Laracon US: Meeting the Team
Back home in Denmark after Laracon US. I joined Laravel in October and this week around 50 of us were together for the first time. I had met a few at Laracon EU, but this was different.
Back from Laracon US.
I joined Laravel in October. Since then I've talked to my teammates every day on Slack, paired on Zoom, reviewed each other's code, and debugged production incidents together at odd hours. But Laravel is a fully remote team, spread across time zones, and until this week I had only met a handful of them in person at Laracon EU.
Fifty people in one room
Laracon US brought around fifty of us together. Designers, engineers, support, leadership. People whose voices I knew from calls, whose code I had read for months, whose opinions I had debated in pull request comments. Putting faces to all of that changes things.
Remote work is effective. I believe that. Hearing how someone actually thinks about a problem over lunch -- Slack can't replicate that.
The conference
Laracon US is a well-run event. The talks were good, and the Laravel Cloud demo on stage was a highlight.
What I'm taking home
Building infrastructure alone is fine, but seeing how it connects to everything else, and hearing from devs who'll actually use it -- that changes your energy. Came back with more than I left with.
It was a good week.