor, but like I jumped, I jumped to the JavaScript world for a few years and like, uh, maybe 2019 to 2022 and just saw how things were over there and you kind of get that fast deployment, all that good stuff. This is, like, I think just a new age for PHP that if you check out one thing this month, this is probably the thing to just see where the heads at for what a future Laravel deployment looks like.
Matt Stauffer:
Okay.
Yeah, and when I got access to beta, the first thing I did was take an existing, I was like, what is the most recent project I've deployed on Forge? And let me get that running on Cloud. And I do think that's a really good next step for anybody is if you've deployed anything recently that you own, you so you have the GitHub repo, just go try just for fun. You don't have to move it there. Just try to kick the tires and to feel what the experience is like is because the experience did not lead me to say, I'm going to use Cloud for every project ever in the history of the future. But it was like, oh this is a different experience that I know where I want to use it as a result of trying it out on this thing, even though I'm not moving this thing over right now.
So I do think that just like kicking the tires and playing around with it will give you a better sense because the number of people who ask us, should we use Cloud or or should we use Forge or Vapor on this? It's unbelievable. Even people who know so much. It's only when you've used the features, you've used the products, you've used the tools or whatever that you really know like where it fits. Hosting is everything.
Chris Sev:
Yep.
Matt Stauffer:
Everything's got to get hosted somewhere, right? This is a good chance to just go try out the thing and say, now I know how to answer the question of does this belong on Cloud or not in the future.
Chris Sev:
Yes. And that's something I want to also talk on is, I think if you're not connected to all the things, right? You might be saying to yourself, is Cloud the future? Will Forge go away? And I don't think, I can say that's not the case. Forge and Cloud are here.
And I think those two are kind of like where you get the comparison for, like if you need a little bit more management and you like that style of hosting, or you have something a little more custom, like Forge is great. If you need, yeah, fully managed hosting, Cloud's there. And between both of those, I think that's like a really, really good coverage for all kinds of apps.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I told you this before we recorded, but I plan to put all my clients on Cloud. You know, whether or not every single Tighten project went up Cloud, I plan on every client, you know, if they don't have their own internal team managing things, they should move to Cloud. And if they do, I'm going to introduce that team to the folks at Laravel and let them kind of have their whole conversation because I will enjoy working with them more if they're on Cloud as well. But like the number of clients who I have put on Forge and then now had to, you know, charge them for us to maintain their Forge and update their dependencies and all this kind of stuff, like I'm like, that's not what I got into this for, I didn't get into this to manage your one off VPSs for each of these clients or even 10 off VPSs, know, whatever it is. I have, but again, not everybody's me, right? Not everybody's working with clients, but it was just so clear to me. I'm like, I used it and now I know who this is for. So.
This is totally random, but every single time I go on a podcast with somebody about Cloud someone sends me a message asking for something and I almost feel like I asked this question to Taylor at some point, but I can't remember or I forgot the answer. So just because I have you here. I did at least warn you ahead of time I'm gonna throw a question that we got in our inbox and someone basically asked they like the idea of Cloud but one of their concerns is what happens if they are taking they have a project that's like sitting and they don't upgrade it. So I think when I first heard this question asked Taylor, I asked it wrong and that's why this person resubmitted. This is all coming back to me now. What I asked was can I put my old Laravel app up on Cloud? And I think what this person meant was if I put a Laravel app that is modern today, do I have to worry about now I'm gonna be forced to upgrade if three years down the road, it's gonna be out of date? And I don't know if I kind of communicated that well to you when I passed you the question beforehand, but do you have a sense for what the kind of backwards compatibility story is for Cloud?
Chris Sev:
Yeah, so that is level nine and above.
Matt Stauffer:
Okay, so that's already pretty old, right? Okay, that's what I thought.
Chris Sev:
Yeah, yeah. And the reasoning there is because anything before that is PHP 7.3. So yeah, as far as what versions of Laravel, like PHP 8 versions, Laravel 9 plus is supported.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. OK.
And for those who aren't familiar, at Tighten we maintain two projects. We've got phpreleases.com and Laravelversions.com. And I wish I had the same, you know, Laravel versions, PHP versions where we couldn't. If you go to those sites, it's going to show you for every single version of both PHP and Laravel, when were they released, when did they stop getting updates, when did they stop getting security updates. And I use this thing multiple times a week. And so he said Laravel 9, and the first thing I go and I look and I see, well, Laravel 9 isn't even getting security fixes right now and yet they're still getting support there. And to me personally, I know there's some people in the open source world who are like, force everybody to use the most modern one. It's for their good. And I'm like, you don't understand the constraints that are going on in their lives that have them in this older one. So no, we don't force them to do these things.
So I'm very excited to see that. And I also do see what you said, which is like, once we go before nine, we may not have those, those PHP support versions and everything like that. But also you, you said PHP seven not four, if seven not four stopped getting security support in 2022. So we're talking at least several, you know, two to three years ago of support on a project that's releasing in 2025. So that definitely shows me that there's a level of commitment to, you know, older applications that warms my heart as someone who constantly works with clients who for various reasons get stuck on older versions. So that's really nice to hear.
