Things Jeffrey Way’s talk at Laracon Made me Believe

As web developers, we love to code. We love the challenges that coding presents and building applications that might one day change the world and make it a better place.

Making world class applications is what we thrive on, in the tidiest and most professional way so as to help it continue being an enjoyable project to work on for the course of the product’s lifecycle.

However, with that comes an overwhelming amount of technologies, principles and concepts that we need to be very familiar with:  where to use them, the limitations of each – and we all know it can very quickly get out of hand.

I attended the LaraconEU 2015 conference in Amsterdam this year. One talk that definitely hit home for me was Jeffrey Way’s talk entitled “Things Laravel Made me Believe”. The talk went through the common thoughts and ideas of a modern PHP web developer.

Jeffrey Way of Laracasts.com has been coding for over 10 years, and even now is still learning new things every single day. Hearing a community leader like Jeffrey Way make a statement like that certainly gives the rest of us hope!  It can be overwhelming listening to other Web Developers talk about new concepts and new technologies that we have not gotten around to learning yet. And even by the time we finally get around to learning said technology, a new concept or framework is released, and the full cycle starts again.

Another issue that was covered was the idea that “we’re all vulnerable, and wide open to influence”. What Jeffrey continued to explain was that we can examine all the concepts and principles that we want but at the end of the day each possible action is only tangible for certain situations. Jeffrey went on to say that we should ‘distrust’ other developers. Every developer will have their own opinions and ideas about what works best however we should be working on what suits us best, whether it be as a team or as a lone developer. “Take it in, consider it, but don’t necessarily immediately adopt it”.

What I really took away from this talk was that we should always take care in what we build, resolve to take the simplest approach to a given problem for what suits us best and take what we hear about ‘the next best thing’ with a pinch of salt.

If you want to hear Jeffrey's full talk, you can view it in full here.