A recap of Laracon 2026 - July 28-29 - in Boston, MA
Torq’d Podcast: Laracon US 2026 Boston Recap, AI Workflows, and Community Events
Dan Soppelsa hosts the Torq’d podcast with coworkers Chris Lemon and Joe Racz, introducing a “liked, learned, lacked” reflection segment focused largely on AI’s impact: Chris likes building mobile apps with NativePHP, learned to build a Kotlin/Swift plugin with Claude, and notes AI increases workload and organization needs; Dan likes Claude Code Artifacts for turning plans and explanations into shareable interactive HTML, but worries AI-generated code can weaken developers’ mental models; Joe uses AI to reduce decision paralysis and for design/feedback, but found it easy to overinvest in optional work. They share upcoming community events (GPUG monthly, KWJS monthly, Laravel Worldwide Meetup, Laravel Toronto, London ON Laravel, and Longhorn PHP where Dan and Chris will speak). The main topic is Laracon US 2026 in Boston, including Laraprom, the industrial venue, the after-party, and “Ship or Die” pitches where Chris presented his Collect Shine smart record-shelf concept and received Laravel Cloud credits.
00:00 Podcast Kickoff
00:40 Liked Learned Lacked
02:09 Chris on NativePHP
03:22 AI Speed and Focus
06:48 Dan on Mental Models
08:44 Claude Artifacts and Sharing
12:14 Joe Uses AI for Design
15:42 Community Events Roundup
16:07 GPUG Meetup Updates
18:00 More Meetups and Laracon Lead In
21:52 Laracon US 2026 Begins
22:54 Arrivals and Boston First Impressions
24:53 Houseboat Airbnb Adventure
27:02 Fenway and City Exploring
28:38 Boston Waterfront Walks
29:20 Laraprom Party Highlights
31:06 Dodgeball and Night Zero
31:42 Sowa Power Station Venue
34:52 Day One Talk Takeaways
37:10 After Party Food and Vibes
38:38 Day Two Standouts
40:40 Ship or Die Pitch Show
43:31 Collect Shine Smart Shelf
50:35 Conference Wrap and Swag
Dan Soppelsa: [00:00:00] I think we're live. All right, cool. All right, welcome everybody to an episode of the Torq'd podcast. My name's Dan Soppelsa. I'm a web developer at Vehikl. I'm joined with a couple of my friends and coworkers here, Mr. Chris Lemon. Hello, Chris.
Joe Racz: Hello.
Dan Soppelsa: How are you doing today?
Chris Lemon: I'm doing quite well, Dan. Thank you for asking
Dan Soppelsa: Oh, you're quite welcome. And Joe Racz, how are you, Joe?
Joe Racz: I'm doing well. Thank you
Dan Soppelsa: How's your week been, man? What's, good week? Thumbs up week or thumbs down or somewhere in between?
Joe Racz: It's been a busy week. It's so- somewhere in between. Some great things happened, and then s- some work got complicated, but we're here, so
Dan Soppelsa: Isn't that the way, though? Isn't that the way? Cool. All right. Yeah, we're, we're just feeling out the, this podcast and the format of things a little bit, but, we've settled on on some ideas for some structure here. So we're gonna get into our main topic today shortly, which is a bit of a, our own look back on,, Laracon US 2026, which just happened a short while ago in Boston, Massachusetts.
But before then, we got a couple of things we [00:01:00] wanna touch on, and the first segment we wanna touch on is like a reflection segment, right? Here at Vehikl, we really value working with intention and being really... and also in, in what comes with working with intention and being very intentional about what we do is reflecting on what we do after we've done, we've completed a task and analyze how we did, how we can improve what went well what not so much.
And, some of that can come with our team's retros at the end of the week as well. So in that that, that vein we thought we'd do a, a liked, learned, lacked segment here a little bit. And so what we want, what we're thinking here is if we can think of something in our recent work, doesn't, last week, two weeks, sometime recently, something that you really liked.
It could've been something that maybe an approach or a task that went really and maybe why it went really well, or some piece of software or service you worked with that you really liked. Something you maybe learned connected with that, and then equally, we learn from the mistakes so often something that may have lacked from that experience as well, and maybe what you might have ma- taken from that.
So that's the the the general idea of this segment. [00:02:00] So without without causing a riot here, does anyone anyone wanna volunteer to go first? Anyone have some thoughts off the bat?
Chris Lemon: Yeah, I could go first. I don't
Dan Soppelsa: Go for it, Chris
Chris Lemon: Yeah, so liked, I've been doing a lot of building with native PHP. Big shout-out to Shane and Simon for building such a cool
Dan Soppelsa: Friends of the show
Chris Lemon: Friends of the show, yeah, absolutely. Really awesome way to build mobile apps. Been just having a blast building with that this week and last week and for the last few weeks actually.
Yeah, and I guess on building on top of that, on top of learned today I spent some time learning how to build a plugin because there was a piece of native Android and iOS feature that I, couldn't just didn't exist in in the native PHP ecosystem. So I said, "Hey, rather than asking someone to build it for me, I could just ask, work with my good buddy Claude and see if we could do it."
And that was pretty successful. I learned a little bit about how to structure the plugin and how it, we could wire it up to actual [00:03:00] native you Kotlin or Swift code. So that was really cool to see in action and a huge win because, within a few hours we had a working plugin between myself and Claude, which was really cool to see.
So, just Another really, power of AI, but also the power of really great tooling in the native PHP stuff.
Dan Soppelsa: Yeah. That's cool
Chris Lemon: and yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I think if we wanna move into lacked I think one thing that I- I've been struggling with lately is you could really accelerate your development speed with AI, but the on top...
But that comes with a let's say, not a problem, an opportunity to to level up your organizational and yeah, your organizational process. I find that, I have a lot more PRs open now. There's a lot more to keep track of. So I think one thing that I'm struggling with, and I definitely need to get better at, is keeping a handle on all the things that I have going on, especially now that, development can certainly skyrocket as you kinda embrace AI tooling to speed [00:04:00] up your flow.
Yeah, I totally totally agree on that. There's it seems like there's just more let's see now, fish pot- pots on the stove or pans in the oven or something in the oven. But yeah, even more things going on at once for sure. I've definitely had that experience a lot, so it's really pushes and challenges people's organization skills.
Probably people that were good at organization already have probably adapted fairly well. People that struggled with it are probably... Those things are being exposed more,
Joe Racz: I was gonna say, it's also those opportunities he mentioned where it's like tough to... for some people it might be tough to stop themselves from going deep on things they shouldn't possibly. Like you were talking about making a plugin, right? Like maybe your goal there is to create something, but you need the plugin to do it, and all of a sudden you're creating a plugin that for you that became an opportunity to put something up.
But you keep doing that, and then the work you're trying to get done will never get done 'cause you're just now everything can be made, so w- what should you make? It's the selection process too, is like what you're focusing on. I found some of that challenging at times.
Chris Lemon: Yeah, I [00:05:00] think I agree with that. I think feature creep is a real issue now. When you could build basically anything you want and at a speed that we've never seen before, it starts becoming a problem of should I build this? Not can I build it, but should I, right? And we had a client actually a little while ago who I was talking to, and they said that their customers actually asked them to slow down their speed of development because they couldn't keep up with all the new features that were coming into their application.
