I'll be committing live from Laracon AU next week in Brisbane, Australia.
Follow to stay up-to-date if you can't attend (or even if you are attending, I suppose!)
I will also be live from Laracon AU next week!
Who will I see there?
Shane Smith
@shane-smith
Developer / Product Owner working with PHP, Vue, Tailwind.
Organiser of 
@PHPxADL (PHP & Laravel meetup) in Adelaide, Australia.
- Adelaide, Australia
- phpxadl.com
- github.com/shane-smith
- Sponsor on GitHub
- Joined October 2026
Commit activity
101 commits in the last 30 days
longest streak 15 dayscurrent 15
2,149 / 2,500 XP351 XP to root
Pinned
Today
Working code is not the same as understanding that code. Thanks Anaya Dodge! 🎉
Can you check these boxes?
An experienced developer may not need to check off both of them.
But if you're a junior or you're trying to learn, you should definitely try to check off all five.
Number 4 is the MOST important of all.…
"The act of retrieving information is itself a potent learning event."
When you teach others, it makes YOU a better developer. This is a well known fact with everything - not just software dev - that teaching others helps the teacher too.
We can use AI in a way that also…
AI that gives you answers can be a problem for learning, and understanding the code.
AI that helps to break down the problem and explain it before giving an answer also helps you to both learn and grow, as well as improves your understanding of the final code.
AI that gives you answers can be a problem for learning, and understanding the code.
AI that helps to break down the problem and explain it before giving an answer also helps you to both learn and grow, as well as improves your understanding of the final code.
"The act of retrieving information is itself a potent learning event."
When you teach others, it makes YOU a better developer. This is a well known fact with everything - not just software dev - that teaching others helps the teacher too.
We can use AI in a way that also…
Once you've got the answers to these to questions, this is what you do:
Questions to ask yourself before you prompt AI:
Once you've got the answers to these to questions, this is what you do:
Stack Overflow developer survey. Developers use it, but don't really trust it.
Also when the work gets faster, the expectations get higher.
Everyone seems to be shipping faster than ever, and there's now pressure to use AI in a way that doesn't facilitate learning or properly…
Anaya Dodge talking about learning to code - in a world of AI generated code - at Laracon AU.
Formula 1 has a systematic approach to improving safety:
- Red flag to pause the race
- Emergency car on the first lap
- Race suit to protect against fire
- Survival cell in the vehicle itself
- HANS device (harness) to redistribute force to the shoulders and away from the neck…
We want to move quickly, but we want to do it without putting the business at risk.
How do we produce software quickly, without taking on additional risk in the world of AI assisted coding, but also AI assisted vulnerability discovery and attacks?
No one would say that driving…
However, accelerating upstream to write code faster won't help if there are bottlenecks downstream. How can we speed up QA?
Get the QA specialists to help early on and provide critical guidance, but make the engineers responsible for the environment.
Engineers and QA should…
Compared to our suburban road, the racing environment is far more controlled. The speed limit can be pushed much further.
If we can control our environment, we can allow for significant speed when delivering software.
We want to engineer a predictable environment, rather than…
We want to move quickly, but we want to do it without putting the business at risk.
How do we produce software quickly, without taking on additional risk in the world of AI assisted coding, but also AI assisted vulnerability discovery and attacks?
No one would say that driving…
Formula 1 has a systematic approach to improving safety:
- Red flag to pause the race
- Emergency car on the first lap
- Race suit to protect against fire
- Survival cell in the vehicle itself
- HANS device (harness) to redistribute force to the shoulders and away from the neck…
@Statamic uses the Glide library under the hood to resize and crop or adjust images.
https://glide.thephpleague.com/
Also worth taking a look if you need a solution for regular Laravel apps.
glide.thephpleague.comGlide - HTTP based image manipulationsWonderfully easy on-demand image manipulation library with an HTTP based API.
@Statamic uses the Glide library under the hood to resize and crop or adjust images.
https://glide.thephpleague.com/
Also worth taking a look if you need a solution for regular Laravel apps.
glide.thephpleague.comGlide - HTTP based image manipulationsWonderfully easy on-demand image manipulation library with an HTTP based API.
"Do we really need Laravel?" asks Marty Friedel at the Laravel conference. They were never seen again 😁
The point: Statamic can help with static caching. You can scale by not booting Laravel at all when you don't need it.
You can even do partial, half-measure caching, only…
Yesterday
Harden the signals to help catch issues early. This gives an LLM all the information it needs to do a better, more thorough job.
Package https://github.com/nunomaduro/essentials by @nunomaduro mentioned by @mpociot as a good starting point.
#LaraconAU
GitHubGitHub - nunomaduro/essentials: Just better defaults for your Laravel projects.Just better defaults for your Laravel projects. Contribute to nunomaduro/essentials development by creating an account on GitHub.
As @mpociot points out in his Laracon AU talk, we have many tools but none of them tell us what is actually happening on production.