yeah all right i know it's been a minute um and uh i probably shouldn't be hitting record right now because Well, there's a lot of reasons I haven't really recorded. Half of them I know, the other half I'm not even sure. But I did scroll Twitter this morning, which I have not been doing, which is part of... sort of like kind of unintentionally disconnecting where is this tweet do I have to pull out my phone let's pull out the phone and see if it's still pulled up here I'm sure it is
Scroll up. Yeah, so I scrolled down so far after that. That you'd think I would have like had this, you know, queued up. But somebody hating on LiveWire. So... was it okay it's this dude i think i actually met him at php nyc um maybe not but i met his team for sure Oh, come on. I can't find it. And I don't remember his name. It's like Brandon something.
brandon something yeah this is my life you know where like you can just be you can just open twitter and this is something do you know what this is like To just open Twitter. This is why I don't open Twitter, by the way. At least a part of it. to open twitter and people just like decide to start like a whole rally against your thing you know like that's a wild thing that a lot of people don't know what that's like It sucks. Let me search Brandon. I don't follow him. I'm sure I don't.
Supervillain Brandon Straka, is that it? No. I'd have to like search for it, whatever. Okay, sorry. But, okay. So this guy. He made an app that Zillow acquired. So all the folks that work for Zillow that are associated with Laravel, which David Hemphill is actually one of them, but he's like a late addition, so I love you, David. In case I'm going to shit on these people. This guy...
Yeah, so he made an app startup in the real estate space of some kind and Zillow acquired it and acquired his whole team. I think it's a fairly small team, and they kind of do their own thing inside of Zillow. So I went to the PHP New York City meetup, and it was in the Zillow headquarters because they have that connection. We were like, what, Laravel? Zillow uses Laravel? No. They acquired it.
brand and they let them still use Laravel inside of them okay so here's the thing he opens the thing and he goes I'm looking for Laravel developers okay this is I'm getting even more mad you're so stupid Brandon whoever you are I probably met him and probably shook his hand and talked to him a little bit and was like, Eric Gould did. I actually met the whole team and my impression is that
They're really cool people. That's my impression. But hey, if you're going to drag my thing, I'm going to slander you. That's how we do it. So this guy, Brandon, what a stupid name. Um... So he says, you know, he's looking for Laravel talent. Of course, like if he's hiring people in Laravel, he's looking for Laravel talent and he's surprised how many people position themselves as tall stack live wire people. And he says, I think this is a mistake. And here's why.
It's a mistake because I wish I had the tweet so I could represent it. It's a mistake because you're really limiting yourself. Like most people are hiring for React and Vue and JavaScript stuff. So it's like... don't i think that's like one point is like don't limit yourself to livewire why would you do that but then he like kind of expands it basically hit what what you get from this tweet is don't use livewire
That's what it is. It's don't use LiveWire because it's not React, essentially. And React is what all the jobs are for. Why would you limit yourself? And more than that, it's also not as capable so just bite the bullet and you're going to have to learn it someday anyway because livewire is not going to suit your needs so why would you use livewire just learn go straight to react you know Well, here's what I say to that.
um you're ugly uh this is what i say to that i get that line of thinking actually like um my brother-in-law so i thought this is funny because you know you're defensive when somebody well what you are is you're scared you know you're always scared of i've talked about this of of uh of not being able to put food on top of your family Um, So it's like, since day one, I've always felt like Livewire is out the door, this feeling.
of like LiveWire is just everybody hates it, nobody wants to use it, you know. has always been there. and so in the replies of this of course whenever anybody gets into and he's not a he's not a popular account and for him this is probably a lot of engagement good for you you posted something negative about something and you got engagement
Surprise. Big surprise. If you didn't know this and you want engagement, that's how you get it. Did you know that? You can go do it and it's really easy to do. It's very easy to do. It's incredibly easy to criticize. I really wonder how much he's used Livewire. It's so easy to criticize and you're rewarded for it. How stupid is that? Okay? So anytime somebody posts something like this, it's a great opportunity for people to dogpile. So the first few replies are just dogpiling.
oh, you're saying that, you know, you shouldn't use LiveWare because React, oh, by the way, LiveWare also sucks, also, or whatever. It's, you know, it's like, people that that just pile up and then and then you scroll down and you get to the people who are like well actually you know and actually i love it and what's your problem and and hey you're looking for laravel devs hire me you know whatever just like
Okay, anyway, I get it. If I were this guy, I get it. This guy runs a React shop. He actually hired one of the filament team, and they don't use filament. He's a React guy. I know what this guy is like. In an alternate universe, I'm a React guy. He's a React guy. He doesn't like this technology in the same way that I don't like that technology. Actually not in the same way.
um but he doesn't like this technology so he doesn't use it as at his company fine and he tweets some opinion about it fine he's not picturing me He's not picturing me and him sitting in a room and him saying this to me. And I get that. He shouldn't not be able to say this publicly. um but let me continue here so let me tell you why he's right he's right because my brother-in-law called me the other day and asked a friend wants to get into tech and
And wants to know what technologies to learn, what lane to pick. And this is a question I've been asked a million times. I'm sure you have too, or have you at least thought about it? And my answer is A, I'm actually not the person to ask because I don't know a lot about jobs. in the job market so that's one thing a lot of what i know is my day-to-day interactions which are few and also what i see on twitter which is skewed
But given those two things, I would tell somebody to go learn React. That's what you should do. That's what everything I see everywhere is all React. So I told him, just learn React, whatever. If he wants to get into enterprise, Tell them to learn React and Java. I think that's the safest bet.
