Meetups are happening all around us, every day of the year. Every possible interest, hobby or learning opportunity is ready for you to dive into participate and Austin is a prime location to do just that. I have both a personal and professional interest in the Laravel-Austin meetup group which gets together the first Thursday of every month. A couple years ago White Lion switched gears and began using Laravel as the primary framework for our custom web projects. It is quite the rising star among web frameworks. Its vast and active community, with committed creator Taylor Otwell, continually pushes for and surpasses the ease of use powered by understandable complexity making the choice irresistibly simple.

At the May 2015 meetup we had the luxury of having an hour-long direct question & answer session with the creator himself via Skype. The meetup participants were eager to ask the questions they had prepared ahead of time even making them a point of discussion amongst themselves before the Q&A had begun. The meeting was held in a conference room at the Omni building in downtown Austin provided by Capital Factory. The usual spread of pizza and soft drinks were provided by the group’s sponsors.

A lot of great questions and answers were given and it was difficult to narrow down just a handful that stood out but here they are:

 1. What drove you to create Laravel in the first place?

Taylor Otwell: I got into PHP because of the ease of setup, and didn’t know you weren’t supposed to write your own framework.

2. What inspired you to make Lumen and do you see it as competing with Laravel?

Taylor Otwell: I started with Lumen when getting started with Envoyer. I wanted to add a feature to monitor cron jobs but didn’t want it bogging down the messaging system. I didn’t like working without Laravel tools so I decided to make a micro framework that incorporates some of the Laravel standards to help development familiarity.

3. What are your favorite packages other than ones you have made?

• Guzzle
• Cashier
• Socialite
• Pusher
• Bug Snag
• Digital Ocean SDKs

4. Multiline comments decrement by 3 chars, why? Is there a reason, or just OCD?

Taylor Otwell: Yeah, just OCD.

5. You teased that with L5 you added the casting ability with eloquent properties, do you see how you would like to grow eloquent in the future?

Taylor Otwell: I don’t know, it may be a sign that it is pretty solid because I haven’t needed to update it and I don’t get a lot of pull requests.

It was a great session and I appreciate the time that Taylor took to be with us, as well as the meetup group organizers Terry Matula and Hunter Skrasek for doing a great job running the show.

Photo Credit: by Hunter Skrasek