And so they were missing things or not getting the full benefit because it was just a fire hose of "Oh, here's a new feature, here's a new feature," and they couldn't-- they didn't have time to start working those new features into their flow before another one came down that they also had to learn.
So I think it's something that I think, yeah, AI is great and like we've definitely sped things up, but we don't necessarily need to go light speed, maybe just like near light speed, right?
Dan Soppelsa: Not to mention, and I know we do a lot of good things as developers to guard against regressions and introducing introducing bugs. But sometimes when you move fast, you do break things too as well, right? And sometimes when there's a [00:06:00] lot of things moving at once and something gets broken, it's sometimes a little more challenging to trace it back to what was the change, right?
If there's a lot of changes going on constantly. So yeah, I think definitely cadence is something we're all trying to figure out in this kind of new world a little bit.
Joe Racz: also that idea of it might not be broken, but is it cohesive with the rest of your app? Like you're putting a bunch of stuff out, so I imagine the people that are in charge of "Okay, let me test this. Let me go train the people that are gonna use this in the field." Does it even make sense together?
Is like a whole story to itself. Yeah
Dan Soppelsa: in terms of mine, my stuff, you, I really put me on the spot there, Chris. I didn't know we were doing multiple things like a and a lack so I'm gonna do my best
Chris Lemon: so sorry. No, you don't to. Sorry, I just... All right. Sorry.
Dan Soppelsa: I think, no, there's no apology required. I think actually on the lack front and I don't know if I felt it a ton this week, but I think certainly in, in general I've been feeling it.
It's connected to this and was having a good chat with with Karen, one of our team members here at Vehikl the other day about this and some, some [00:07:00] strategies for this. But just what, the, the more and more code that you might be generating with AI especially when it's, it's client code, it's a, it's an application you're maintaining and you really care about and you want it to, to the application to perform well and not, and be introducing regressions.
But how is your building new features and fixing bugs if you're not actually tip-tapping on the keyboard and writing the code yourself? How do you build that, mental model that you normally would have, by writing the code yourself? And I know there's lots of people talking about this idea, right?
And I think it's something we can all struggle with, and especially if we're going super fast, it's very easy, especially if it's a, a language or an ecosystem we may be less familiar with. It's very easy to not build up that mental model and, hey, there's a bunch of tests passing and I can click around in the browser, it looks good or whatever the case may be.
But not really, understanding what maybe like more of an architecture level. What have I introduced or what have I done? What are the implications? What are the pros and cons? Been thinking about that a lot recently and, at times and looking at, some skills that are out there.
I know Matt Pocock is a guy that I'm hearing a lot of. He's got some cool skills that actually this week I'm experimenting with. Some of them, help, helping you, [00:08:00] navigate a code base and understand a code base better. So looking at, leaning into AI a little bit, and this was actually part of my discussion with Karen yesterday of I think, there's a speed gain for sure, especially if you have an idea of what code you want it to produce.
If you prompt the AI to like actually spit that code out and get that in, into your editor and into the code base, can be a lot faster than the past, right? But I don't think that means we should necessarily ship that code right away, and I think what we've gained now with that is it's some, a chance to iterate on things a little bit, right?
And maybe u- use that opportunity to understand a little bit more and build that mental model before you ship it off to a PR or something like that. So that's definitely been on my mind in terms of like something that I think we can, we, we can all do a better job at and we're figuring out how to do really, I think is the best way to put it.
In terms of likes actually connected to AI as well I've just discovered it's not new to some people, but if those that work with Cloud Code Cloud Code Artifacts, I discovered just in the last couple weeks. And it had a very similar thought. It's not a groundbreaking thought by any means, but I've had this experience a lot where [00:09:00] you may be if you're using AI, especially in a CLI in, in, in the terminal but even in some of the desktop apps and you're using it in like maybe like a planning or explore- exploratory approach where you're trying to understand some code and/or, make a plan to implement a feature within the code base.
There's, there's sometimes, a lot of information that all of a sudden gets dumped into the console. The AI's gone a bunch of, done a bit of exploration. It's maybe giving you a summary of maybe how things are structured currently where it wants to go with things, what tests it's gonna write, et cetera, et cetera.
And I find it, very overwhelming sometimes to just read this wall of text in the console. So I certainly had this on my mind in a while of it'd be very nice just to make like a nice presentation, like in a webpage or something like that. And that's the really the spirit of what Claude Code artifacts are.
You can very easily like export a conversation or an idea or a plan into an artifact, which becomes an HTML page. But then there's like a lot of opportunities and things that opens up including having like interactive diagrams and things like that. Tyler on our team too was even showing me he was using Claude Design, if anyone's played around with that tool, which is really cool.
And he was [00:10:00] doing some redesign on an internal application here at Vehikl that we use, and and he was able to make an artifact that was like fully interactive, so then he could send it around to other, kind of stakeholders on the application and say, "What do you think about these design changes?"
And they could, actually click things and modals would open and all this sort of stuff, right? So yeah, artifacts are really cool. I could see it being useful in, for like prototyping ideas like that and getting something a little more tangible into someone's hands very quickly and just see "Is this what you want?"
But also just for like summarizing a code base, a problem, a plan. You could use it, with clients as well, right? If they had access to the document to... You've done some exploration, there's maybe some questions you have of them, and you need to maybe explain something technical to maybe less technical people.
You can have it generate an artifact that does that and answers that and almost walks them through. Used it recently created an artifact like just last week , on a code base I was new to and and ended up producing sort of what I'd call like a technical blog post that was very...
It was some nice diagrams, and it was very nice to scroll through there and get a, get an understanding of what the [00:11:00] purpose of the application was and how data flew, flows through the application and that sort of thing. So Claude Ar- Claude Artifacts, very cool. I'm sure if they don't already, Codex and others are gonna have have an equivalent available pretty soon.
Joe Racz: That's a-- That, that makes me think about something. Just before the podcast here, I think D- Dan and I were talking about how Markdown files are weird, that this, these operating systems just don't have something already built in to open them. But I wonder if like Markdown files aren't even what people are gonna be passing around.
It's... There's a good chance it's gonna be stuff like this complete web pages just with a single file that show stuff like this. Like we could have sh- sent these show notes to each other and it's got sections. Just imagine being able to navigate around and saying "Okay, segment one, segment two, segment three."
You can see everything, and it's like, why not do that? And then operating systems don't have to build anything new in, 'cause we can all open up a browser. It's interesting.
Dan Soppelsa: Mark- Markdown files, yeah, they have ceast-- at least become the de facto, like intermediary between humans and AI, right? Of, like, how [00:12:00] we're communicating and writing our, persistent plans and thoughts and desires and stuff like that, yeah, I don't know if that part will change or not, but I think, yeah, these, these artifacts are pretty cool, especially when you wanna be sharing them from human to human.
I think there's a lot of opportunities it opens up. Joe, what about you? Any anything you liked, learned, or lacked recently that comes to mind?
