I attended my first Laracon in person and I have to say I really enjoyed the experience — maybe more than I expected to. It was well organised and the talks were diverse, informative and actionable. Day 1 was all technical and mostly revolved around Laravel. Day 2 had a different mix of talks and the non-technical ones were thought-provoking and entertaining.

One big highlight for me personally was getting to meet a bunch of people I follow and banter with on Twitter.

Another highlight was being able to go on a mini food pilgrimage during my limited time in New York. Laracon had plenty of free food and I did sample some, but I wasn’t going to let this opportunity slip by.

Here’s a quick recap of my learnings from the presentations. Unfortunately, I could only make it to one of the Science Fair talks because I sat through all the main presentations. I didn’t take notes for all of them and this is not a blow-by-blow account of every talk. Some may be sparser in detail compared to others.

Day 1

Freek Van der Herten, Spatie

Topic: Creating a dashboard with Laravel, Vue.js and Pusher

I was already familiar with Freek’s presentation from his blog post on the same topic. It was still a good learning experience as he did some live coding to demonstrate how the time/weather, packagist stats and twitter feed components were built.

He also took us through some impressive stats for Spatie’s OSS packages.

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