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As a solo bootstrapped SaaS founder that literally relies on my app to pay my rent and food, I owe my sanity to Laravel. I've been doing web development for 10+

by _xnmw 5y ago

As a solo bootstrapped SaaS founder that literally relies on my app to pay my rent and food, I owe my sanity to Laravel. I've been doing web development for 10+ years. Nothing else understands the needs of a business owner AND solo programmer like Laravel does. I worked with Python (Flask/Django) for (4+ years) longer than I worked with Laravel (only 1 year), and yet I'm already 10x more productive in Laravel than I have ever been in Python. Software projects follow Conway's Law, i.e. [1] the software architecture reflects the team structure. Laravel reflects the needs of business owners and one-man-companies because it is built by a business owner and has an ecosystem supported by one-man-companies who build high quality products for profit. I want beautiful high level abstractions AND a theoretically sound framework that is battle-tested in production. Laravel gives me both. The number of headaches that Laravel just solves for me, out of the box: 0. Background Jobs/Queues/Rate Limiting/Retry logic handled by the excellent queueing framework 1. Rock solid server deployments/DevOps handled by Laravel Forge 2. Seamless version upgrades handled automatically by Laravel Shift 3. Backend-agnostic full-text search built into the framework with Scout 4. ORM which seamlessly enables caching, lazy loading, advanced subqueries, dynamic scoping, or just mixing in raw SQL when you need it 5. And there's just so much more. I live and breathe Laravel. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law

jw1224 5y ago
> As a solo bootstrapped SaaS founder that literally relies on my app to pay my rent and food, I owe my sanity to Laravel I’m in the same boat as you, and I couldn’t agree more. Your comment absolutely nails it. Laravel is a pleasure to work with. It takes care of 95% of everything I could ever need from a framework. And that last 5% is guaranteed to be covered by a high-quality community package. (Just look at Spatie, this is all just from one maintainer! https://spatie.be/open-source https://spatie.be/open-source ) Some commenters in this thread seem to take issue with Laravel’s “artisan” approach… and yeah, sure. Maybe it’s a bit pretentious. But, whatever. They’ve earned it. Laravel, its ecosystem and community takes pride in being polished and professional — and rightly so.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  Medialibrary and the Stripe Webhooks library made me happy.
pooya72 5y ago
I love hearing about developer experiences by solo devs. As a potential solo dev, I was actually looking to go the Spring Boot route. I think Java has gone in a better direction the past few years, and I prefer it over PHP due to static typing, functional programming (to a point), and the tooling. Spring Boot seems to provide a lot of the same development productivity. My only other experience is with Rails and Django, although those have been with small projects. I always find these technical decisions to be difficult to gauge when you're starting off.
- rahkiin 5y ago
  I also find these decisions very hard. I switched from NodeJS to Spring Boot some 5 years ago when I found that the JS community moved faster than my clients could pay me to keep up to date. It has been great to make apps in Java with Thymeleaf, until I wanted to add dynamic frontends (a lot of advantages vanished) or when I tried to put Java on my CV. I am now considering switching to .NET and Angular. I would be happy to have a talk on this topic: what directions to take as solo-dev. I find that a whole different set of requirements apply.
  - pooya72 5y ago
    Hey that's fantastic. I'd love to hear more! You went 5 years in the direct direction I want to go (Spring Boot + Thymeleaf). I'm a bit confused why you were having difficulty finding work with Java. Seems like there's a lot of Java work out there.
    - rahkiin 5y ago
      What I found, and I may have been wrong, is that there is a lot of Java work but if you look deeper it is hardcore Java EE with all thise 200 levels of Java that a lot of folks fear. And so do I. Even jobs that had Spring Boot asked for the JavaEE experience. Could be just me though.
      - mgkimsal 5y ago
        I don't think it's just you. I came off a java gig about couple years back - typical enterprise... stuff. Lots of legacy stuff from 10-15 years ago that few people knew anything about, mixed docs, some tests, but not useful to learn from. Even pre-covid, far too few people for the size of the codebase and where they were trying to go. I started in October, I was given a ticket in November that someone else - who had left months earlier - estimated at '40 hours' in May of that year. This was my first 'task' at the company, and ... it took way more than 40 hours. It took 40 calendar hours to get a meeting with the PM to actually walk me through how to set up the bug the ticket was about. Some bigwig threw up to my manager that I was 'over budget' and 'threatened their client relationship' because I was taking so long (on a ticket that had been sitting around 5 months before it was estimated, then another 6 months before someone started working on it). They routinely rejected requests for info on the issue, or access to servers/data/etc. So... I went part time then, and moved in to something else pretty quickly. I know not all Java shops are like that, but it was like living in an enterprise cliché.
cutler 5y ago
There's nothing in your list which doesn't have an equivalent in the Rails and Django ecosystems. Laravel is just another MVC framework built with a dynamically-typed scripting language. Rails, Django, Laravel - take your pick. Same wine in a similar bottle.
- ksec 5y ago
  >doesn't have an equivalent Having an equivalent and being included and used by default is very different. To the point Laravel is more opinionated ( so to speak ) than Rails.
- tluyben2 5y ago
  OP seems to quite vehemently disagree that they are that alike even though he has more experience with Django than with Laravel. Curious what explains this gap.
- midrus 5y ago
  I've worked 8+ years with Django and the last 2~3 years with Laravel. Other than the admin, I don't miss anything from Django. Laravel is so much better in almost every other aspect.