And I think he should want to get into enterprise. So he should learn React and Java. If he wants to get into startups, probably just React and Next or whatever, whatever is in vogue, you know, like that. Okay. so here's something so that there's one thing that came out of that one thing that that that tells me is like oh this guy's actually right He's right in that people are hiring for React. Yeah, okay.
So where he is wrong is that, well, I won't even frame it as that. Here's just an interesting thought that I had. In the same way that you shouldn't learn Livewire, you also shouldn't learn Laravel. Do you know how many Laravel jobs are out there? Not that many. Not in the way that he's talking about. These kind of like the people hiring for React, like open yourself up to the broader market. Why are you learning Laravel?
you should not learn it there are plenty of reasons to not learn more niche technologies and if your fundamental reason is for job searching why are you in Laravel the guy who wrote the tweet runs a small startup inside of Zillow and because Zillow acquired them and let them keep using Laravel Zillow could, whatever, even if they just stand on their own. It's this little tiny microcosm in this big enterprise that is Zillow. And Zillow, I am positive, does not use Laravel.
So if you're actually, if you want to go get a job and you're in New York City, I highly recommend you stay away from Laravel because there's only like one or two open positions at this place. But if you want to go get hired at Zillow, there's a ton of them. Go learn Java or C-sharp or whatever, even a deeper technology. Who knows?
so anyway that's that's another thing because in those moments i go uh react is taking over the world you know there's the despair there's the uh do i just give up what's this all for like you know it's like is this is the writing on the wall there's that is the writing on the wall you know But there's a few things that I always tell myself when I feel these things. It's, here's what I tell myself. Here's what I know to be true, actually, given my experience. Is that...
What are the things, Caleb? What are those things you know to be true? It's that you determine your own destiny largely. That's been my experience. It's also that things seem inevitable. This is a huge one. Things seem so inevitable and then they don't come to fruition.
the latest example of this the last time I felt this hubbub was Aaron Francis' fusion and uh you know when he like came out with that i was like oh my life is over you know like it's over he's gonna make this thing that gives you a lot of the juice of live wire and he's doing it in react and or in view and he's you know laravel famous and the laravel team seems to be on board with this just put yourself in my shoes for a second you have aaron francis
you know this incredible communicator um he's got this stage presence you know and he he's he's launching this thing he's doing it on stage at the second biggest laricon you know, of the year or whatever. I don't actually know that by size or whatever. You know what I'm saying? Whatever. A premier Laracon. Everybody's there.
um he's launching this thing on stage people who helped work on him joe tannenbaum head of whatever engineering at laravel head of open source engineering big big guy laravel now joe tannenbaum And Jason Beggs, you know, like, Jason's not, you know, Jason's not actually a good developer. So that actually was, I'm just kidding. I'm just trying to rib on Jason as if he was here, but now it just sounds like an insult.
jason's the best it's just he's just fun to make fun of because he likes to make fun of me so Anyway... yes you got all these people and he's launching this thing and it's like of course i think it's a good idea like a single file, a class that has methods that you can call without needing to submit Ajax requests and properties that you can bind inputs to. It's like, I know this very well. Of course, I think it's a good idea. Now I'm scared.
um and it just felt like this was an inevitable thing like this will happen and it will hurt me and there's a lot there's actually a whole side story there um that you know whatever but Point is, is it didn't come to fruition. for whatever reason for a handful of reasons um but i'm still alive you know there's so many times where i felt like there was a time where i felt filament was this way was like Like, ah, film, it's gonna be the death of me.
And now, fortunately, honestly, because of flux, sort of saving me from that feeling of like, filament is the everybody will use filament because nobody wants to roll their own modals by hand so they're all going to use filament And because filament is such a high-level abstraction, they're not going to really care about liveware, buy my courses, and I'm going to go broke, and it's all going to go away.
i felt that way at one point but because of flux because i created a competitive filament i now feel so much better it's like like no like it's like use now i see it like no filament is actually like a good you can see things Once I stop seeing things as existential threats, I start to see clearly. And I've seen more clearly.
all of these things that I feel existentially threatened by once I stop feeling that way I see things more clearly and it's always surprising how blind I was in the moment but that's just just the way I am and it's something to keep in mind but okay so I'm all of that is so now it's like the more people that use filament that's that's great because that's the more people using livewire you know if you zoom out it's like
People who use React don't use Filament. So if React is my enemy, then Filament is my ally. And you don't really see that when you're in the fog of war. Yeah, and some people don't ever see it because they don't ever get all hubbed up the way that I do.
but anyway so uh so there's plenty of these examples inertia i mean remains a strong the strongest contender since day one always has been but there's been times where it really felt like live glares on death's door and inertia is being crowned king and then there would be a and then i would get actually like this feeling this is why This is probably why I'm successful, unfortunately, is because when I read tweets like this, you know what happened this morning? I read this tweet.
I start to get all flushed. I start to feel all the feelings in a minor way, you know, nothing like when it's, you know, it's, yeah, it's fairly minor, but it is a version of the way I'm capable of feeling. What it does to me, it fills me with fear, okay? Fear and instability, which there's an episode called Fear and Instability that describes this feeling. It fills me with fear and instability.
It's like sadness. It's negative emotion. It's like, you want to see me down. You put me in front of something like this. That will get me down. And it's not a good place to be. It doesn't feel good. It makes me think.
I quit, you know? It sort of. And it makes me think, okay, but the point is is that this is probably why i'm successful because what it always turns into is well i'm not going to go down without a fight you know that's what it is i'm just a fighter i think so it turns into this just like i'm gonna prove them wrong or or even if they're right I don't know. It sends me to my keyboard is what it does. With full of motivation.
