Laracon US 2025: Quick Notes from Denver

Laracon US 2025 was stacked: great venue, sharp talks, and plenty of useful hallway conversations. Here are a few of standouts for me.

Pest 4 — Nuno Maduro

This was the standout for testing. Browser testing baked in, visual diffs, sharding—solid DX upgrades! This puts Playwright-powered, parallel, Laravel-native browser tests right inside your PHP suite (with visual/smoke checks), so going forward you can keep unit, feature, and end-to-end tests in one runner.

You Should Reinvent The Wheel - Thiery Laverdure

I got a chance to work with Thiery back when he was with Tighten ~10 years ago on a project for Curricula, great to see the cool stuff he is working on now.

Livewire 4 - Caleb Porzio

Livewire 4 lands at wire:live with some real upgrades: the new Blaze engine speeds up Blade renders, and the @island directive lets you isolate and lazy/poll heavy UI sections so the rest of the page stays snappy. If you’re going, keep an eye out for Ghostable—would love to say hi.

Thanks

Huge thanks to the Laracon organizers, speakers, sponsors, and volunteers for a smooth event. Cheers to Jake for showing me around Denver!