Laravel is cool and all, but does not quite provide the “out of the box” dev experience as ASP.NET or, gasp, Typescript. Let us change that by using a few good editor tools and packages. PHP Intelephense extension I use VSCode and there is no better auto completion than PHP Intelephense.

Last year I started focusing on web and application development to a greater extent than what I have done in the past. After having done my time with large enterprises, I now work primarily in a super cost-conscious market. All those things speak poorly about my budgeting and planning skills as far as server hosts are concerned.

Laravel is my development platform of choice lately. And, this brought in a host of interesting tools to my PC. Earlier days were simple enough - just use XAMPP to host the site locally and be done with it. Yes, there were other tools but none had the same charm. XAMPP was simple and got out of the way of the development lifecycle.

I had chosen Laravel as platform to create magic. I came to this decision after painful evaluation of many back-end frameworks to quickly build out applications. Laravel is easy to learn, implement and ship products Many features like auth, ORM are built in and I don’t really need to make my own stupid decisions There is a vast community that seems to know all answers (including the ‘answer to everything’) Of course I don’t know a lot about how to stitch everything together in Laravel, but hopefully my previous PHP experience will help (or not).

Web developers today are a spoiled lot. I consider myself as an absolute beginner in the web development world, but I am truly amazed at the things I can do today with free / minimal cost infrastructure. The system automates everything except me - I am that stupid man in the middle.