You want to motivate me? Threaten me. Threaten my existence. That's a good motivator. And it has always been for me with this project. and when i see projects like Like, um, Fusion and Aaron deciding to leave Fusion, it's like, you saved yourself um because if everybody adored fusion out of the gate like that's a different story but they didn't i still think it could have worked i think aaron also thinks it could have worked but he would have to bleed for it
in a in in the way that i have to bleed for this thing and it's not a it's not a healthy life and you look you look around i guess nothing's healthy but you look around and i see other people then i see dax talking about something i see all these people talking about stuff and i go oh you're all just talkers i don't want to say just you all get to talk about stuff Because you're not married to anything.
You know? You get to just talk about it. You didn't invent React. You didn't invent whatever. You're not bleeding for it. It's a different experience to be. I've always felt like that's a huge, huge benefit and should totally be weighed Take into account when you embark on your journey through whatever. If you're deciding between making an open source project or something,
as opposed to being a YouTube influencer or something. It's like, well, one of these things, you get to just review everybody else's work. The other one, you better hope you made the right bet. And even if you did, you're going to have to bleed for it. People are going to come at you in every possible way. I mean, that is That is meritocracy or capitalism or free market or whatever you want to call it. It's like people doing things and other people competing with them.
It's if people are aligned with you, they're trying to make something in your world and like think about taylor like we're all kind of in taylor's world but there are people inside the world that he's created that compete with him or adam think of the same thing it's like he's created this world and he's won over you know in the beginning there's tailwind versus
uh whatever bootstrap okay and he wins all these people over to his side and now people inside of his realm and he's making money off you know uh telling you why or whatever now people inside of his realm start ripping him off chakra ui windy css like all these things so it's like if you even do win the macro level uh you know combat the war if you win that or the battle you win that the people on your side They're going to come at you too.
And then that's a different form of competition. And then when you start to lose the macro level war, then you start to see, you know what it is? Here, I'm going to play this out for you. I don't know how much of reality this is or how delusional this is. But here's something. Yeah, picture this. We'll use talent.
you know we gotta pick examples that aren't me so that we can talk about other people um we're gonna use tailwind tailwind uh this is actually a bad example because tailwind has consistently and is still winning the macro war but the macro war being uh you know um What's that called? Object-oriented CSS. What was that even called? I used to write that. whatever. Okay. Bootstrap. Atomic CSS.
And the freaking thing where you write with the double underscores and then the hyphens and stuff to separate. block level things and component level things. It's called something. BMM, MBMM, B-O-B-W-M. uh it's called something like that i shouldn't be caring this much about it all right we'll move on so the macro level tailwind war of these big things okay and adam didn't like this adam kind of won the war in adam style which is like he just was doing his own thing that he really liked and
people were like really attracted to and he already had like a very large you know audience of adherence but he just smashed outside of the walls over and over and over and consumed the world because he he took whatever we don't have to tell the adam story we've told that before um but
So here he is in this macro level war and he is when once he wins the war then it's like you have you know two sides of this war you got the let's say they're the blue flags and the red flags till one will tell and be that the teal flag so it's uh it's red versus teal
And on the teal side, they're all fighting back and forth, right? And then, like, they start to gain a bunch of ground, and now they're sitting there eating, you know, their turkey legs with, like, the fat dripping down their beard onto their bare belly kind of thing. so that's that's toan and the teal flags and they've won but then the people inside of the camp
then they start to rise up and compete with the king. And they're coming for the crown inside of the teal group. And everybody's already on board with this teal stuff. It's just like certain people think they can do it better or can do it different or do things that hurt the king, you know? And so inside, so how does the king feel? The king feels like mad at those people. They go, hey,
you, you know, whoever's coming to compete with them. I guess I don't want to, I shouldn't even be using another example that's close to me because I could be naming all of the competitors, but I don't want to. okay so you get it right and so that's how the king feels is they're they're like scared they're mad they're trying to who's on my side you know like within the camp but then outside is still the macro war still being waged the the red flags are still biding their time they're still
they're still fighting they're still trying to gain ground and if that macro level war gets overwhelmed so the king is distracted and might not see what's going on outside And then because he's sitting there being concerned about his lords and whatever. trying to take his crown or take a jewel off his crown.
um so then he realized so then they start to gain ground and then he wakes up and goes oh there's a macro war going on here and he was so busy fighting with his with the people inside of this camp that now they're not even his allies you know uh they'll still fight the red team but for their own preservation you know what i mean not necessarily to be allegiant to the king
And that's a bad place for him to be, I guess. I don't know. It's just an interesting thing. I thought maybe something more interesting would come out of that. But I think the point is that And this probably exists. This is just a fascinating thing. I bet this exists in a lot of ways. Let's say Pepsi and Coke. I bet the folks at Coke hate the folks at Pepsi. I'm positive of that. They hate them. Although...
It's tricky with food because you might think that, but then you realize they're owned by the same parent company. But I don't think Pepsi and Coke are owned by the same parent company. So they hate each other. you know? But then comes LaCroix.
The macro war is the... processed drink war or whatever it's the it's the the soda versus anti-soda or if you live near me the pop versus no pop you know and it's like oh all of a sudden the marketing that you're doing pepsi for your own self preservation When you're going out there and telling people that studies just came out and sugar is actually good for you in large doses.
then you benefit from that. You benefit from the war that they're waging. You know what I mean? But there's this internal battle and it's like, That's just, I don't even know. It's just an interesting thing. So, anyway. there's some lesson there that, like, Okay. Is the existential threat to you or is the competition that you're like upset about or whatever, is it, um, Is it infighting or not? Is it part of the micro war or the macro war? Are they on your side?