Joe Racz: Liked, honestly I've been using AI as kinda like a buddy to hang out with kinda stay away from decision paralysis, if that makes sense, during trying to develop stuff. So that's been kinda fun. You mentioned Claude Design. I used it to help flush out ideas for how this should look lo- in mobile.
Took a screenshot of what I got so far for desktop. Talked about "Hey, I just don't like this piece here toggling between, say, a code view or something else." Like an example view, what would you do here with a toggle and why? Stuff like this. Pulling up ChatGPT as like a, an actual app on your machine so it can make [00:13:00] visits to websites and stuff.
So I sent it to a documentation site I was building for Look at JS and just asked "Hey, what do you think?" "Where should I make these changes?" Or, "What changes do you think that need to be made? What's working? What's not working?" Think about cohesiveness and stuff like that, messaging. It drew up a whole plan as well for like marketing on its own, which was interesting.
Used Claude Design to make a 3D model of the logo that could stand somewhere and spin. Still f- gotta figure out how to get that to be printed 'cause I think they need different files, not OBJs. But yeah, just playing around with it constantly and just like trying to use it to my advantage.
I'm trying not to do too much. I still want like hands-on with what I'm building, I find. But it's done a pretty good job at getting things moving. You're not stuck with decision paralysis in moments where you'd rather not jump around and intake six, seven different files, but you have the mental model of what you're looking for.
I find it can also get the work done as long as you can articulate what you're saying. [00:14:00] So usually it's like trying to grow that skill, like the prompting and being comfortable with AI has been fun 'cause it's surprising me. I'm sure it's, a lot of people have gone through that point where they feel sketchy about it and then they start to enjoy it.
Some things that have been, maybe lacked. Maybe in t- in tandem with what some of Chris said where he was talking about like you gotta organize all your stuff. I was doing a presentation and trying to put that together, and I think I might've spent too much time on the presentation and less time on the physical examples than I wanted to, and it's because I could explore so much with say, Claude Design, do this part, go into Figma, do my thing, and somewhere else and there's just a lot to do, a lot that could've been done.
But which parts are like, the most important? It's like now you've got to focus in yourself and not get lost in the sauce of all the things you can possibly do. yeah,
Dan Soppelsa: Yeah, definitely that same th- same theme of lots of pots on the stove at once. And yeah, trying [00:15:00] to... We always wanna, especially, yeah, when you're trying to get something done, trying to deliver something for a client, for instance you want to make sure you're working on the most important things and focusing the majority of your time on those things.
But yeah the temptation's totally there to have a lot of things going on at once. We've we, the, the, the old, the traditional the joke about developers having, a bunch of side projects that are, like, half done or 80% done or whatever, right? That's just, that problem's just compounded now, right?
'Cause you can get that first 80, 90% done, so quickly relatively now. But then it's like that extra, the 10% of or whatever of polish that takes so much longer that if you don't put the time in, you're gonna have a lot of half-finished, m-more half-finished projects than ever. All right.
Great great little segment there. So let's let's move into just some short kind of community event-related items. But we have a bunch of events that that we're involved with, some of them directly here here at Vehikl and and some of them a little more indirectly where we've maybe been attendees and things like that.
So we just wanted to highlight some of them. Some of them are a little more geographic specific. We have a couple of [00:16:00] local meetups in our area that are often in-person meetups that, might be a little more appealing or possible for, for local attendees to make it out to.
And some of them are available online, going through them here, we have a long time a, a long, , a, a meetup that Vehikl has been a long-time sponsor of in, in our area, the GPUG which was previously for many years stewarded by our very own Colin DeCarlo. But recently Colin DeCarlo was put out to pasture and those responsibilities were taken over by our very own Chris Lemon.
So Chris I don't know, put you on the spot there, but yeah, in general, what's what's the outlook like for for the, the GPUG the next next little while? What's what are things looking like? How often does GPUG meet? Tell us a little bit about GPUG.
Chris Lemon: Yeah. So I guess, yeah, GPUG is our PHP meetup. Stands for GPUG, PHP User Group. Get the joke. Yeah,
Dan Soppelsa: backronym, just like PHP, right?
Chris Lemon: just like PHP. Yeah, we steal from the best. Yeah, so we meet once a month at the last Wednesday of every month. So I imagine this, by the time this goes out, our latest one will have already come and gone, but we have one coming up [00:17:00] on August 26th.
And then we will also have one if I pull up my calendar here. We can cut the dead air here maybe.
We will have one September 30th. We have another talk lined up. So coming up August 26th, we have Scott Keck-Warren from, He hosts a podcast for PHP Architect, which is a PHP magazine, which is quite good if I do say so myself. So he hosts the Community Corner podcast for them, and he's gonna be joining us to talk about time in PHP and how to manage your time objects which should be pretty interesting.
And then September 30th, we have a GPUG member, Jasper, who's gonna be talking, Actually, I don't know what he's gonna be talking about yet, but he has offered to give a talk we are looking forward to that as well. And that's what we got going on for the next couple months
Dan Soppelsa: All right. And we'll we'll put the links in the show notes, but it's meetup.com/_gpug_ if you wanna check out upcoming and past events for the GPUG [00:18:00] group. And then, yeah, similarly we have the the KWJS group, which is a little newer, but still quite established at this point.
Local meetup, a little more, tends to be a little more of a JavaScript focus. Our very own Joe Racks has presented there a couple of days ago presented his Flipkit library. And yeah, similar cadence to the GPUG. KWJS meets once a month, usually the, the, I guess the third weekend or this, or the, the third Wednesday or the second to the last Wednesday of the month, however you wanna look at it.
The one before the GPUG is the usual meeting day for for the K- KWJS, and that's generally an in-person meetup in the Waterloo area. And then we also have, big sponsors of Laravel and the Laravel ecosystem that we've been doing for many years. We have the Laravel Worldwide Meetup co-hosted by myself and our very own Margaret Tavares.
We generally it's been a bit of a fluctuation through the summer here, but we generally have those streams on the last Tuesday of the month. 12 noon Eastern is our usual start time on YouTube. But those, are available for to, for viewing afterwards as well. Upcoming events, we have one coming up actually this August [00:19:00] 26th or 25th rather, with the Laravel's team member, Christoph Rumple, who's gonna be talking about an application he built recently where he started with fully traditionally coding, hand coding it, and then switched into more of a fully agentic kind of approach to development and kind of his thoughts and feelings of that whole process.
Something I think very relevant to a lot of us, something we're actively feeling as as AI continues to progress. And then we have the Laravel Toronto Meetup. Not a meetup that we're directly involved with here at GPUG, but there's some, some good friends of the show there that are involved with that meetup.
And actually our very own Chris Lemon here spoke at the Laravel Toronto Meetup just a couple short months ago, I think. Is that correct, Chris?
Joe Racz: That is correct. Yeah, I gave a great talk about how Vehikl is using AI to accelerate our development and how it's impacted us and our culture here at Vehikl. So it was a good time, good attendance, good people. Pizza was great too. Yeah, recommend checking that out if you're in the Toronto area
Dan Soppelsa: Yeah. Do you happen to know if they re- meet on a regular cadence, the Toronto Laravel group?
