The story of how I got started with Laravel is a common one: I had written PHP for years, but I was on my way out the door, pursuing the power of Rails and other modern web frameworks. Rails in particular had a lively community, a perfect combination of opinionated defaults and flexibility, and the power of Ruby Gems to leverage prepackaged common code.
Something kept me from jumping ship, and I was glad for that when I found Laravel. It offered everything I was drawn to in Rails, but it wasn’t just a Rails clone; this was an innovative framework with incredible documentation, a welcoming community, and clear influences from many languages and frameworks.
Since that day I’ve been able to share my journey of learning Laravel through blogging and speaking at conferences; I’ve written dozens of apps in Laravel for side and work projects, and I’ve met thousands of Laravel developers online and in person. I have plenty of tools in my toolkit at our consultancy, but I am honestly happiest when I sit down in front of a command line and type laravel new project.