And I'm sure this is like a nested egg thing. so picture like the pepsi and coke they're mad at each other and they go we're actually on the same side we're against la croix but then la croix and then like then there's the big war of whether or not of aluminum cans versus you know, sacks full of water or something. It's like, oh, now we're all in this together, like LaCroix.
Pepsi and Coke all are trying to campaign that aluminum is good for you, even though people found out that aluminum causes pimples or something. so there is that but i guess it's really what how it's it's all relative it's what what lens you're looking where you are and how you're looking at it so anyway we've gotten far off track here
The point is, is that, yes, you shouldn't learn Livewire because there are far more jobs for React. And also, you shouldn't learn Laravel because there are far more jobs. for Java, and for C-sharp, and for Next.
for sure like why would you learn laravel i well if you learn laravel because you believe in the stack it's it's beautiful it's incredible allows you to move so fast and it's like oh well then okay well then the same can be said about live that you believe in the stack and it allows you to move so fast you could say yeah well it does livewire does until you hit a certain point you know and then you outgrow it or there's like things it can't do and you like really need that you know
virtualized, scrollable, you know, 10,000 item select dropdown or whatever, whatever you need. You really need that.
and now you've outgrown liveware so like why did you even use it in the first place you should have just started with react because you're in okay it's like well yeah i mean the same thing can be said about laravel because eventually, when your startup gets big enough, you're going to have to you know at scale like like look at facebook all the folks at facebook they're saying this they're going oh yeah joe's larville but you know let me i'll save the facebook one i'll say like um
let's say, I wish I knew of an example of a company that used Laravel and Garadovit, but name one really big company that uses Laravel. Name one. There are none. There are none. I can't name one. Like one, you know, Rails has Shopify, has GitHub and a host of others that I'm not thinking of. They have biggies.
And just a few biggies. Think of all the biggies. The enterprise stuff. That's all Java. And C Sharp. And what other platforms or whatever. But name the ones on Laravel. I can't think of one. So if I could then I would tell you an example of You know, there's probably an example of a company that started on Laravel and then switched away when they got to a certain scale because they got to that scale and the stakeholders said, you know, we need, you know, 10.
million requests per microsecond and you know and microservice architecture and blah blah blah and all these things and and okay we need to move off of laravel or whatever we're outgrowing it so don't learn laravel because eventually you're going to have to outgrow it no the evidence is let me tell you all the reasons not to learn laravel don't learn laravel because a there's no jobs for it okay so start with that
B, it's not in the zeitgeist. It's not the popular thing. You want to be a blog post writer. Is that what they call themselves? You want to be a YouTuber or whatever. Your market's just so much smaller. Don't learn Laravel. Also, show me the big companies using Laravel. I don't see them anywhere. I don't know of any. So why would you learn that niche technology?
All of these things can be said at any scale. Facebook would say, why would you use PHP? At scale, it's too slow. We literally created HHVM. to or hack or whatever we literally had to create an entire new like superset of the language with its own rendering with its own engine because We outgrew and we needed more performance or whatever. And in the front end, we outgrew the front end stuff. So we created PHX.
or PHPX, the successor to JSX. JSX came from Facebook because they had the exact same thing in PHP called PHPX or whatever. They created that. They outgrew it. They would know. Those developers would know. They would say, oh, you silly folks. Why would you start on PHP? You're eventually going to outgrow it. And then the folks using React.
There's some front-end equivalent, maybe, maybe not, probably not. React is by the Facebook folks, but there are plenty of instances where using React in the happy pathway that all of the plebs know how to use it. is death to performance because of React's model of rendering the whole tree every time. So you have projects like a million JS that go, React is incredibly slow.
And it's just going to bog you down with any sort of animations, with any sort of really fast stuff. I bet, you know, GitHub would tell you the same thing about, or I guess GitLab would tell you the same thing about Vue.
yeah you go you use view and it's all happy days until you need to write a giant get diff interface that's like a zillion dom nodes long and now view crawl so you can hack the crap out of it and its rendering engine to cache aggressively or you can just take those pieces and drop down to vanilla.js whatever this is the world
So yeah, you can say don't learn liveware because there's not enough jobs. You can also say don't learn liveware because at some scale, at some UI fidelity need, you will outgrow it. But you can say this about anything at any point in time. You can say the same things about learning Blade. You can say the same things about learning React. You can say the same things about learning Laravel.
I should say that the one point of truth that is like the hole in my plan here is that like, yes, React is incredibly capable. It's a high ceiling and a ton of people are using it and there's a lot of jobs for it. totally yes and that's why you're seeing the laravel company itself using react all the time because a laravel is owned by uh excel And so a lot of the people inside Excel owns or whatever is at least a giant investor and if not owns Vercel.
So Excel is the funding company or whatever, you know, the VC firm that owns Laravel and owns Vercel, I think.
and there's a lot of like hank at laravel he's an x for sale guy there's a lot of people at laravel that are all the designers at laravel hugo my man he's a react he came from react he worked at tuple and they used react hugo knows react and david uh i don't know how much of a coder he is but i can tell you he's learning react because that world these are people who go to react miami These are Vercel people.
So of course, Laravel is going to use React for a few reasons. A, because a lot of the people in new Laravel and connected with the new Laravel world are connected with React. Also, React has the zeitgeist of the web on Twitter and on YouTube. So Laravel wants to be main stage in the big web conversation. And how do you do that? You use React. Um,
Why else do you use React? I mean, like, Adam used React for not these reasons, for not these sort of associative reasons, just because, like, it has libraries like React, ARIA, Radex. So those big UI component libraries that are better than anything in the other ecosystems, by far, that is true. I've read through all of the code bases of these packages and nothing, nothing is as good as React ARIA.
