Narrowing scope & post Laracon 2025 thoughts

Laracon US 2025 wrapped up last week and I had such a great time. Events like Laracon energize and motivate me to get back to work on my personal / side projects and this year was no different. Since I got back, I've rewritten the entirety of songrank.dev in livewire 3 in preparation to build new features and try to grow the platform. 😂 I got really into it and did a big chunk of the re-write while I waited for my delayed flight.

For some background, last year was my first Laracon ever, and I had such a great time. I went to Laracon by myself, on my own dime, knowing nobody and it was some of the most fun I ever had. Being around such an awesome community of like-minded individuals was just what I needed then to stay motivated. Since Laracon last year, I also started attending other PHP & Laravel meetups (specifically phpxphilly & phpxnyc) and made so many great friends! So this year, I got to hang around with great friends and meet so many new ones too!

This year, I easily met over 2 dozen new faces. As I chatted with new and current friends, I started to notice a trend; more than half of everyone I talked to had their own business, is a freelancer or worked for themselves in some capacity.

Having these conversations made me start thinking more in depth about my current career trajectory and where I truly wanted to be 5 years from now when I am 30. This is something recruiters, colleagues, family and friends have always asked me, but it was never really something I spent a lot of energy planning. I never really had a clear goal for myself in mind. I thought maybe I'd transition into management or move further up the chain at my current agency. However, after chatting around, I think it would be really cool, and great for me to try to build some real SaaS style products (not just for-fun toy like apps like songrank.dev or joystickjury.app) and work for myself. By attending events like Larcon & PHPxPhilly, I've learned that I am capable of it, I need to just do it.

Well that's a lot easier said than done, right? 😆 So I've started planning the first baby steps on how I am going to achieve this - and then just start.

• First, I want to "organize my tools". I want to enhance my development flow and productivity. Alex did a great talk on TMUX & greater utilization of the terminal to help enhance my development workflow this laracon. So I am going to explore this more in depth and see if it will help me.

• Next, I need to consolidate some of the common patterns I copy & paste from project to project. I had a great chat with Nuno at Laracon who encouraged me to build my own "essentials" package tailored to the way I like to write my applications. This package will drop in helper functions, action class/pattern generation, asset handling and other niche things that I've noticed come up on every app I work on / start to work on then throw away 🥶. This will also give me the opportunity to learn more about how packages are made and maintained. I've worked on proprietary packages at work for workflows, fields, files and forms - but never built any myself from the ground up. It is time to change that.

• Then, I want to invest more in myself. I need to take and make the time to watch some more laracasts courses. I also think it's time I bite the bullet and purchase a PHP Storm license. I'm also thinking about upping my claude subscription, as well as my laravel nightwatch subscription too. I also primarily develop on my custom built windows 11 gaming PC. I hate windows, and used to be on popOS, but switched back about a year ago. But I also own a Macbook Air (thanks Taylor 😎) & I think I may attempt to switch over to writing apps on that machine instead. Keep gaming and development seperate.

• Another thing I need to work on is rest and knowing that it is OK to rest and take time to do nothing. Rest is a part of the discipline, and that is something I never really practiced. I would just write, and develop until I would hit a weird road block, burn out, give up and check out.

A big part of achieving this will also be narrowing my personal scope. What I mean by that is making dedicated time every week, or every day to work on developing applications, further developing myself and refining my goals. I have a huge range of hobbies that I never seem to have enough time for. (Video Games, Building Computers, 3D printing & modeling, jigsaw puzzles, streaming on twitch, riding my bike, playing board games, hanging out with friends.. it goes on and on) By choosing hours, or chunks of time weekly / daily, outside of my working hours, I think will help keep me in check in regards to my routine and allow me to better see my progression.

This is something I really care about, so making time for this as opposed to other hobbies will be difficult. However, I think it is necessary to get to where I want to be. I am still figuring out a cadence for this time, but right now I am thinking a minimum of 3, 3 hour sessions every week. We'll see how that goes - Lol.

So these are my thoughts on my future goals, and narrowing my scope. I am hoping by putting these thoughts out into the world, it will help hold myself accountable and I will be able to look back after next Laracon at how far I've come.

Also - here's a photo dump of all of all the photos I have from this Laracon! Hope to see you all there next year!