Hey everyone . This is Adrian from the Friendly Show we're at Rails World 2024 , and with me is Taylor Otwell , the author of Laravel . It's great to have you here , taylor .
Yeah , it's great to be here . Thanks for having me .
So for the folks who haven't heard about Laravel , if that's even possible , it's a full-stack MVC PHP framework similar to Rails . Is that a correct description ? Similar to .
Rails inspired by Rails to some extent . You know , I always felt like we were kind of standing on a Rails shoulders as we were building Laravel . I was always consulting the Rails docs and like how does Rails do things you know and using that for inspiration . So , yeah , it's good to be here at my first Ruby on Rails conference .
actually , oh , that's awesome . That's awesome , it's almost in your backyard , right .
Yeah , pretty much yeah .
Awesome . So for the people who a few people really know that I actually started out as a PHP developer and Laravel was one of the first application app frameworks that I used . And at some point I got a job at a place where they did Rails and I almost you know , and I almost automatically slid in .
So in a way , laravel brought me into Rails because it was really really easy to just get into it . So my first question was how much did Rails inspire you to do it ? Was it something like hey , I love that Rails .
You know , I love what Rails is and you know , I know how DHH does things and I want to be kind of , you know , stepping on , like you know , dhh's trail .
Yeah , I mean to a large extent . Yes , rails was a really big inspiration for Laravel , probably like the singular biggest inspiration . I took a lot of ideas from a lot of different frameworks . I think Rails would be considered kind of the primary one and you see that a lot in Laravel , where you see it probably most in like the ORM .
You know it feels very much like Active Record .
For sure .
It follows like the Active Record design pattern of building ORMs , the controllers , the views , the routing it all feels like pretty familiar if you've built a Ruby on Rails app , I think so yeah , but I mean , and even beyond the code , I think just like the overall philosophy of being a really productive full stack framework , kind of like DHH said still this
morning , where one person can sit down with a framework and build a complete application like that's you know , their own idea , their own business and launch it out into the world , I think that's actually just a really powerful concept and really inspiring .
So that was also just a big piece of kind of what I drew from Ruby on Rails was that overall philosophy .
Awesome , that sounds great . Well , me following you along , because I was a Laravel 3 user . When we used underscores for method names , I noticed it was kind of like you wanted to reach where Rails is , but at some point to me it seemed like you figured out .
It's okay , we're Laravel , we'll do things a little bit different and you kind of went your separate way , because there are some patterns that are quite different . Can you like pinpoint , kind of like that's that place in time , or like inversion ?
yeah , you know , I would say like it would probably be around like the laravel 4 time period , which is probably , like I don't know , 2015 , 2016 or something like that where you know laravel had matured to a certain extent and started , we started forming some of our own opinions . I think you see that a little bit more on the front end side of things .
So , tools like InertiaJS , tools like Laravel , livewire , which was eventually released in like 2019 . That , I think , are pretty different than the way front end has typically been done in Rails , so that's one area where they kind of diverged , but while still trying to maintain the overall philosophy of just like rapid iteration , shipping quickly being super productive .
Yeah , but we did kind of come into our own , you know , and try to build out some of our own ideas as well .
Yeah for sure . So I remember at some point I went back from Rails to Laravel and the event-based system . That was something cool where you have events and listeners Right . That's kind of a little bit different from what Rails does .
Yeah , yeah , yeah . Yeah , events are a pretty popular feature in Laravel . We had job queues for a long time in Laravel and now we've even gone down similar things to Rails with , like Rails has action cable . We've now launched Laravel Reverb to do , you know , real time stuff .
So we've followed a lot of similar paths and sometimes the implementations look somewhat similar , sometimes different , but yeah , it's been a fun journey .
Awesome . What was so after watching the keynote ? What's something that inspired you ?
Well , one thing I actually really love about Rails 8 , and this may have started in Rails 7 , is this getting back to just like the database as being the default sort of backend for cache , queues , sessions and now I guess even real-time stuff with action cable having a database sort of adapter . I actually really agree with that .