So there's that. And then there's motion, framer, framer motion. There's so many react devs that are like, take this out of my, rip this out of my cold dead hands, you know, like.
they'll die on that hill like nothing is as good as that in other ecosystems and that is true um even with there's alternatives to those things in other ecosystems like the guy who i can't matt perry is it who wrote framer motion like he's created a view version he's on his own now and he's creating other versions i've tried the vanilla version it's nice but it's not the react version you look at the docs between the two just the examples even
The React version is singular. It is in a league on its own, and nobody's switching away from React because now these other things exist. so anyway react has the package share it has the mind share it has shad cn now it has versell it has v0 claude pushes out of the gate it has this massive massive momentum and everybody's sort of going for it so yeah use react
It makes sense. I would say similarly, don't use Laravel. Go learn Next.js. You use Laravel if you want to be productive, And if you want to, you know, if you believe in the magic of the monolith and the ability of the solo dev to do big things and you see the preposterous things going on in the other ecosystems with complexity and scale and all of these things you see what's going on over there in these third party things and blah blah blah
and you go, that's not it. Laravel is it. That's why you choose it. That's why you choose Laravel, because you believe in the ethos. You believe in Taylor's craftsmanship. You found love in the community. That's why you choose it. You don't choose it because of the job market.
Point blank. Similarly with Livewire, you might choose Livewire because you can do so much more. Because you can do so much more with so much less. And you might choose it because it's a friendly community and you found love in it. You might choose it because you like the ethos.
you know like those are those are reasons that you might choose a technology and so i have to remind myself of those things that's like you know it's not over in the moments where i feel like it's over Because of tweet threads like that, it's like... A, I've felt this way a hundred times. None of those times have turned out to be true. Part of that, again, is because you determine your own destiny. If you bleed for a thing, and you're good at it.
If they still let me get on stage at Laracon, if I still make big things that I believe in, that I believe are beautiful and really pour my sweat into it, I'll still be able to gain a group of adherence, basically. if I believe in a thing and make a thing that I believe in that's actually compelling. So that's one thing.
uh that that's just a factor in general why these hundred things never came true because part of it is your own agency but then another part of it a part of it is also the half-life of a project is the liveware has been around for a long time now so even if even if they come for the castle Even if it shrinks and shrinks and shrinks, there's a long tail left of people who are working in apps, whether they like it or not, that uses LiveWire.
And they're going to need support or they're going to need whatever. They're going to want new tools for it. There's also going to be, you know, a group of strict adherence, even to the bitter end. uh and that so there's you know that half-life thing or whatever the thing people talk about where it's like however long your business has been around is how long it will continue to be around in general you know what i mean like at least so if you have been in business for 10 years
when the decline starts you got another 10 years because you've you've spent 10 years gaining land and it's going to take a long time to lose all that land of course it's not like physical law, but it is a phenomenon that is observed. And so similarly, like with LiveWire, I have some time in that regard. It's not all going to evaporate overnight. And of course, there are ebbs and flows like that. And there are downward trajectories that you have to save. Otherwise, it will just go down to zero.
so there's that so i have time because of that it's also i have my own ability to change things it's also because sometimes things just seem very popular in the web, and then things go in phases. The success of HTMX is an incredible story of, you know, of like, These ideas that are embedded in Livewire, these Livewire-esque ideas, all the criticisms of Livewire can be levied against somebody using HTMX or Turbo.
we're all in the same team as same as with Alpine and Intercooler or whatever and trying to think of the other one whatever with these sort of sprinkles framework stimulus and things so we're all in the same boat you know and there have been times where it was like the writing's on the wall these things are stupid they're dead And then somebody comes along, like Carson, and just memes the crap out of it and makes it cool to like these things. That's the other thing.
is okay if you use react it's cool in a sense but it's cool in the it's cool in that you're just doing the cool thing sense all the money's behind it all the vcs behind it then somebody something like htmx comes along and people the real neck recognize real thing where i mean this is just kind of like another meta narrative here that could be delusion is is like you're using the thing that everybody uses. And I get that because I'm a guy who generally does that.
um like i you know i i think like i'm an iphone guy i'm a mac guy it's like what's everybody doing i'll get on board with the thing that everybody's doing and using so that i can like Because I really don't like the frustration of like some feature not being supported or something. And if we're all in that boat, then there's a better chance that a feature will get supported or a bug will get fixed or something like that. So I get that. I get being in the happy path and the happy zone.
but there is um there is something for like like i think it's really cool that like the primogen isn't a sold-out react guy that's crazy you can become think about somebody talking to primogen and he's like you know i really want to become like a you know a technology influencer or whatever and i want to like stream about programming and whatever and picture his advisors. Picture the VC firm that's advising him and they're going well. Let's analyze the
Let's analyze the market here of web development. React is really king. JavaScript seems to be the king, and that's what... a lot of these viewers on YouTube are going to be looking for is how to use effect hooks. So you should write React. But then this guy goes and does all this writing are obscure languages and russ i mean like tige with like oh camel and you know these people using
you know, NeoVim and HTMX, and they're drawn to these weird things because they have a deep love of tech. I love that about this influencer group, about the terminal shop or whatever, but specifically about React and TJ. that they are not en vogue developers that just do the popular sexy thing. They actually love prog. They're like real tech people that love tech.
