Laracon 2018 Recap: Great conference, people, and city

It’s already one and half a month ago. I traveled to Chicago from Japan to attend Laracon 2018 at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. It was my first overseas tech conference and also my first visit to the US! I learned a lot, met many Laravel devs in the community, and enjoyed the city of Chicago.

I started my career as a web developer 4 years ago in my current company Kurashicom, and since then I’ve been using Laravel and loved it a lot! Hence, it was a great pleasure for me to attend the conference.

There were a wide variety of sessions. Not only sessions about Laravel, but also Vue.js, CSS, architecture and soft skills. All sessions were very informative and exciting but I cannot cover all of them in this post. So, let me share the three of them that inspired me the most.

Jason Fried Q&A

Jason Fried, CEO at Basecamp, talked about how they work at Basecamp. They work in 6-week cycles. Every 6 weeks, they decide what they will work on and assign teams of 2 or 3 people. It’s nice to work in such a short cycle because a long project makes the team bored and less motivated.

His talk inspired me a lot as I was just wondering how we should structure projects and teams as our team was growing with new developers.

If you want to know more about their working style, there are detailed blog posts and YouTube videos available below.

• How we structure our work and teams at Basecamp (Medium)
• What six weeks of work looks like (Medium)
• How We Work — Getting Real (YouTube)

Colin DeCarlo “Design Patterns with Laravel”

Colin DeCarlo talked about how to apply design patterns to Laravel applications. In his session, he introduced 3 design patterns, Adapter Pattern, Strategy Pattern, and Factory Pattern.

I had heard about those design patterns but got a deeper understanding through this session. Actually, after the conference, I introduced Strategy Pattern and Factory Pattern to my e-commerce app that has several payment options 🙌

Jocelyn Glei “Hurry Slowly”

Jocelyn Glei hosts a podcast called “Hurry Slowly”. Her session totally blew me mind. She talked about how we can be more productive and creative on our work.

The single most important thing is making progress in meaningful work. Not just launching new version of app, get rid of huge amount of debt, but really matters is daily, incremental progress. Seeing yourself take baby steps towards completing a task. Humans love small wins.

Unfortunately, her session is not available on YouTube but you should check her podcast!

Community around the globe

I had many chances to talk to other attendees from around the world during breaks between sessions, lunch time, and the after party (and after-after party as well!).

I came from Japan by myself so it was a great opportunity to talk to Laravel developers around the globe. It was fantastic to make friends who use the same technology. I heard from the presenter Justin Jackson that I was the attendee from the farthest country!

During the after party, I had a chance to talk to Taylor Otwell, the creator of Laravel. I asked a question about Laravel Nova that he just revealed in the keynote. He kindly answered my question and took a picture with me 😀

The city of Chicago

The city was also great. I stayed Chicago for one week and worked remotely until the day before the conference. It was much cooler and less humid than Japan. The lake Michigan was beautiful. I also love Chicago-style deep dish pizza!

Back to real life

It was a great experience for me to attend Laracon. I learned a lot but it doesn’t mean that my tech skills suddenly skyrockets. I will watch conference sessions again on YouTube, check their blog posts and put what I learned into the real projects.

Before attending Laracon, I was not sure if it would be worth attending it from Japan. But now I’m sure I’ll be back to the next Laracon! The conference itself was very interesting and exciting, and also it was great to talk to many people in the community.

See you next year!