That's something we also did in Laravel with the most recent Laravel 11 release is database is like the default driver and , just like David said this morning , it's just like one less thing you have to have in your stack . If you don't have to have like Redis or even like MySQL or Postgres , just have SQLite as a file .
I think that's actually a really awesome getting started point for getting new people onto the framework because they don't need to install any other software on their machine . So I'm also I share David's excitement about that , for sure that's awesome .
Is it an overstatement if we say Laravel goes SQLite ?
Yeah , I mean we've gone full SQLite by default . So if you start a new Laravel application today , it's using SQLite . That's what the standard configuration is , and of course , you can switch it to MySQL or Postgres or even SQL Server . But yeah , SQLite is the default in Laravel 11 , which came out back in February .
That's awesome . Tell me what do you think about Rails World , the attendees , the venue oh it's great .
I mean it's an amazing venue . I'm always blown away how fast Rails World has been selling out of tickets . We sell out at Laracon but it takes a few months for us to sell all the tickets . But it's like Rails World you have to be ready to like buy your ticket the first day those things go on sale or you're going to miss out , which I think is actually .
I mean , I think the Rails community should be super excited about that , because there's just a lot of demand for Rails events apparently . So I mean , I think that's a good sign for the health of the ecosystem overall and I think Rails world is sort of a great opportunity for a very mature , established ecosystem to kind of get like fresh energy .
I think Rails probably wanted that and needed that to some extent , and it feels like that's kind of happening here .
Awesome , thanks for saying that . So here at the Friendly Show we try to capture a little bit of the human side of our guests , not only the techie side . So I would like to ask what's your ideal vacation ? Look like so .
I've had a few different vacations that I really like , like my wife and I and my kids . If we go on vacation we like to just like go to different cities and we'll usually stop at like three different cities . So , like this year , we went to Vienna , salzburg and Munich kind of all in one trip . And it was super cool getting to see everything .
If it's just my wife and I , a lot of times we'll go somewhere really warm and just sit by the beach or by the pool for like a week and , just you know , have good food and relax . So there's a couple of different styles of vacations we like , but that's what we've done recently , that's awesome .
The big question do you bring your laptop with you ?
I always bring my laptop . Yeah , you know . You know how it is . It's open source , like sometimes you got to get on . So I've always brought my laptop . But we'll see . I'm trying to get Laravel to a point where maybe next year I can take a vacation and everything will keep running smoothly .
Prs will get handled , because I still spend every morning actually handling PRs on the framework directly . But we'll get there . We're working on it , that's awesome , not about vacations .
when are you most productive ? Is it the mornings , or are you like a night owl ?
I would say these days some of the most productive times I have are like weekend nights . So like a Sunday night , no one's messaging me , there's nothing going on . I can really just get on my laptop and work with no distractions . That's super productive for me , yeah .
So like just a couple weeks ago on a Sunday night , I crushed through so many GitHub PRs and stuff just because nothing else was going on . You know , social media is quiet , everything's quiet .
Awesome , I'm the same , I'm the same . So in my eight-hour flight here I had like eight PRs ready .
Yeah , flights . Flights are so productive for me , just like walk in yeah .
Awesome . Before we conclude , I know that you like to tease folks with secret projects that you're building . Are you working on something cool for 2025 ?
We have more stuff coming in 2024 . So , like the beginning of November , I go to Laracon Australia . It's in Brisbane . This year we're actually showing an entirely new product there . So at Laracon US we showed Larabel Cloud , which is sort of one of the big things we've been working on that we hope to release you know , later this year , early next year .
We actually have a whole nother product that we haven't even revealed yet and we're going to do the first public unveil of that at Laracon , Australia , just in , you know , I guess five or six weeks from now . So , yeah , that's what's up next . And then 2025 , we do have stuff planned Probably into the spring . You know we'll get into some of that stuff .
Gotcha , Gotcha Sounds great Cool . Thank you so much , Taylor for being here .
Yeah , thanks for having me .
And keep on doing it All right , yeah , will do .