and love programming enough to experiment with it and fall in love with something that isn't like the most marketable decision. And that's really cool. And I can say that because I'm somebody who benefits from people not just choosing the thing that is in vogue um so whatever anyway the world's a big place it's hard to oh also also why if you're you know i talked about this like on a podcast with taylor it's like
And if I was sitting in the VC room where they're talking about acquiring Laravel or something, I'd be like, yeah, I don't know, man. Everything's going JavaScript. Like, this doesn't seem... php is so out like nobody's talking about php why would you buy this company that is about php php is like literally the punching bag of the tech world nobody takes it seriously nobody calls themselves a php developer nobody
It's so old school. Everybody, all the big folks in tech, they know about PHP because they started on PHP, but they left it pretty quickly and they didn't look back. I bet you, Wes, Boss has PHP roots. Chris Coyer, definitely. They used WordPress. CSS Tricks probably still is written on WordPress. any of these big folks, big influencers. They probably started on PHP.
Why would you buy a PHP company? There's no prospect for them in the future. Where's the pipeline? There's no boot camps teaching PHP. There's no CS degrees pumping people out. There's no enterprise companies using PHP. Why? It doesn't make any sense. These things don't make any sense. But the reality is Laravel is growing. laravel's revenue is growing laravel launches things and gets a lot of people to buy it they make a lot of money
The composer installs are going up. Go figure that out. What's up with that? Let's do this right now. Packages. Let's look at Laravel on packages. So when you do this, you have to do Pat, you have to do Laravel slash framework to do it accurately, not Laravel slash Laravel. Laravel slash framework, and I'm going to look at installs. Only 42 million. What? And then I'm going to also search symphony.
and let's see symphony i really don't know how to search symphony because they're all like dependencies i'll say symphony routing okay Okay, only 662 million installs? Isn't that something? You don't even think about Symfony. Symfony has more composer installs than Laravel. all right so let's look at these trends What's another PHP thing? What's something that would be representative of dying PHP? It's tough because we're already biased by looking at packages.
like we're not going to see any wordpress stuff on there let's i don't know what what is i'm going to have to be doing this what is a php composer package on packages That is representative of the dying PHP. type things like cPanel and WordPress and whatnot. I know a lot of this stuff isn't on packages. but try get one for me. Do you talk like, I misspell, I mistype, and I talk like a caveman to ChatGPT a lot.
all right i'll let it well oh this is the 04 mini so it's going to think for a second but let's look at these installs all right so get this you look at laravel framework it is a upward trend for sure still trending upward hockey stick type thing not total hockey stick but there's this really cool phenomenon if you look at the stock market this is just one of those realizations that once I saw this you can't unsee it
so like google s p 500 click on um yeah if you click on five years it's actually not quite hockey sticky but you look at mac so it's giving us from 1997 to 2025 and is stock market up a bunch Oh wow, it is up a bunch. I should have bought when it was lower. Anyway.
so you look at the stock market and it looks like the laravel trend actually there's some big ups and downs obviously like in this graph i'm looking at you have the dot-com bubble at 2000 you have the real estate you know or the like financial crisis of 2008. You have the COVID drop in 2020.
Then you have the supply chain crap and COVID after like inflation crap in 2022. And then you have Trump tariffs in 2025. You have all of these basically like... like five to eight four to eight year just removals of stock market growth in this graph but it still looks like laravel where it goes from the bottom left corner and it slopes slowly up and then sharp up at the right side of the graph, right? The crazy thing is,
As you zoom in and out of the stock market, you see this same curve. It's weird. If you zoom out and you did like 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 or 100 year they all look like that's like tiny little slow growth on the left side right at the bottom slow slow and then it goes up
it's this weird thing i learned mr money mustache did a post about it and somebody made a tool that you could just zoom in and out it would basically you know just show you that like this growth thing it's like it happens at any scale so and similarly The Laravel framework packages install growth looks exactly like this, which is very interesting.
um and i bet if you zoom that like you see oh it was such slow growth back in 2015 but if you look it was zoomed in so that it was just you know the first few years of laravel it would look the same as it looks right now which is growing let's look at symphony simp this is a crazy thing symphony is growing i thought we'd see the opposite
No. Symphony's growing. So that disproves my theory that everybody's leaving Symphony and going to Laravel. I guess it might not be totally on point because Laravel uses Symphony under the hood. Shoot! We have to account for that. Let's chat to you this. Sorry about this episode turning into something. It's not. Symphony. What is a symphony package?
on Packagist that a pure symphony app would use that isn't a dependency of Laravel so that I can visualize the actual usage of symphony unpackagist divorce from Laravel. Let's just see. and let's look check in on the other chat gpt oh i have it stuck on 04 mini um let's get off of this let's just go to 4.0 get a fast response New chat, paste it in. All right. Oh, Joomla slash framework. So that's what they gave me for like a big, it's an abandoned project. This is dead PHP.
Let's look at this. Joomla slash framework. No, this is stupid. I don't know why it gave me this example. That's dumb. I did use Joomla before. Remember Joomla? All right, so Symphony Maker Bundle. so symphony maker bundle is how you look at the usage of symphony divorced from laravel in theory okay so it's more like it 90 million oh man laravel is a lot more popular than symphony did you know that laravel has 420 million symphony has 90 million
And symphony's a dependency of Laravel. There's a tear falling down Fabian Potentier's cheek right now. so let's look at the install graph for symphony there you go it's steady growth steady growth till 2023 and then it's pretty much flatlined since 2023 so that's it and it's not hockey stick growth Anyway, what were we even saying here? I don't know. It's just that's that's what it is there's all these things this is my existence My existence is threatened.
all the time. And you have to deal with that. You have to deal with those emotions. If you've ever been in a situation of creating something in public, you know what this feeling is like. And the majority of you who haven't don't know what it's like. You probably can relate to another area of your life, but...
