Laravel Live UK Recap

Earlier in week, I headed down to London for Laravel Live 2025. This was the conference I've been looking forward to since the tickets first went on sale, and honestly, the lineup did not disappoint. It's also worth mentioning that this was my very first Laravel Live!

It was great to catch up with some familiar faces from the community and, of course, add a couple of new ElePHPants to the herd! But the real highlights were the talks and networking opportunities

All of the talks were great, but here are a few of my favourite sessions from the conference:

Introducing Filament 4

As someone who uses Filament for almost every admin panel I build, I was eager to see what Dan Harrin had in store. Filament 4 feels like a massive leap forward. The new table builder enhancements and the way it handles complex relationships now is beautiful.

Introducing Laravel Nightwatch

This was a big one. Nightwatch is Laravel's new first-party monitoring and observability platform. It’s built on AWS and ClickHouse, and the sheer scale it can handle billions of events, is mind-blowing. Having a first-class tool for real-time insights without having to piece together third-party services is going to be a game-changer for production stability. I'm definitely going to be trying it out for some of my own applications. Could it be a replacement for Sentry? Perhaps!

Behind Laravel Cloud

We’ve all been hearing about Laravel Cloud for a while now, but getting a look "under the hood" was fascinating. Seeing how they've optimised the deployment pipeline and the way it integrates with the rest of the ecosystem makes it a very tempting choice new Laravel apps. Joe did a fantastic job in explaining the development of Cloud, the easy bits, the hard bits and how Taylor Otwell, from basically the beginning, set the goal of 60 seconds, that's how long it should take, as a maximum, to deploy a new Laravel application.

A Slice Of PIE: Revolutionising PHP Extension Installation

I really enjoyed James' talk about PIE, which is something he's been working on for the PHP Foundation, which is a replacement for PECL. PIE (PHP Installer for Extensions) is the official replacement and it works much more like Composer. It makes managing extensions feel like it belongs in the modern age! Plus, who doesn't love Pie?

Building Mobile Apps with PHP

Simon Hamp’s talk on NativePHP for mobile was incredible. The idea that we can now build truly native iOS and Android apps using the Laravel and Livewire skills we already have is just amazing. I’ve already started thinking about all the projects I could build as apps, to make my life easier! Now I just need to find the time!

Hardware with Laravel

I've been following Dan Johnson’s work on hardware for a while, so seeing his latest demo was a treat. There’s something incredibly satisfying about seeing a PHP script trigger physical hardware in real-time. If I find the time later this year, I'll definitely be doing some tinkering with Pinout and seeing what I can come up with! I'd quite like to build a real time composer install count from Packagist!

Overall, Laravel Live 2025 was fantastic. It’s an exciting time to be a PHP developer, and I’ve come away with a huge list of things I want to try out. This was my 2nd ever conference, and my first Laravel Live. I actually ended up bumping into some people I met back in Feburary at PHPUK, which was nice!