Laravel Creator Spotlight

The conversation covers experiences at Laracon India and preparations for Laracon EU, as well as announcements made at Laracon India regarding Native PHP version 3, technical limitations, open-source development, and showcasing Native PHP's apps and capabilities. The conversation delves into the power of Laravel plugins and their impact on empowering developers. It explores early plugin adoption and sponsorship, as well as the integration of a local ML model on a device. Additionally, it highlights the significance of the Cloud Code Plugin and its potential for developers.

Takeaways
Laracon India and Laracon EU events
Native PHP version 3 and its features
Challenges and opportunities in building mobile apps with Native PHP Local ML model on device
Power of Laravel plugins

In this live episode of the Laravel Creator Series, I’m joined by Dan Newns, co-founder of Jump24, a Laravel development studio with over a decade of real-world experience building Laravel applications across multiple industries.

We talk candidly about:

- How Jump24 uses Laravel in client and internal projects
- Creating weekly “This Week in Laravel” style videos
- AI tools in PHP and Laravel workflows
- Planning vs one-shot prompting with AI
- Skills, agents, and internal AI tooling
- PHP’s evolution and where Laravel is headed next
- The future of junior and senior developer roles
- Middleware, architecture, and long-term maintainability
- Conferences like Laracon EU and Laravel Live UK

Show Links

- Daniel Newns LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-newns/
- Daniel Newns X https://x.com/DanielNewns
- Jump 24 - https://jump24.co.uk/

This was a relaxed, unscripted live conversation covering what it’s really like to build with Laravel in 2026 and how AI is starting to reshape the ecosystem without replacing experienced developers.

If you’re working with Laravel, curious about AI-assisted development, or thinking about the future of PHP, this one’s for you.

PIE is a new installer for PHP extensions intended to eventually replace PECL. It is distributed as a PHAR, just like Composer, and works similarly to Composer. However, it installs PHP extensions (PHP Modules or Zend Extensions) to your PHP installation rather than pulling PHP packages into your project or library.
🔗 Show Links
https://laravel-news.com/php-pie-with-james-titcumb
https://github.com/php/pie
https://github.com/asgrim

In this episode, Eric Barnes sits down with James Brooks, team lead for Laravel’s core services team, to dive into the new Laravel Forge launch. James walks through the biggest updates to Forge, from organization support and zero-downtime deployments to the new command palette that makes managing servers and deployments easier than ever.

We also explore how Forge compares with Envoyer and Laravel Cloud, the challenges of building on top of legacy infrastructure, and how community feedback continues to shape the future of Laravel’s server management tools. Whether you’re a hobbyist or running production workloads at scale, this conversation will help you understand how Forge empowers developers with flexibility and control.

🔑 Key Takeaways
James Brooks leads Laravel’s core services, including Forge and Envoyer.
The new Forge introduces organization support and zero-downtime deployments.
The command palette is a major UX improvement for developers.
Forge continues to provide maximum flexibility for custom server setups.
Envoyer focuses on zero-downtime deployments across multiple servers.
Laravel Cloud offers a fully managed, simplified deployment experience.
User feedback is central to feature development and roadmap decisions.
🔗 Resources
Laravel Forge
Laravel Cloud

Laravel Boost is your new AI coding starter kit, designed to make working with AI agents better. It does this by feeding them Laravel-specific data to help them write higher-quality code. Ashley Hindle described it as, "Boost helps guide the AI to do better".
Some of the features of Boost include:
Provides a Laravel-specific MCP Server
Version-specific documentation
Laravel maintained AI guidelines
Show Links
https://laravel-news.com/laravel-boost
https://x.com/ashleyhindle
https://x.com/ericlbarnes