Joe Racz: I think they [00:20:00] try to meet monthly, but they take a break for the summer. So currently they're on a break, but I s- I saw some chatter back and forth that it's coming back hopefully in September. Keep your eyes posted for that
Dan Soppelsa: Cool. And then yeah, meetup.com/laravel-toronto. We'll put the link in the show notes. And then a newer meetup that I just I was saying to Chris before the show, caught wind of actually unfortunately after it happened but was speaking with the, the organizers at Laracon about it. But London, Ontario there's a Laravel meetup that started just their first meeting I think was this spring, a little bit earlier this year.
And I was told by the organizers they're hoping to meet quarterly, and the next meetup is they're intending to meet on October 1st. So check that out, especially if you're in the London, Ontario area London on Laravel meetup. And then lastly for our our events in the next little bit Longhorn PHP.
It's coming up middle of October 15th and 16th in Austin, Texas, USA. And it's A conference we've long been been fans of and supporters of here at Vehikl, [00:21:00] and especially this year 'cause both myself and Chris Lemon here have the honor of being speakers at the event.
So Chris have you been to Longhorn before?
Joe Racz: I have not. This is my first time not only at the conference, but in Austin, Texas in general. I'm very excited. I'm looking forward to all the barbecue and I hear Austin has a great music scene, so hopefully checking that out as well. And then, all things PHP. I hear Longhorn's a great time, and we were th- lucky to meet some of the organizers when we were at PHP Tech in Chicago this year, and they, obviously really sold us on the idea of going.
Now we're going
Dan Soppelsa: Absolutely, yeah. Same, I haven't been to Longhorn, but I've been to Austin just the once and very much looking forward to it for all the reasons you said. Not the least of which is I understand Omni Adams the organizer, brews his own beer and makes that available to attendees, so very much looking forward to that.
Chris Lemon: All right.
Joe Racz: Yeah, this is gonna be fun
Dan Soppelsa: Yeah. Cool. All right. And with that, let's let's just slide into kind of the main event here the main kind of t- the topic for for this episode. Laracon US [00:22:00] 2026. We have the the pleasure and the honor of being, supporters of the Laravel and the Lara- Laracon conference here at Vehikl and as Vehikl employees, we have the option to attend the conference, so we als- often go down en masse.
We have usually the biggest group at the conference. I don't think that was any different this year. When we posed for our team photo, there was a lot of us there, but yeah, both myself and, or all of myself and Joe and Chris were lucky enough to attend this year. So we just kinda, kinda wanted to go through, not a lot of structure here, and just kinda share some thoughts about the conference and Boston and our experience and maybe some highlights and that sort of thing, without further ado yeah, the, the event this year was held in Boston, Massachusetts. So it was the first time I believe ever that that Laracon US has been in Boston. I'd been to Boston before, but not for many years, but and overall, I thought it was a very cool experience, very cool city, very very old city, some old architecture, some old parts of town that I was able to wander through, so that was really cool.
Conference ran on the 28th and 29th of July, a Tuesday and a Wednesday. So I [00:23:00] think, yeah, a lot of people trickled into town a day or two before that. What about you guys, Joe and Chris? When when did you get into town?
Chris Lemon: I think I arrived Monday myself. Yeah Monday like midday. Tra-- flew out of Detroit and then landed there. Didn't get to do too much on that one day, but we did have LERA prom, so that's something we checked out on that day, I think Monday night, right?
Dan Soppelsa: Monday night, so that was like the pre-party? Is that what you're talking about?
Chris Lemon: Think so. Yeah, I think it was all Leraprom or
Dan Soppelsa: Oh, the Laraprim, yeah. Yeah. So did you get into town, was it Monday as well, Chris? Or you there Sunday? When did you get into town?
Joe Racz: We got in very early Monday. We were in... I think we landed like 9:30 AM Monday. Yeah, it was nice. It gave us a good opportunity to explore.
Dan Soppelsa: Yeah. Did you, I was gonna say that, that dilemma where you had you couldn't check into your your your dwelling until after a while, so you just kinda putzed around town? Or h-how'd you spend your time?
Joe Racz: Yeah. We actually took the ferry across from the airport to downtown Boston, so that [00:24:00] killed 45 minutes to an hour, which was lovely. A great way to get fr- I wish more places would let you take a ferry from the airport. That was phen- phenomenal. Absolutely just beautiful.
Great way to enter the city. Yeah. Then we went to I think it was called James Hook & Co., which is a restaurant that's been going for about 100 years, and they serve lobster rolls. And it was probably one of the best things I've ever eaten in my life. Just a, just, just a, a white bun loaded with lobster.
It was very expensive, but very excellent. Highly
Chris Lemon: Yeah, that sounds great
Dan Soppelsa: yeah, overall, first impressions of Boston, what would you say?
Joe Racz: I loved it. I wanna go back very badly. It's just beautiful. I love the architecture, the mixture of the old buildings with the new buildings. Real sense of history and you just feel ev- everywhere you look, you just things have happened here. You know what I mean?
Dan Soppelsa: Yeah. Definitely. And I know I believe Chris, you were amongst a, a group here at Vehikl that had some special living arrangements while you were in [00:25:00] Boston. You wanna tell us about that?
Joe Racz: Yeah. Whenever we go to Laracon, a group of us always try to get an Airbnb together and do something interesting. When we were in Nashville, we had this beautiful Airbnb that looked out over at the Smoky Mountains, which was pretty awesome. This year, no different. We got a houseboat in the Boston Harbor and lived on a houseboat for the entire week, and that was quite an adventure.
A lot of fun. Beautiful beautiful way to wake up every morning, just walk outside and see, open water and the Boston skyline against it. It was just excellent. Loved it
Dan Soppelsa: And overall, the, the water wasn't too rough? It was... You were able to sleep at night?
Joe Racz: Yeah, I didn't even mean-- Yeah, I think I was so tired at the end of every day that I just fell right asleep. But yeah, no, it was-- couldn't really tell. Definitely wasn't when you're just in the harbor, there's a lot of breaks and sea walls and whatever that kind of stop the waves from really getting to you too badly.
So it was pretty, pretty nice.
Dan Soppelsa: That's cool. And what
Chris Lemon: Yeah, I kinda chickened out on the boat. We generally hang together with Chris like with that group, but I was like, [00:26:00] "I'm not sure how the sleeping is gonna go," and there was already limited space. So I was like, "All right I'll be the first one to bow out." But I did manage to make it on the boat at least once.
We spent one night hanging out, which was good. It was nice, I gotta say. It was pretty good. As soon as I left, you guys lost power too, so that was interesting.
Joe Racz: Yes. I think it was your fault personally. I think... It was very convenient. You left and then we lost power,
Dan Soppelsa: so it was Joe's fault quite clearly
Joe Racz: It was a fit of jealousy, I think.