You don't know what it's like to not want to open Twitter because you don't know what you'll see that'll send you into some negative emotion. That's what it is. I thought about unfollowing everybody.
which i did before but that felt kind of like i don't know that's a big that's a bold move so i just stopped looking at twitter i stopped tweeting and i stopped looking at twitter um so yeah i don't know man it's tricky so okay so put all like care about growth sides like What if I freed myself from all of that and literally just made the tool that I wanted to make for myself, you know, and cared not at all about usage or adoption or react or anything.
What if I doubled down on being uniquely me and and uniquely anti-react or what if i incorporated react what if i made my own fusion liveware has most of the plumbing to do something like that what if i just made you know Livewire for React. I think it would be an uphill battle. And I think I would find myself in the same position as Aaron. but in theory it could be done it's something that could yeah but it's a lot it's it's a lot and there's a lot of competition out there you know
There's a lot of competition and you get tired. I get tired and I'm like, I don't want to do it. I don't want to compete. I'm tired. Is this what burnout is?
i'm tired i i'll tell you why i know i'm tired because i random things like i was watching some comedy folks i don't know like youtube knows i like comedians and comedy so so i end up watching like just a few strings of youtube recommending i was working so i'm on my lap i'm just letting the comedy roll on youtube so it's stuff like um you know, Bad Friends, that podcast with Bobby Lee and Andrew Santino.
watching some of that and then i'm watching like bill burr and shane gillis and that whole group like kill tony group like all that type of stuff and theo always theo von top dog for me favorite love And what's that other guy? I can't think of his name right now, but... Anyway, all these people, you know?
And I'm seeing like, oh, this is just like Laravel. You see this a lot, like for me at least. It's like once I've been a part of something like this where there's like sort of like a celebrity group.
kind of that that there's you know you have all it's like Laravel I think is a microcosm of what plays out in Hollywood what plays out in in anything like that so it's because there's this there's a central thing like we're all in this thing and then there's like an internal kind of like fame hierarchy It's just one lens to look at it through, but it is a lens that you can look through where there's an aspect of celebrity. There's people taking pictures with folks and sending them gifts.
gif that is also gifs and yeah and like achievement and like a like a little award ceremony type vibe like uh you know like these are these are things there's inner circles there's uh beef There's private beefs that the public doesn't know about. There's internal grumbling. There's people who are friends for profit. and friends for real friends. There's all these, it's a microcosm. So once you experience something like it, then you start to see this is an interesting thing.
That I have been changed by this experience. Because I see things now. I don't know. It could be wrong. But I'm pretty sure they're right. Because you have evidence. I see people bite their tongue a little bit publicly about a peer, like celebrity.
that like you can tell that oh when we're not we don't get the full picture when you're at a dinner with your friends with your other like peer friends you shit talk this guy you're kind of like being passe or whatever on in public like on whatever i'm watching you're like yeah you know he just made a different decision and that's all right it's like oh you hate that guy
or people that that you might think like love each other you go oh you actually don't or or you see you start to get a vibe for like oh you're kind of you're like a you're a cloudy kind of person you know oh and your peers they roll their eyes about that or you you know and it's like you just see the you see the things um
Yeah, you see the things. The reason I said that is because I can see how all of these people, because they're all hustling, they're all friends, but when you're hustling with you, it's not a normal friend group.
When everybody's hustling, there's a lot of opportunities for people to be subtly mad at each other you know or we're not even mad at each other but just like fearful or jealous or whatever it's like you can tell uh so like shane was making he was making fun of somebody else and being like you know now you're slipping man and those people they're coming up after you and they're coming you know and you haven't like write a joke it's like
you know the same thing could be said about like me like writing a blog post or something you know what i mean it's like you just see the similar things in any way i'm saying all this to say that i see this world and i go oh man You guys are constantly, on the biggest scale, exposed to the things that I'm exposed to that hurt me. People slandering your thing publicly.
you know peers competing with you all of these things they're exposed to all the time and I'm seeing it's like they have to hustle so hard you have to hustle so hard and hearing Ben Affleck talk about uh talk about how it's like there is no tenure you know it's not like you know being in show business or whatever being a movie star it's like You, when you don't, when you're, when you suck or you do great, you do great and you're a hit.
But then the next movie flops. People don't hire you. There's a big giant risk that people just stop calling you. Because they have a budget they're trying to call the hot people that make stuff that people love and that just had a hot movie come out they're not trying to call the one who just made a flop and it's so easy to just get left behind and forgotten whatever that's a meritocracy
There's no tenure there. There's no, well, thank you for your service. Here's your retirement. It's like, no, your career is dead. That sucks for you. It's a common outcome. anyway you just see how hard these people have to hustle i used to look at celebrities and hollywood folks and think that's not real work but now i go oh They're emotionally dying every day. They are in a battle every day. A war.
of all of these emotions of jealousy, of fear of whatever and then of course ecstasy and you know all these things and then you see the people that have like a really you can also you see the people who have a really like calm collected cool head about things or just take it in stride or whatever some of that you also don't know what to trust because even something like someone like tom hanks seems that way to me
But just imagine that Tom Hanks is like delusional and is actually like, I don't know. I mean, you don't remember Ellen? Like you've people that you just see who market themselves as being like the coolest, nicest people. and then she's just like a witch it's like yeah like that stuff can happen so you don't even know um anyway i don't even know what we're talking about anymore clearly i don't want to work this morning i mean while we're here big update whatever so
i'm working on something kind of for laricon kind of for flux kind of for livewire i'm in a i'm in a uh an exploratory phase um i'm trying to figure out i guess very specifically I'm trying to solve problems with speed in livewire which means speed in blade which means speed in blade components And I'm having a lot of fun, but I have thought I would have found more valuable. I mean, these hills have already been mined for easy performance wins. They're not here.
