Laracon US 2025 recap, Part 1

Steve HamSteve Ham
6 min read

Recap Part 2 | Recap Part 3

For a while I'd been wanting to attend a Laracon US conference (the premier national conference for the PHP framework Laravel) but couldn't see myself traveling to one in the past, so I was very excited when the 2025 event (held last week Tuesday and Wednesday 7/29-30) came to my local area of Denver, Colorado this year. I knew that I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to attend with some very well-known names on the list of speakers like Taylor Otwell (creator of the Laravel framework), Evan You (creator of Vue.js), Jeffrey Way (creator of Laracasts), and Aaron Francis (Laravel developer and course instructor), so I made the plans to attend.

Getting to see Evan You and Jeffrey Way had particular interest for me since I've used both Vue.js and Laracasts (as a learning resource) for several years now, going back to 2018. Since I also first heard of Aaron Francis through the Small Bets community in 2023 (when he led a webinar called "Effortless Screencasting" about how to streamline screencasting including tips & tricks for video production), I've followed his articles and courses with great interest and he always conveys so much passion, excitement, and inspiration for what he does!

The conference was very well-attended at the Mission Ballroom located just outside of downtown Denver and seemed to almost fill the venue's capacity (which according to its website "provides flexible seating of 2,200 to 4,000 guests"), and in the office/retail building across from Mission Ballroom (shared with Left Hand Brewing), almost 30 sponsor companies had a table in a sponsor expo area for attendees to network and learn more about each company. In addition, folks from the Laravel company organized a "stamp card hunt" so that attendees could nab some free swag like a T-shirt and toy Lamborghini if they got enough "stamps" from expo tables for Laravel Cloud services and sponsor companies, respectively.

All of the companies sponsoring Laracon US 2025 that had a table at the sponsor expo included: Active Logic, Cloudflare, CodeRabbit, Curotec, DigitalOcean, Geocodio, Givebutter, JetBrains, Kirschbaum, LaraCopilot, Loop, Modern Mcguire, MongoDB, Mux, Neon, Packagist, Prompt Health, Resend, Sentry, Statamic, Storyblok, Tighten, TinyMCE, Valkey, Vehikl, Vonage, and WorkOS.

The range of speakers included folks from the Laravel company (founder/CEO Taylor Otwell, along with their Head of Design David Hill, Forge Team Lead James Brooks, Cloud Team Lead Joe Dixon, Agency Partnerships Manager Dave Hicking, Marketing Engineer Leah Thompson, President/COO Tom Crary, and Marketing folks Hank Taylor and Sam Sappenfield), other prominent figures from both sponsor and non-sponsor companies, and individuals that were simply part of the community, which helped to make Laracon feel like a true community event for everyone passionate about the Laravel framework. Laravel developer (and course instructor) Aaron Francis provided Tuesday morning's opening speech and acted as an MC and moderator for both days of the conference, and hit just the right vibe to make the conference feel casual, entertaining, and informative all at the same time. I most appreciated that Aaron Francis took a couple of minutes after every speaker finished their presentation to ask them one or two follow-up questions that perfectly recapped the presentation and reinforced a couple of takeaway points for the audience!

Some of the topics covered included Aaron Francis' excellent motivational opening speech empowering developers to create whatever it is that we want to build and to just start, to technical deep-dives on Pest 4, Eloquent ORM, Livewire 4, and Git rebase, to more high-level reviews of design patterns, team communication, and the larger Laravel community. Below was the full agenda of talks for this year (note: every speaker's individual and company name below has been linked appropriately to their own website or social media profile):

Day 1 (Tuesday 7/29):

Day 2 (Wednesday 7/30):

After attending Laracon US 2025 last week, I came away extremely impressed by all of the folks behind Laravel and producing everything that goes into the framework, along with the incredible community around Laravel and how large and active it is. The excitement from other developers was also very palpable, as things like Laravel Cloud updates, Tailwind CSS, and Livewire 4 got a huge round of applause when they were mentioned. Over the course of both days, it became clear that the Laravel framework (including its ecosystem and community) is aiming to provide everything that you could possibly need to easily create, maintain, test, and deploy Laravel applications as easily as possible, and that there's also a conscious effort to streamline that process as much as possible. As someone who's been working with PHP since the beginning of my career in web development (circa 2017/2018), it invigorated my excitement in Laravel and seeing how it continues to evolve going into the future!

In my next follow-up post (which I'll be posting as soon as I can, within the next week), I'll provide some of the key takeaways and detailed notes that I wrote down for each speaker's presentation. In the meantime, anyone who missed attending in-person can catch up from the official Laracon US livestreams that were recorded for each day:

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Steve Ham
Steve Ham