Dan Soppelsa: Correlation, correlation doesn't equal causation, but
Chris Lemon: But
Dan Soppelsa: yeah. Yeah, I think I, I unfortunately didn't get over to see the boat, but, and ch- talking with you, Chris, I, I think I was over walking around that area. I think it was, is it Lo- Long Wharf? Was it in that area? Yeah. Did wander over there the one night and it was, There were some big boats over there. Some like, pe- boats that people live on for lengths of time were in harbor. And yeah, it was it was interesting to see, so you were right in the heart of that, were you?
Chris Lemon: Yes, I will say our boat was not one of the big boats, but it was a [00:27:00] boat next the big boats
Dan Soppelsa: Cool. Yeah for myself, I actually big baseball fan, so I, looking at the calendar, I saw my Toronto Blue Jays were in town the few days before the conference started. So I actually trekked out there with with my girlfriend on Saturday. We got into town actually about midday on Saturday and ended up baseball games both on Saturday and Sunday Boston Red Sox and Toronto Blue Jays.
So saw a win and a loss for my Jays, but overall, yeah, what a... i'd been to Fenway Park before, but not for many years as well. And yeah, definitely a place, even if you're not a baseball fan, a really interesting place to visit. It's it's over 100 years old. There's a lot of history there. A lot of quirks about the stadium.
So that was that was very cool. And the whole area in and around... I don't know if you guys-- Did you guys get over to the area around Fenway Park at all?
Chris Lemon: I don't think so.
Dan Soppelsa: No,
Joe Racz: I don't think I
Chris Lemon: Oh, actually, that's not true. We took a hop-on, hop-off bus on the
Dan Soppelsa: Okay, there you go
Joe Racz: We briefly were by Fenway. So in the most technical way, yes, I was there.
Dan Soppelsa: They've done a good job, and I think they've [00:28:00] been up the streets right around the stadium. I think they basically close off on game day, but there's lots of options for bars and restaurants and, kind of things going on in and around the stadium both, right at game time and afterwards and stuff like that.
So that was cool.
Chris Lemon: of buses, I actually saw... Did you guys see that bus that kept running around the city? It was like some kind of like hybrid. It could go in the water
Dan Soppelsa: duck, I think they're called, they call them duck boats.
Chris Lemon: Yeah. I was like, man I wish I could've tried that. I'm not sure if who did or who didn't, but it looked like fun. Un- unless it just doesn't really go in the water or goes in the water for like the shortest bit, then maybe it wouldn't be as fun.
But I don't know, it looked cool
Dan Soppelsa: Yeah, I think an interesting touristy thing probably to do at least once, right? I feel like it's one of those things that the, the locals are just like, "Ah," they roll their eyes at it or something like that perhaps. But yeah, those are cool looking though, those amphibious Vehicles. Yeah, that's so-- that was day one.
Did, did-- actually, did any of you you're over in the harbor there did any of you get up to so there's like Charles River kind of flows through town as well, so there's like a [00:29:00] quite a long waterway along the river, the Charles River Esplanade. Did you guys get up there at all?
Chris Lemon: No, I didn't
Dan Soppelsa: Yeah, did a bunch of walking and stuff along there.
It was really cool, a lot of people out running and biking and stuff like that and yeah, so it's really cool. There's like a long waterway along the river in Boston as well as like out on the kind of ocean side, harbor side as well, cool, yeah, so that was day one, and you mentioned it before, Joe.
Did you guys get to Laraprom?
Chris Lemon: did
I was there
Dan Soppelsa: Yeah. What were your thoughts of the Laraprom event?
Joe Racz: It's pretty fun though I not to throw shade, but there was a promise of a Laravel tie, and I don't think anyone got one
Dan Soppelsa: You make a great point. You make a great point. We need to talk to, we need to talk to the folks at La- at Laravel. Yeah. Yeah, I thought it was an interesting, they, I they generally, or at least for a few years, there's been some sort of, pre-conference, pre-party, whatever you wanna call it.
And then, layering a theme onto it I thought was a neat idea. I thought overall, I think, I think probably more people dressed up than than I thought might. And some people took it very seriously, including our own our own Margaret, if anyone was there. She saw her custom-made [00:30:00] dress adorned with Vehikl and and Laravel logos.
That was pretty cool. And yeah,
Chris Lemon: I can't believe she ma- I can't believe she made that.
Dan Soppelsa: It's unbelievable. Yeah, I would've,
Chris Lemon: I know
Right
Dan Soppelsa: yeah I thought about, oh, a custom suit would be cool, but I'd be like, "That's gonna cost me hundreds if not thousands of dollars." What, that's... But she was able to make that by hand. But, and the thing too I, I thought, I figured when I heard it, it was like a high school gym.
I was like, oh, it's gonna be like, it used to be a high school and, it's closed now and they just have whatever in there. But no there was, like, banners on the wall from a year or two ago the sports teams that won championships and stuff or whatever. So it's a legit high school that we were in.
We were just, having a little party in the gym. So that was pretty cool. I wonder, thinking ahead to next year, I'm sure they've probably, the team's already been thinking about it, but what they might do. Will they go back with, roll the Laraprom theme back or, I like the idea of putting a theme on things, so maybe see if they c- if they come up with something else next year.
Did did either of you... Yeah. Yeah. Did either of
Joe Racz: Yeah, really add some fun to it
Dan Soppelsa: Yeah, no, it was definitely a, a nice little wrinkle in things. Probably could've used a couple more bars for refreshments. There were some long [00:31:00] lines, but I think the,
Chris Lemon: lines were very long
Dan Soppelsa: I don't think we need to point that out to anyone. They're probably well aware of that, and I'm sure they're on it. Earlier that day, there was a, there was, like, a dodgeball game. Did either of you play dodgeball?
Chris Lemon: I did not. I was busy eating a lobster roll, unfortunately
Dan Soppelsa: up, unfortunately. But I've heard nothing but good things. I think, I know a couple years ago, was it, they did a, a basketball game, which some people thought, basketball takes a little more skill to be, decent at it, I think.
But dodgeball, a lot of people can jump into a dodgeball game and at least try their hand at it, so heard nothing but good things, so I imagine that's gonna be, there's gonna be something similar next year as well. Yeah, and then from there we That was night, or night zero, if you will, of the zero-indexed array.
And then we head into day one. Yeah, day one, heading over to the venue. It was at it was the Sowa Power Station, which is this old industrial building that I think, was a power station at some point. So very very tall very pr- quite large. I guess what any, any initial thoughts when you guys arrived at the venue and saw the venue?
Or what were your first [00:32:00] impressions?
Chris Lemon: I feel like whoever plans these things loves a certain aesthetic, and I also love it. That's not a complaint, but it definitely has matched, I think, every venue that we've been to so far, except for maybe last year in Denver.
When I was in Nashville and Dallas definitely had like kind of a reused industrial vibe and this year no different as well.
And I think that aesthetic is really cool. And I am always down for kind of reuse of historical buildings in modern ways. So it's great to see. And it was, yeah, it was a lovely venue.
Dan Soppelsa: Modern industrial, yeah. That was cool.
Chris Lemon: Yeah, I loved it too. I think the only thing I feel like I was missing from it was like the levels that we generally are you know, given in seating. That would've been awesome. But other than that, And plus they went crazy with the the props on stages like several years in a row, and there wasn't too much this time.