Um, I've scanned every line of code in all of Blade and profiled it all. And I have a pretty good understanding of it at this point. And you can tell the performance wins. You can tell where, oh, these, This path has been walked. I see this. This would have been a performance hit, but somebody added a layer of static caching here. Ah, or somebody cached this use of reflection. Ah, okay. Somebody's done what I'm doing.
And all of the wins are now bold wins. You have to make a big change or make a big assumption or something like that. And I plan to. I'm going to figure something out. I haven't talked about my Laracon talk because I don't even know what it is yet. but I want it, but I think a part of it is going to be like, blade and blade performance specifically it's this thing that kind of doesn't matter until it does like blade is not also blade is the wrong word it's blade components
Blade just compiles itself away to just PHP. When you use at if, the thing that runs in your browser or on your server is a literal PHP if statement. Blade is kind of beautiful in that way that it's a really lightweight templating engine. It doesn't build. any abstract syntax tree that renders itself down at runtime like react does or i think even antlers maybe maybe antlers uses a tokenizer or something i don't know it compiles itself down to like very simple just
The way you would write PHP in the days of yore. Like just in line, you know. So that's kind of a beautiful thing. It's simplicity is beautiful. That is the beautiful thing about Blade is its simplicity. And that is something that I'm actually like.
struggling with a little bit it's like i don't really want to ruin that but can you still keep that simplicity and have lightning fast performance blade gets slow when you start using include and then blade components more than that so when you use those There's a lot of overhead and it doesn't really matter much. Like I've never really thought about it for my apps. I've heard people talk about blade being slow. I've never thought about it. I've heard people talk about filament being slow.
And I've heard them talk about that's because blade components are slow. And I think they've changed a lot of the way that they build filament to not use blade components. so that's some evidence i have but Then, when I release Flux, which is just byte components,
I started getting complaints about performance. Not a ton, but definitely some people reporting some pretty bad performance, and I've just been able to kick the can. It's just like, well, I mean, it's actually just blade components, so it's not really anything I can do. Flux just uses blade components.
take it up with laravel i don't know um i'll look into it but it's not i i first i thought oh it's because i'm using all this class concatenation no it's not it's it's because of blade components and and then i well whatever i'm not gonna let don't don't try to give me don't try me to get me to give you the whole talk here
uh so it's played uh and but then so i went if you're following the flux journey i've been releasing stuff consistently for a long time and then i just stopped well here's what happened I tried to make, my goal was to make, select menus Big and fast. So be able to have like zillions of select options and like a searchable select and make it lightning fast and everything. And that has destroyed me. I've gone on so many side quests.
should we just do this with json and render this in javascript i've gone down that whole road all of the performance stuff there all the profiling there dom stuff virtuals virtualized lists you know with like fake like scrolling and on-demand rendering and window you know virtualized windows don't talk about if you even know what that is um because you're so stupid you wouldn't know
it's uh we talked about it you know what it is you're so smart so that um and then like because like php it's just like really slow to have a loop of like a thousand select options So I started pulling that thread. It was like, well, what if I just made the server super fast? What if I made it really, really fast?
to just render all this stuff because it doesn't cost a ton to send all this over the wire it costs a ton to have this php loop with all of these calls and stuff so like what if i just make this really fast and that journey has i have not stopped and that's what happens to me i try to solve an important problem and then it just sends me in a million directions. I started a LiveWire 4 branch, and I spent weeks building the future of LiveWire when I thought, now I'm cold on that.
I spent a long time building a totally new blade component syntax, a new blade component system, like a vault thing. All this stuff. A completely new parser. A completely new compiler.
learned everything that i at least i need to know about compilation and parsing and caching and blah blah blah blahing in every bit of the internals of blade searching i'm searching for something and i don't know what it is like i'm still exploring um so that's just kind of an update for you and yeah That's what I got for you.
that's it and josh hanley has been working every day by the way because now i have an employee so when i go off on these things stuff still gets taken care of emails still get answered josh has been fixing all the flux bugs and now he's doing some really really sick live wire improvements like that's part of this is crusade it's like like flux needs liveware to be great needs blade to be great so like we got to solve all of these problems in this stack and
One of them does snapshot errors in LiveWire. It's something that when people hit, they don't know how to debug, and then it contributes to this feeling that LiveWire is brittle, and when you hit an error, you don't know what to do with it. And it really kind of all comes down to this one error. Because this is a bottleneck error. It's an exception that gets thrown because of many different reasons whenever there's a mismatch in DOM morphing with nested components.
It's a difficult problem, but we... you know this is how it goes it's like these difficult things require new levels of complexity that you weren't ready to tackle but over enough time and the problems persistent enough and you solved all the other problems then you go all right
It's time to kill this one. And we've been doing it. And Josh has been doing really great work on it. And it's going to be sick. And we have a branch for it. You can even look at the branch. It's public. A pull request in the LiveWare repo. But it's going to be awesome. And when we release it, hopefully next week, week after, we're going to release some other improvements along with it whatever this is going to be like a size like a really really really big
reliability improvement to livewire that i am so stoked about so anyway there's that going on i'm just giving you random updates how long have i been recording get back to work caleb happy sunday why are you working on a sunday Обещание.