Laracon EU 2025 - My Recap

Taylor Otwell at Laracon EU - we must ship

Laracon EU is the official Laravel conference in Europe. In 2024, I attended part of the first day, but had to give up because I got sick halfway through.

In 2025, I managed to attend the full 2-day event and I had a blast. The conference is very well-organized and the Laravel community is full of positive vibes and people. I consider myself lucky to be part of such a vibrant ecosystem.

Some impressions

Talks

With 17 talks, there was something for everyone. I didn't attend all the talks, but I will definitely watch the ones I missed on YouTube. Here are some of the talks that stood out to me.

Have you met Ada? Word Embeddings with Laravel

Diana broke down a very complex topic and made it accessible for non-math witches and wizards.

Generating word embeddings for your data is getting more and more common in the world of AI. For example, to build out a semantic search or figuring out the context of your content.

This will be very helpful for my project Content Catalog and I can't wait to play with the ada-laravel package.

Laravel Update

The room was buzzing when Taylor, the creator of Laravel, took the stage and gave us an update on the Laravel ecosystem.

There is now a release date and pricing for the Laravel Cloud. This new platform simplifies deploying Laravel apps without having to manage your own infrastructure. I was lucky enough to get early access back in December and already moved two apps to the Laravel Cloud, including Wire in the Wild.

New starter kits are coming soon and they look absolutely gorgeous. As a huge fan of Livewire, I am super excited that the creator, Caleb, will be offering parts of the official Livewire UI kit flux for free, bundled with the new starter kit.

Designing Laravel

Being a bit of a design nerd, but not a designer, the talk by David Hill was a welcome change to the usual technical lineup. The new design language will help lift Laravel further, and rightfully so. Crafted by Artisans all the way.

The choice to use Swiss Design grids and typography as a starting point will certainly help to craft a design system for all the various outputs and things to come.

If we suspend disbelief and criticism, what would that idea look like?

Introducing FUSION: a new paradigm for Laravel + Javascript

With FUSION, Aaron introduces a new way to work with Javascript frontends in Laravel apps. Coming from Livewire, this looks like a great excuse to learn more Javascript in the future.

While still early, I'm certain this will make it more approachable for Javascript developers to work with Laravel too.

As with all things Aaron, the best message for me was when he said, he is not qualified to build this, but took the challenge anyway. What a beautiful approach to work and life.

Come and join a growing bunch of people supporting the Try Hard Studios open-source efforts:

Try Hard Studios Backstage

Let's help Try Hard try harder.

Building Mobile Apps with PHP

After the inspiring and mind-blowing talk by Aaron, it was time to get my mind blown one more time. Simon got on stage and took what was probably the first-ever photo on an iPhone using a PHP app.

Let that sink in for a moment, not only can you build desktop apps with your favorite tech stack, now you can start building mobile apps too.

I'm definitely going to build an app or two with this. Join and support the efforts of Simon and the crew behind Native PHP:

Herd

Launch Laravel faster than ever before.