So I was like, "Oh man, where's that?" 'Cause I enjoyed it, and I was like, "These guys are really going crazy with them." But other than that, honestly, like the venue was great. I think I like the idea that they had the sponsors separate [00:33:00] in a different room as well. That was that's been working out. I think they've done that second time now.
It's good
Dan Soppelsa: They brought the big tent in that they added to the venue. And then, and it was... I'm sure you guys had the same experience. It was really nice and comfortable in there in the morning. They had the air conditioning pumping in there, but once you fill that room with a bunch of developers, the temperature goes up a little bit.
Chris Lemon: Oh yeah.
Dan Soppelsa: but and I think it worked out well. Yeah, there was one rainy day where I think some water getting in was kinda just 'cause it was in the parking lot. Some- the, the floor was wet, but overall, I think the, they did a pretty good job of of mitigating that and things dried up pretty quickly when when the rain stopped, so yeah, it was definitely a, it was big.
It was I think Chris Keithlin said it best, it was a cavernous venue when you walked in. Very high ceilings, right? Like just... And what was nice about it too was like, I don't know exactly what the attendance numbers were, but I think it was in and around 1,000 I wanna say. And, but it didn't feel tight or cramped, right?
Like it would be very easy in a lot of venues with the, with numbers like that to even as, you're trying to walk in and out and get around the group to like everything to be really tight and didn't feel like that at all. It felt like there was just lots of room [00:34:00] to move so you could easily sit and watch talks, but if you needed to walk around and move somewhere else, that was easy to do.
Yeah, it was cool and then they had all the, the seating outside and with the picnic tables and umbrellas for lunch and stuff like that, but it was a cool layout, co- cool way to do it, cool venue. Yeah, I think all of that stuff. I almost thought like the first day when I walked up, I almost thought I was in the wrong place.
I was like, "Oh, this is like a Metallica concert or something they're set up for," when they had the, all the tents and stuff like that being set up, so that was pretty crazy. Yeah, so looking forward to seeing seeing what the, the Laravel team comes up with for next year. I know certainly gotten to the point, I'm sure like the the, even just the choosing of the venue's a team project probably, right?
Starting from, y- the, anywhere in the US is the possible venue to start, right? And then narrowing it down from there to finding a decent city and then finding a decent venue within... you might have cities that are great locations, but maybe the, the venues aren't, quite what you want.
So really curious to see what the team comes up with next year, cool. Was there any just, general like just highlights from day one for you? Anything that really stood out of day one's proceedings? Not to get into all the, the nitty-gritty of every [00:35:00] single talk but any, any big takeaways or memories from day one talks or otherwise?
Joe Racz: I love the whimsy-driven development talk. I think that's I-- for me, that's how I build my side projects anyway, is a, the sense of let's, what's something fun that we can do? That's... I think side projects are a great way to learn, but they're not a great way to learn if you're doing something rote, if you're doing a, if you're doing like a to-do app, that's not a great way to learn 'cause you're just gonna give up on it eventually 'cause it's not fun. And I think that sense of whimsy is what keep, keeps people coming back to side projects and that, that gives them that drive to push new features that are gonna push their knowledge to the next level.
So that, that talk really resonated with me
I experienced something very similar to even when you're not necessarily say, just trying something super crazy to have fun with and build your side project on. A lot of times people start out their side projects and they go, "All right, let's start this," and they start with like authentication and log in and sign up,
Dan Soppelsa: fun
Joe Racz: I don't know yeah.
And it's [00:36:00] like forget all that. Just build the core of what you're trying to do so you can see it come alive, and then build all that stuff around it. It's just extract the fun early on so that you want this to become something that lives and, you've actually invested something now, so you're wor- willing to go through the grueling part of the auth and whatever else you might be doing or it might be needing as a product.
But yeah, I think I definitely agree with that Whimsy stuff. It's just,
Dan Soppelsa: Yeah, it was an en- entertaining presentation in addition to yeah, a good message just to remember to not take things too seriously sometimes. And, I think there's an element of, I think a l- a lot of us, found our way into programming one way or another as, as, as younger people.
And probably in, some angle at least, some desire to make games or figure out how games are made, things like that when we were kids. And so I think there was an element of that too, of just reconnecting to like really the, the fun part of like software that that, that drew you to it in some way originally.
So yeah, I thought that was a really good message. Yeah, some cool talks. There was obviously there was Taylor's big list of updates there, some really cool stuff coming to [00:37:00] Laravel Cloud and the framework as well. So yeah, you can check all those things out. But yeah, I would think overall there was some really good good impressions of the venue that first day and just kinda how everything was put together.
And then there was there was actually just, to wrap up that day, there was an after party a little bit later outside not far from the venue, but not at the venue. What did you guys think of the after party? Were you, did you both make it out to that?
Joe Racz: Sure did
Dan Soppelsa: Yeah.
Joe Racz: Incredible food. I'll say that Oh my God.
Dan Soppelsa: Okay.
Joe Racz: stuff I gotta figure out, like how they're making, honestly
Dan Soppelsa: the best food item, Joe? That
Joe Racz: There was a steak skewer or something that. I'm not even sure what they were calling it, but that was crazy.
Dan Soppelsa: Yeah. And I thought, I-- well, I'd say equally was the venue was, I thought was really cool, right? It was
Joe Racz: Oh yeah, really cool
Dan Soppelsa: this outdoor venue, some outdoor bars and kinda picnic table, lounge chair kinda areas, and then there was a stage there.
There was a live band for a bit. So yeah,
Joe Racz: There's these like cabanas and stuff, right? Or whatever you wanna call them. I guess these like sectioned off nice [00:38:00] s-
Dan Soppelsa: good thing it didn't rain. I wonder what the... If there was a contingency plan, 'cause it was very much an outdoor venue. Yeah. And then
Joe Racz: I really, yeah, I think the vibes there were just great. It was a very... I think there was a lot of people there, but it never felt chaotic or busy. I think the vibe was very relaxed despite kind of the-- There, there's probably what? 500, 600 people there, right? I would imagine. And it never felt crowded or, I think there's-- In, in my opinion, it was the best after-party we've had yet
Dan Soppelsa: Yeah, I'd say. There's been some good ones too, right? So that's saying something. Yeah, I think it was, I think it was great. Yeah, that was cool. And then we probably headed off into the night and did some different things after that we don't need to get too much into. But then yeah, we re- rolled into day two from there.
Again, l- nice, great lineup of talks. And yeah, day two, we're gonna get to, towards the end of day two in a moment here. There was a significant event, but outside of that anything any other, thoughts or things that stood out for you from day two, whether from the talks or events or anything like that?[00:39:00]
Joe Racz: It was day two or day one when Aaron said that he's now the new VP,
Dan Soppelsa: Oh, that was, yeah,
Joe Racz: of marketing
Dan Soppelsa: that was a big announcement. That was right at the start of day one, yeah.
Joe Racz: Oh, okay. Yeah. A, lot of people like the guy, so I including myself, so pumped to see what he's gonna do. I wonder if is it marketing and community department that deals with Laracon? So there might be changes there too. Who knows? With his hands in there, I'm not sure. But looking forward to see what he does all that.
