Laracasts was built to kind of scratch my own
itch. I think programmers may be well aware of this, but when you're learning something
new, it sort of feels
like you're trick or treating for knowledge and, programmers know what I mean here, you're trying to learn something and you're opening up 50 different tabs trying
to figure out one thing. And the problem is the solution is not in a single tab. It's like you get
a little bit of it in this tab and then you keep searching and then you find something here where
it kind of helps. But it's in a different language and it's in a different framework. And so
you're kind of having trouble parsing it, but there's something there and then
you open another tab and again, programmers know exactly what I'm talking about.
When you want to learn something, it requires googling the entire web and finding 100 different
tabs, each of which is like a little puzzle piece that solves the problem for you. And I've
done this over and over in my career. In each tab is like a little aha moment where
you're like, ok, this explains that definition better than anywhere else I've seen. So that
helps. And this has an actual code example that I can use and see if it works. And then you kind of
combine them all, and that's how you learn things. But it does get a little bit frustrating because
you don’t know where to find the next little piece of knowledge, you know? All you have is
a Google search. So Laracasts was kind of built in a way to scratch my own itch, to kind of
create the educational platform that I wish had been available to me when I was first
getting started. If I could have a single location that had all the answers to my questions
for one specific tool or framework or package, I would have appreciated that so much because
at the time, obviously there's other sites very much like Laracasts, but at the time usually
programming education sites were trying to service all programmers, which is kind of cool in that
if I'm a web designer, I can go here and I can learn about CSS. And if I am like a Python
backend developer, I can go to the same site and learn it and you can pick up anything
you want. But the only downside to that is, it's great for the business because they make more
money, they bring people from all different areas, but the only downside is it's not for one specific
developer, so that means 90% of what that platform provides is not for you because we're not learning
everything, we're all learning a little piece of the programming world. You might be learning these
few things, but you're not learning everything else. You couldn't do it. There's not enough
hours in a lifetime to learn all of this stuff. So what's nice about Laracasts is it is for one type
of developer. If you use Laravel, if you use PHP, if you're kind of a full-stack developer where you
need to reach for CSS every once in a while, it is for them. It's not for Python developers, it's
not for Ruby developers. They might get something out of it if they if they join the site, but it's
not targeted at them. And that is maybe to our financial deficit but I still think it's worth
it. I think it's a good idea. It's nice to have a community for one type of developer. And when
you join, everyone else there is just like you. I quite like it. I'm sure Laracasts has had
a nice impact on Laravel’s popularity, but it would be nothing without Laravel. So
Laravel’s success is due exclusively to Taylor and the team that works on it. But I think where
Laracasts has helped is again in the sense that it is a place for people to go to instantly get
up and running with Laravel, and many frameworks don't have that. They would like to, but they
simply don’t. The community isn't large enough. We've gotten to a point now where… This originally
started with the Rails world, where you had sites like RailsCasts that were dedicated to Ruby on
Rails. Laracasts is dedicated to Laravel. It's very much inspired from the Ruby world, and these
days it's actually very popular. You see it across communities. But years ago, when I launched
Laracasts, that wasn't necessarily the thing. I'll tell you what, when I originally
launched Laracasts, I got a lot of pushback because people would say to me why are you
creating Laracasts? Why not create PHPCasts? Which is the language Laravel is built on. And
they would kind of do it with like a suspicion, like, what are you doing here? Like why? Why are
you creating silos? Which is what a lot of people will often say. Why don't you service the entire
wider general community instead of focusing on this small group here? And my answer to that
has always been like, ok, well, why don't I just create ProgrammingCasts? You know, how many
layers up do we want to go? And the answer is, I don't want to go up that many layers. There are
resources for every single layer of your learning, and it would be really nice to have one that's
very targeted at a single type of of user, which is why I created Laracasts. So the benefit
to that is I'm sure it pointed a lot of people to Laravel or people who are
already interested in Laravel, it was probably nice for them to see like, oh,
there is this site with thousands of videos, so many, countless of which are just free to
anyone, you don't even have to sign up, it’s free, that will get me up and running. That's a
nice little bonus. I've said before, the documentation for Laravel is incredible and it is.
But also documentation serves a specific purpose. And once you read it, you still have
to know how to build an application. And that is a much larger question that is
beyond the scope of a framework documentation. So I think Laracasts was good at sort of filling
in that gap of, ok, we're going to help you, you're going to read the documentation,
but I'm going to help you along the way. Sort of like a teacher. And then I'm also going
to show you how to combine all of this stuff and build things to actually solve problems,
which is the whole point we're doing this anyways.
