Recapping 2023 Laravel meetup @ Agiledrop

On Thursday, June 15, we hosted our 2023 Laravel meetup which took place in our headquarters in Ljubljana. While we’ve had Laravel-focused talks at past PHP meetups, this was exclusively a Laravel meetup of the local development community here in Slovenia, and we’re very happy we got to organize and host it.

With over 60 guests, it was our biggest community-centered event since things started to open up again after Covid (if not ever!). We started with three talks by three fantastic speakers sharing their expertise and lessons learned while working with Laravel.

Rok Jencic: Best practices for Laravel API integration

The first talk was given by Agiledrop’s very own Laravel expert Rok Jencic, who has been an integral team member for over four years, recently in particular due to his role in the onboarding projects for Laravel and Angular engineers.

Rok spoke about best practices for integrating Laravel with third-party APIs, while also covering potential pitfalls such as using unofficial libraries. The key takeaways from his talk were: tighten error handling; validate before sending requests; cache whenever possible; and make sure to thoroughly test your code.

Janez Cergolj: Lessons and tricks from a decade of working with Laravel

The next speaker was Janez Cergolj, a seasoned Laravel consultant with a decade’s worth of experience. He shared the lessons and tricks he’s accumulated over the years, covering topics and challenges that every Laravel developer will have encountered, while also providing tips and additional resources for more senior Laravel engineers who want to advance their knowledge.

Besides covering specific Laravel concepts such as routes, controllers and macros, his talk also highlighted the importance of properly caring for your code through tools like Larastan and Laravel Pint. He finished with a few general tips and tricks, such as embracing community standards and not trying to fight the framework.

Damjan Cvetko: Laravel Sail + Xdebug + VS Code (lightning talk)

The last presentation was given in the form of a lightning talk by Damjan Cvetko, skilled development engineer and system architect with over 20 years of experience across different languages and frameworks, e.g. C, C++, C#, Java, Vue, and of course PHP.

He demonstrated live debugging with Xdebug 3 and also showed a practical example of integrating Xdebug into an IDE, focusing on VS Code since it is the top choice for so many developers.

After the official part of the meetup, it was time for some networking over snacks and drinks, as well as some exciting games of table football which has become somewhat of a household sport here at Agiledrop over the last year.

Since we had so many people this time around, each guest received their own name tag upon entering, as well as an exclusive t-shirt that we had designed and produced just for this meetup.

We were very happy to host such a large number of Laravel enthusiasts and provide such great sessions from Laravel professionals. Events like these help us stay true to our mission of promoting both awesome open-source projects as well as the local tech community. We’re already planning some exciting stuff for after the summer holidays – stay tuned!