Dan Soppelsa: Yeah, and I think that was a cool way they announced it, how Taylor came out and kinda said, "Oh, we've had a community member in the past, but we've switched things up. We're gonna have, a team member," and then, and it was all the same person, so yeah. Got a chance to to congratulate Aaron myself as well, and yeah I totally agree such a...
Kinda doing that role in a lot of ways anyway, certainly especially the the community building part of things. So it seems like a very natural fit to me, so all the best to Aaron in that role, and I'm sure he's gonna crush it. I know he will. Yeah, in terms of any of the talks that stood out to you any messages from the talks?[00:40:00]
Joe Racz: only one that I really remember was the building the CLI coding agent from scratch talk, which I thought was really cool. But for reasons that will become clear later if you missed Laracon, I was not super focused on the talks on day two. I was I would say stressed. So I think I was listening, but I wasn't really listening. But we'll get into that soon.
Dan Soppelsa: and Joe was just running around dropping off flip kit cards on tables, so
Chris Lemon: Exactly. That too.
Fixing the mobile version of the dark side too
Dan Soppelsa: Another great list of talks from a bunch of great speakers from day two, so you can, check those out on Laravel's YouTube. I think they might all be posted at this point. But yeah, we've been hitting that a little bit. Towards the end of day two this is the first time that they've done this at a Laracon.
I thought it was a, a really cool way to kinda wrap things up. I think last year was at Laracon, they did a panel. They had Adam Wathan and Taylor and Jeffrey Way up there, and they were kinda talking business and stuff like that. And this year I think they did something even better. They did if anyone's that watched "Shark Tank" or [00:41:00] "Dragon's Den," any of those sorts of shows where entrepreneurs that have some business and idea that the product they're building perhaps, they'll go on and pitch some potential investors and, see how they like the idea.
So they entitled this segment Ship or Die which mean, Spoiler alert, nobody died, which is good. And they had a small panel of judges come up and had some people come out and give a short presentation of their their application, their idea. Some of them on...
There was a spectrum of how complete some of the, the thoughts and ideas were. And then the, the judges voted whether the idea should be shipped or whether maybe it should die. And the the catch was there was four judges and for every ship plus, thumbs up that somebody got they received $100 in cloud credits for Laravel.
And our very own Chris Lemon was a participant in this this event. I gotta say again I m- I gotta subscribe just to the, the news sources you do, Chris. I didn't even know it was happening until the, the-- we were there, but it was something you had to apply for ahead of time, how [00:42:00] did you catch wind of it?
What what was the application like? Yeah, give me your thoughts.
Chris Lemon: Yeah. Yeah, so I'm on the Laravel Discord and I think her name's Leah. She's one of the community managers, I think. Yeah. She made a post. I-- Someone was asking, oh, have I missed any announcements about Laracon, and she just said, "Oh there, there was this tweet that went out about, a pitch competition."
And I was like, "Oh, that's interesting. What's that about?" And then I read and I was like, "Oh, have you built something cool with Laravel? Do you wanna talk about it on stage at Laracon?" And I said, "I have built something cool, and I would like to talk about it on stage at Laracon." So I don't... I was so excited.
I don't have a Twitter account, and it w- the it was a tweet that you had to res- reply to, so I immediately made a Twitter account. Or X, sorry, I think it's called X now. And yeah, the everything app, and made a post and then I didn't hear anything until the Friday before we left. So it was Friday.
I'm flying out Monday, planning on, spending the weekend relaxing, hanging out with my wife and my dog. And then Friday at noon, I get an email saying, "Hey are you still [00:43:00] interested in, pitching at Laracon?" And I said, "I sure am," and then spent the rest of the weekend stressing out and trying to figure out how I was possibly gonna pitch my product at La- Laracon, was yeah, not how I planned on spending my weekend before Laracon but I think time spent.
Dan Soppelsa: Yeah. No, it came together really well, and I think you had you had great energy. It was, I think, well-received by all the judges. I think they were all definitely, especially in the... There, there's a bit of, in the, the spirit of the, the w-whimsical development, right? There was a bit of that, I think, in the product, and then, and it just, so actually, why don't you, why don't you de-describe the product briefly, and then it'll make more sense to
Chris Lemon: Yeah. S- sure, yeah. So I've built what I'm, what I call Collect Shine, which is I think it's-- I'd like to describe it as a smart shelf. But basically it's for record collectors to organize, track, and I like to say elevate their record collection. Primary feature is there's a strip of LED lights on each shelf.
There's-- and then you can control them from the app. And if, for people with large collections often don't know where a record's gonna [00:44:00] live on their shelf so y- you just tap a record on the app, and then a light turns on above it to show you exactly where it is. There's a bunch of other features.
You can do a lot of stuff with the lights, and there's tracking and statistics and just ways to help you organize and get the most out of your record collection. Obviously, there's a lot of whimsy in there. I'm a big-time record collector, and I just wanted to build something that was, like, super fun to do with my records.
And I think that maybe eventually other people would like to do the same thing. I'm looking for beta users right now. But yeah. So I got a chance to pitch that on stage at Laracon. It was a lot of fun. Dan, I think maybe, I don't know if you watched the same pitch that I did, but I got four noes, so I don't know how the judges were
Dan Soppelsa: let me let me yeah, let me, there's a caveat to that I think in all fairness to you, is that you went last, which I think there was, was it a random draw that determined order? Was that how
Chris Lemon: I have abso-- they, they just told me I was going last. I don't know if it was random or
Dan Soppelsa: So Chris went last, which, he saved the best for last, right? So that there's that.
But I think what happened was clearly the, the first few presenter, everyone had great ideas, and there were certainly some things you'd be like, "Hey, you wanna say yes to everything, right? [00:45:00] And I think the first few presenters, there was a lot of, ship it. Sounds great. Looks good to me."
'Cause I think the, the judges wanted ultimately just give these people some Laravel Cloud credits. Laravel Cloud, the fastest way to ship and scale your Laravel applications. They just wanted to give these people Laravel Cloud credits ultimately. So then I think towards the end, there was some pressure, there was some feeling like, "Oh, we need to say no to more people."
So I think a couple people before you really got some more nos. And then actually Aaron Francis' great idea, he said, or I think it was his idea. He said, "If we, if somebody gets four nos, could we just turn that into say basically the same thing as four yeses?" And I think so, I think those two things combined, one, the, a couple of the judge- I think the judges, they all like, they were, there were smiles on their faces.
They liked the idea. But then I think there was this pressure to say no to people, and it was just a question of, maybe you didn't have the clearest answer for them right away of how you could monetize this thing, and that was where the nos came from. And then I believe I got some inside knowledge that one of the judges then, after they'd heard a few nos from others, said, "I'm gonna say no as well to help this guy out, to give him Laravel Cloud credits."
Is this true?
Joe Racz: I can [00:46:00] neither confirm nor deny that is a conversation that happened backstage.