by _xnmw 5y ago

jw1224 5y ago

> As a solo bootstrapped SaaS founder that literally relies on my app to pay my rent and food, I owe my sanity to Laravel I’m in the same boat as you, and I couldn’t agree more. Your comment absolutely nails it. Laravel is a pleasure to work with. It takes care of 95% of everything I could ever need from a framework. And that last 5% is guaranteed to be covered by a high-quality community package. (Just look at Spatie, this is all just from one maintainer! https://spatie.be/open-source https://spatie.be/open-source ) Some commenters in this thread seem to take issue with Laravel’s “artisan” approach… and yeah, sure. Maybe it’s a bit pretentious. But, whatever. They’ve earned it. Laravel, its ecosystem and community takes pride in being polished and professional — and rightly so.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago
Medialibrary and the Stripe Webhooks library made me happy.

pooya72 5y ago

I love hearing about developer experiences by solo devs. As a potential solo dev, I was actually looking to go the Spring Boot route. I think Java has gone in a better direction the past few years, and I prefer it over PHP due to static typing, functional programming (to a point), and the tooling. Spring Boot seems to provide a lot of the same development productivity. My only other experience is with Rails and Django, although those have been with small projects. I always find these technical decisions to be difficult to gauge when you're starting off.

rahkiin 5y ago
I also find these decisions very hard. I switched from NodeJS to Spring Boot some 5 years ago when I found that the JS community moved faster than my clients could pay me to keep up to date. It has been great to make apps in Java with Thymeleaf, until I wanted to add dynamic frontends (a lot of advantages vanished) or when I tried to put Java on my CV. I am now considering switching to .NET and Angular. I would be happy to have a talk on this topic: what directions to take as solo-dev. I find that a whole different set of requirements apply.
- pooya72 5y ago
  Hey that's fantastic. I'd love to hear more! You went 5 years in the direct direction I want to go (Spring Boot + Thymeleaf). I'm a bit confused why you were having difficulty finding work with Java. Seems like there's a lot of Java work out there.
  - rahkiin 5y ago
    What I found, and I may have been wrong, is that there is a lot of Java work but if you look deeper it is hardcore Java EE with all thise 200 levels of Java that a lot of folks fear. And so do I. Even jobs that had Spring Boot asked for the JavaEE experience. Could be just me though.
    - mgkimsal 5y ago
      I don't think it's just you. I came off a java gig about couple years back - typical enterprise... stuff. Lots of legacy stuff from 10-15 years ago that few people knew anything about, mixed docs, some tests, but not useful to learn from. Even pre-covid, far too few people for the size of the codebase and where they were trying to go. I started in October, I was given a ticket in November that someone else - who had left months earlier - estimated at '40 hours' in May of that year. This was my first 'task' at the company, and ... it took way more than 40 hours. It took 40 calendar hours to get a meeting with the PM to actually walk me through how to set up the bug the ticket was about. Some bigwig threw up to my manager that I was 'over budget' and 'threatened their client relationship' because I was taking so long (on a ticket that had been sitting around 5 months before it was estimated, then another 6 months before someone started working on it). They routinely rejected requests for info on the issue, or access to servers/data/etc. So... I went part time then, and moved in to something else pretty quickly. I know not all Java shops are like that, but it was like living in an enterprise cliché.

cutler 5y ago

There's nothing in your list which doesn't have an equivalent in the Rails and Django ecosystems. Laravel is just another MVC framework built with a dynamically-typed scripting language. Rails, Django, Laravel - take your pick. Same wine in a similar bottle.

ksec 5y ago
>doesn't have an equivalent Having an equivalent and being included and used by default is very different. To the point Laravel is more opinionated ( so to speak ) than Rails.
tluyben2 5y ago
OP seems to quite vehemently disagree that they are that alike even though he has more experience with Django than with Laravel. Curious what explains this gap.
midrus 5y ago
I've worked 8+ years with Django and the last 2~3 years with Laravel. Other than the admin, I don't miss anything from Django. Laravel is so much better in almost every other aspect.