Laracon 2025: The Largest Gathering of the Laravel Community
The year 2025 brought another unforgettable edition of the prestigious Laracon EU conference, this time in the beautiful premises of the Muziekgebouw concert hall in Amsterdam. Laracon is an annual event that brings developers from around the world the latest insights and innovations within the Laravel framework.
This year's conference was also exceptional in that two-thirds of the total 750 participants were attending Laracon for the first time. Let's take a look at what the two-day program full of inspiring presentations and discussions brought.
Day 1: Technology, Optimization, and Product Management
After the opening speech by the Coneco moderator, who welcomed all participants and introduced the program, a series of lectures followed covering performance, machine learning, Livewire, testing, and product management.
Pipeline, Machine Learning, and Performance Problem Solving
The conference was kicked off by Bobby Bouwman with the topic Pipeline Power-Up: Turning Complex Logic into Simple Steps. He introduced the Pipeline Pattern, which allows for sequential processing of commands in Laravel applications (similar to middleware or decorators). He also explained the Saga Pattern, which serves to cancel the entire operation if any step fails.
Next was Diana Scharf with the lecture Have you met Ada? Word Embeddings with Laravel. Diana focused on natural language processing (NLP) in PHP and demonstrated how text can be embedded into vectors, enabling smarter and more accurate searches in applications.
Bert De Swaef delivered a lecture Help out frustrated Bob, focusing on the challenges associated with deploying applications to production. He explained how the team addressed long response times in applications built on Livewire, initially using polling for regular synchronization, but later replacing it with websockets and broadcasting due to increased server load.
Static Analysis and Performance Optimization of Laravel Applications
The next speaker was Ryan Chandler, who in his lecture From Zero to Static Analysis Hero emphasized the importance of static code analysis in software development. He pointed out that by using static analysis, potential errors can be detected before the application is even run, significantly reducing the number of issues in production.
Eliminating Slow Requests and Product Management for Developers
After the lunch break, we saw the energetic Marcel Pociot on stage, who in his lecture No more slow requests addressed the issue of slow requests in Laravel applications. He identified four main factors affecting performance:
- Database queries
- HTTP requests
- Queued jobs
- The performance of PHP itself
He highlighted the importance of queues for optimizing the request-response cycle and introduced the php-spx tool, which allows for detailed profiling of PHP script execution.
The lecture was followed by John Drexler, who in the topic Don't solve non-problems… focused on product management for developers. The theme revolved around product management and the idea that developers should think like product managers. Drexler emphasized the fact that if a developer is working on a project, they are essentially doing product management.
PHP Communities, Extensions, and Introduction of Laravel News
The next speaker was the founder of Larabelles (a community for underrepresented developers in the PHP and Laravel world), who presented the topic Fun with PHP functions. She introduced various lesser-known and fun PHP functions that often find use in specific cases.
Michi Hoffmann explained how to write custom PHP extensions in the lecture A field guide to writing PHP extensions. He introduced the lifecycle of extensions and the new tool PHP Installer of Extensions (PIE), which is expected to soon replace the current standard PHAR.
The Grand Finale of Day 1: Taylor Otwell and the Future of Laravel
The highlight of the first day was the much-anticipated lecture by Taylor Otwell, the founder of Laravel. He introduced new features and upcoming changes, with the most significant announcements including:
- Inertia v2 – an improved version of the popular JavaScript framework for Laravel
- Flux – a paid library of Livewire components (with a basic version for free)
- Official VS Code extension for Laravel
- Redesign of the Laravel website
- Laravel 12 – no major changes, focusing more on stabilizing existing functionalities
- Nightwatch (launching 24.2.2025) – a monitoring tool for Laravel applications
- New starter kits for beginner developers
- Laravel Cloud – official cloud hosting optimized for Laravel, allowing automatic hibernation of unused instances and cost savings
Taylor Otwell also commented on the $57M investment from Accel, emphasizing that Laravel will continue to maintain its independence and community focus.
Summary of the First Day
- Optimization of Laravel Applications – Practical advice on pipeline pattern, rollback mechanisms, and using websockets instead of polling for better performance of Livewire applications.
- Static Code Analysis – Effective tools for detecting errors before deploying the application to increase stability in production.
- Speeding Up Requests – Analyzing the main factors slowing down Laravel applications and introducing solutions like queued jobs and profiling with php-spx.
- Developers should think like product managers – Not every problem requires a code change; only meaningful and real user problems should be addressed.
- Changes in the Laravel Ecosystem – Taylor Otwell introduced new features including Inertia v2, Flux, native VS Code extension, and Laravel 12.
- The Biggest News - Laravel Cloud – Official cloud hosting optimized for Laravel, allowing hibernation of unused instances for cost savings.
Day 2: Open-source, Mobile Applications, and API
After an intense first day full of lectures on optimization, performance, and the future of Laravel, the second day of the conference focused on open-source, mobile development, modern API technologies, and application monitoring.
Monitoring, Open-source, and PHPUnit Tricks
Jess Archer opened the second day of the conference with a lecture on Nightwatch – a new monitoring tool for Laravel applications. She explained in detail how it works, how data will be collected from applications, and what benefits it will bring for the stability and performance of deployed systems.
Chris Morrell - Your First Pull Request, delivered one of the most motivating lectures of the conference. He shared his experiences from his first steps in open-source and emphasized that a rejected pull request is not a failure, but part of learning. According to him, half of his PRs were rejected, but each taught him something. He recommended making small, clear, and easily reviewable pull requests.
Sebastian Bergmann, the creator of PHPUnit, focused in his lecture So you think you know PHPUnit? on lesser-known and advanced PHPUnit testing options. He showed new methods for linking code coverage with source code, filtering tests before running them, and using event hooks to extend PHPUnit functionality. He also introduced the tools ergebnis/phpunit-slow-test-detector and pestphp.com, which help optimize testing in Laravel applications.
Design of Laravel and Creating Modern Web Applications
The main designer of Laravel, David Hill, explained the process of redesigning the official Laravel website and the design philosophy of Swiss design used in its creation. He emphasized that the goal was to improve onboarding for new developers and simplify navigation in the Laravel ecosystem.
Mobile Applications, API, and the New Fusion Tool
Aaron Francis introduced a completely new project, Fusion, which allows the combination of PHP code directly in the application's templates. He explained how Fusion can neatly integrate dynamic components into Laravel applications, speeding up development and improving code cleanliness.
A big surprise of the conference was Simon Hamp's lecture, who demonstrated NativePHP for iOS – a new way of developing native iOS applications using PHP. He demonstrated how PHP combined with NativePHP allows using camera functions, vibration, and other iOS system tools directly from PHP code.
Kévin Dunglas, a member of the Symfony core team, introduced the API Platform for Laravel – a framework that significantly simplifies the development of API interfaces. By using PHP attributes over models or controllers, it is possible to automatically generate API documentation, support REST and GraphQL, and ensure a high level of security from the start. Additionally, the API Platform supports Laravel Octane to increase the performance of API queries.
Summary of the Second Day:
- Nightwatch brings an official tool for monitoring Laravel applications.
- Contributing to open-source is the beginning of growth – don't be afraid of rejected PRs!
- NativePHP for iOS pushes PHP towards mobile application development.
- API Platform simplifies the development of Laravel API architectures with support for REST and GraphQL.
- The new design of the Laravel website makes the framework more accessible to new developers.
The entire conference was well-organized, rich in networking opportunities, and discussions with Laravel community experts.
We are already looking forward to Laracon 2026!