Dan Soppelsa: So I think, yeah, the idea was well-received. A lot of smile, especially, yeah, there was this, there was a part where you were kinda showing a little video or demo of the lights lighting up, and then the lights were kinda going crazy. Everything was lighting up and like that was that was a really fun part of the presentation.
So I think it was it was entertaining and well-received from that standpoint. And you got $400 in Laravel Cloud credits out of it, so you know.
Chris Lemon: Sure, sure did.
Joe Racz: Honestly, my interpretation too is that these guys liked it and it was just like the idea is like they can't see someone doing the work to set it up. But the truth is if you're a collector, that is what you're doing. You're setting your stuff up constantly, displaying it different ways or enjoying it.
I think this is just you taking that to a different level and enjoying it in another way. So yeah the cool factor
Chris Lemon: time will tell because I'm gonna try to launch it, so
Dan Soppelsa: I was gonna say they'll know the mistake they make when Collect shines a Laracon sponsor in the future, right?
Chris Lemon: that's right. That's right. I'll sponsor just to rub it in, a little bit.
Joe Racz: Oh, like, n--
not,
Chris Lemon: yeah, but not to [00:47:00] put the spotlight on me, but I think a lot-- I think everyone who presented up there did a really great job. There lot of cool ideas. I forget it, sorry, I forget your name if you're listening, but commithistory.io.
Love the idea. And I think that you've... That they've launched recently. Unfortunately, they don't, they're not shipping to Canada right now, so I couldn't place an order, but I did try. Because I think that's a really cool product of basically building kind of souvenir gifts out of your code bases, so you could get them on floppy disk or CD.
A copy of your, of a certain point in your code base that maybe you're specifically proud of. Very cool. The person who created it actually gave all of us a floppy that contains V1 of Laravel. So that's sitting behind me now is a floppy with V1 cool. Yeah, and I think, I, yeah, I think this like the whole thing was a lot of fun and like everyone who got a chance to participate clearly was very passionate about what they were doing and had really great ideas and had...
Everyone had built something cool. big props to every- everyone,
Joe Racz: I think the judges also had to give him a fair I guess rating there, is that like they probably had a hard time trying to [00:48:00] say yes, ship it or not ship it because if you remember Chris telling the story, the question was, "Did you make something cool with Laravel, and would you like to show it off at Laracon?"
But then that turned into a Shark Tank thing. So there were a lot of people up there with things that are already shipped. So like what is the judge supposed to say? "Ship it." It's shipped already. It doesn't make much sense. I think they just kept saying yes and then eventually were like, "All right.
We gotta start saying some nos." And just, it's just fair in Chris' lap that he's got four of them.
Dan Soppelsa: Yeah. Yeah, it wasn't
Chris Lemon: you know what? I didn't, yeah, I didn't take it personally. My kinda thought was like, I already made it on stage. No matter what happens, like I kinda won the lottery on this, it, yes or no h- there's 1,000 people at Laracon and only seven of us on s- going on stage to pitch, like jackpot,
Dan Soppelsa: yep, absolutely. Yeah, I thought that was, Yeah, I agree with everything you said in terms of everyone did a great job presenting. There were some cool ideas. Yeah, that commithistory.io was, also kinda connects to the whimsical side of things. It's a, a funny cheeky idea, but also actually something that people are interested [00:49:00] in too, yeah, I thought it was a really cool way to wrap things up. I would be very surprised if there's not a, a very similarly themed format at Laracon next year.
Joe Racz: Yeah,
Dan Soppelsa: Cool, and that...
Chris Lemon: pretty well-received format, so wouldn't surprised. So if you're listening, get your ideas ready for next year
Dan Soppelsa: Get
Joe Racz: Exactly. Do you guys think it would've been even more impactful if they did it, like maybe not at the end, but like maybe right after lunch or something like this, get people hyped up and then let people talk about like everything that got presented there to stick around? I'm just wonder if the, their...
'Cause they used to have these like closing moments and stuff like that. I think Francis gave a, a great one at one point, and it's like all emotional and stuff, or everyone's just hyped about the new Laracon stuff, or Laravel stuff. So I just wondered that thought crossed my mind. I wonder if it did anybody's
Dan Soppelsa: Yeah. Yeah, I think it was a good way to end the conference. Yeah, I wonder if it could've been even better at a different time. I don't know. I hadn't thought about that. I think
Chris Lemon: I do think that having that finish and then walking aside and there [00:50:00] being, a bit of an open bar was a nice way to end. And I it definitely... But I think like it was really, I think it worked well that way, not just because obviously there was alcohol involved, but it gave everyone like a cooler moment that they could, go and chat about outside and So like it, it gave everyone kind of common ground to "Oh, did you see that pitch? That was really cool." Or and that way there's more more things to talk about and like it's easier to build bridges with people 'cause we, everyone just experienced this common thing that was like really cool, and there's obviously lots to talk about with all the things that were pitched, right?
Dan Soppelsa: Yeah.
Chris Lemon: That's true. That makes sense. I like it.
Dan Soppelsa: Yeah, I thought it was great. I thought it was great. Cool, yeah, and that, that kind of like wind down the conference and yeah, like you said, there was a bit of a social afterwards, and then everyone dispersed out into the Boston night, and I think some people headed home later that night or the next day or within the next couple of days.
And overall, yeah, I think it was a, a great venue a great location certainly easy us- for us to travel to from from Southwestern Ontario. And yeah, I think the city of Boston was pretty cool. Any closing thoughts from [00:51:00] from either of you about Laracon?
Joe Racz: Just can't wait for next year. I, yeah, I hope it's s- also somewhere equally as cool
Dan Soppelsa: Yeah. Same Joe?
Chris Lemon: I actually wondered, did you guys grab anything cool swag-wise
Dan Soppelsa: I ended up with with one of these elephants
Joe Racz: I also have one of
Dan Soppelsa: people at Zen, which is like a denim PHP elephant. So that's the first one of those that I have.
Chris Lemon: This, I can't stop playing with this thing. This is like a, a big Hotfix fan. I just love the idea that there's
Dan Soppelsa: Oh, it's a hotfix. That's
Chris Lemon: It's a Hotfix. I love it. It's from Red Berry, I think. It's just, it's cool
Dan Soppelsa: Yeah, I think those are,
Joe Racz: I did yeah.
Dan Soppelsa: go ahead, Chris
Chris Lemon: go ahead, no, I said I also did get one of the Laravel keyboards as part of being on stage, and it is a very nice keyboard. definitely makes me write Lar- Laravel code like 12 times faster,
Dan Soppelsa: Had you purchased one too?
Chris Lemon: I, I had now I only ended up with
Dan Soppelsa: You were able to do an
Joe Racz: Okay, great.
Yeah.
Dan Soppelsa: yeah. Yeah, I'd heard that [00:52:00] you'd bought one, and then you, we were given one, so I was like, "Oh, man."
Joe Racz: Yeah. No, it all, we were able to make a deal, so
Dan Soppelsa: Yeah. Cool. All right. Thanks for joining, guys, and sharing our thoughts. Thanks all of you for tuning in, and we'll see you on the next one. Have a great day, everybody
Joe Racz: See you later
Chris Lemon: Ja