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Laracon EU 2017: First Time

I took two developers from EasyInspect to Laracon EU in Amsterdam. First Laracon. First time meeting Taylor. We were building drone inspection software on Laravel and it felt like the right community to be part of.

· 3 min read · Sylvester Damgaard
Laracon EU 2017: First Time

I brought two developers from EasyInspect to Laracon EU in Amsterdam. It was the first Laracon for all three of us.

At EasyInspect we were building Inspection Cloud, a platform for industrial drone inspections. The entire backend was Laravel. Image processing pipelines, inspection workflows, report generation, customer portals. A conference full of people on the same stack made sense.

Entrance to Laracon EU 2017 in Amsterdam with attendees gathering outside
Laracon EU 2017 in Amsterdam. First Laracon.

Meeting Taylor

I met Taylor Otwell for the first time and got the obligatory selfie. At the time it was a fan moment. I'd been building on his framework for years and there he was, easy to talk to and curious about what people were building. I had no idea that seven years later I would end up on his team.

Selfie with Taylor Otwell at Laracon EU 2017
First selfie with Taylor Otwell at Laracon EU 2017.

The conference

The talks were good, but what stuck with me was the community. Developers from all over Europe building real products on Laravel. Not toy projects or tutorial apps. Production systems handling real traffic and real money. Good to know we weren't the only ones. We were doing the same thing with drone inspections, and it was clear the ecosystem could support it.

My two colleagues came back fired up. We shipped ideas from the conference within weeks.

Looking back, Laracon EU 2017 started here. The meetups, the packages, the talks, joining Laravel. All of it traces back to this conference.