Chris Sev:
Yeah, yeah. that's, it's Laravel, right? So like there's a lot of these older versions, like 9, 10, 11, that your apps will probably still be fantastic, right? It's not like anything has changed too much. Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
I would say if anybody is above 5.8, if you are 6 plus, there is a reasonable migration path to get up to one of these more modern versions that's going to get you good. We have migrated people from before six up to you know up to ten I think but it's a pain go call, go call JMac call Jason McCreary and you know, or you know, we can do it but like but I I do think that I especially if you're in like an eight nine ten eleven, know, especially in nine ten eleven It's a modern app. It's not getting security fixes. So you should for safety reasons, update it. But these are not ancient things. like, know, again, you know, because you're on the early days. In the early days, we would get much bigger breaking changes between versions as, you know, kind of we figured our way. It's not like that anymore. You know, you're not running an old app if you're on Laravel 9.
Chris Sev:
Yeah, and I mean, good segue from that. Laravel 12, you can do a composer update, zero code changes, and you're good. Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
Really? Normally I try to know things coming in the podcast and pretend like I don't know them. I did not know that. Really?
Chris Sev:
Yeah, yeah, that's a, yeah, that's kind of one of the things, like it's strictly like a maintenance release. A lot of the focus went into all the things that are being released on today, So yeah, that's, that's Laravel 12.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.
That's very cool. Okay, well, we've covered the main thing. So I want to talk about you and your job. I wanted to talk about kind of like your, you know, return to the Laravel world and, you know, all the launch stuff that's happening today. Are there any things that are happening today or this week that we didn't cover that you want to take a moment to talk about?
Chris Sev:
Yes. So, there are a lot of events and things releasing this week. So today is, Laravel podcast. Tomorrow we have two streams. The first one is going to be on starter kits. It'll be myself and Kristoff.
Matt Stauffer:
Nice.
Chris Sev:
Just doing a walkthrough of the starter kits, jump on board, like ask us questions, like, let us know what you want to see as far as, walking through those and...
Matt Stauffer:
Nice.
Chris Sev:
That's the first stream tomorrow. The second stream tomorrow is the Laravel Worldwide Meetup, which is going to have Joe Dixon on there.
Matt Stauffer:
Oh cool, that's awesome.
Chris Sev:
Yeah, doing all the Laravel Cloud questions. Wednesday will be Taylor flew out to the Primagen studio. And they're doing like a six hour stream on building, just building together.
Matt Stauffer:
Are they really? my gosh. Okay, that's fun.
Chris Sev:
Yeah. So yeah, I believe that one will be on Prime's Twitch stream channel. The other two are on YouTube. And then on Thursday, which it will have already been posted to Reddit, the Laravel subreddit, Joe Dixon is doing AMA on Thursday.
Matt Stauffer:
Oh nice. Very cool.
Chris Sev:
So as of today, Monday, you can go to the Laravel subreddit and ask your questions there and then he'll get online and ask answer them. Yeah, exactly.
Matt Stauffer:
Wow y'all really stacked this up this week. I love this. This is fun.
Chris Sev:
Yeah, yeah. We were like, should we call this a launch week?
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, I think so.
Chris Sev:
And I'm like, I feel like that word's been used a lot of times. We don't, you know, like let's just release everything on Monday and just do a bunch of events. But yeah, I mean, it's essentially a launch, five days launch.
Matt Stauffer:
Wow, okay, so if somebody wants to stay up to date on all those things, I assume the Laravel X slash Twitter account is the best place to kind of see it. Each of them, is there announced or is there any other any better place?
Chris Sev:
Yeah, no, that's the best place we've sent an email today, Monday. And yeah, I think the Laravel X is great. Laravel LinkedIn is also getting a lot of updates. Yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
LinkedIn. That's how you know you guys are professional now. You're the big leagues now. I love it. All right, Chris. So is there anything that we didn't talk about today that you'd hope for us to get a chance to cover?
Chris Sev:
I think that's good for like the immediate future, like this week. If I had to look forward, you've got Nightwatch and you've got Laracon US in Denver, where I'm at. So yeah, yeah.
Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, We got a lot coming up.
And one of the notes to the listeners, I kind of talked with Chris and some of other folks at Laravel saying, hey, my vision for this next season, you know, I know Taylor's just kind of gotten to the point where he's doing so much press and stuff like that. I'm like, he needs to step away from the podcast.
So my vision for the next season is I want to bring in Laravel employees. I want to get to know you all. I want the team to know, you know, the community, to know what the team's doing, stuff like that. And so the chance to kind of lead off with you in this new role is just so freaking exciting for me. I just want everyone to know that like this is not one of those where Chris now can't come back. Like I do want to eventually get every single Laravel employee on the podcast. But I'm also like, hey, if Chris is doing another thing that's relevant for Chris, Chris is coming back in the podcast.
So while I am facilitating who the guests are, I do want to know from y'all like if there is a specific question you have, you don't need to worry about who I'm gonna have as a guest, I will get the right people on to ask the right questions. So when y'all have questions, let me know I'll get the answers answered. And if you just want to send in a submission to our thing that says, you know, Chris Sev is the most handsome guests you've ever had, you got to bring it back or something like that, feel free to send those in.
I will make sure that our question box is linked in the show notes. I think it's suggest.gg slash something. So I'll make sure it's linked in the show notes. Go take a look. Yeah, Chris, thanks for inaugurating this new season with me. I'm so glad that you are back in the Laravel community. And yeah, just thanks for hanging out today.
Chris Sev:
Yeah, thank you. This was a lot of fun. So much to talk about and so much to, I don't know, see how this week goes. Let's have some fun!
Matt Stauffer:
I'm looking forward to it. And for the rest of you, thank you so much for hanging out with us. We'll see you next time.
Chris Sev:
Thanks everybody.