Podcasts about Kohana

While EVERY episode of Thrive LouD is spectacular, we cherry picked a few from 2023 that we thought were worth revisiting. Here's is a list of the one's we featured via brief clips from their appearances on Thrive LouD along with links to their original full episode. Author of “Idea Flow” Jeremy Utley (Ep 882) Founder of Eat My Words & Author of “Hello my name is Awesome” Alexandra Watkins (Ep 937) Founder of the Child Liberation Foundation and Executive Producer of “Saving the Children” Paul Hutchinson (Ep 903) Keynote Speaker, Coach and WSJ Best Selling Author of “Wonderhell” Laura Gassner Otting (Ep 894) Founder and Inventor of Alchemy Grills Chef Matt Basile (Ep 898) General Manager at Kō Hana Distillers Kyle Reutner (Ep 913) Author, TV personality and podcast host Paula Faris (Ep 872) Coach and Boundary Builder Nick Pollard (Ep 912) The Avengers of Conscious Relationships Rachele & Emilio Palafox (Ep 900) NY Times Bestselling Author and Keynote Speaker on Innovation and Sales Diana Kander (Ep 916) ***CONNECT WITH LOU DIAMOND & THRIVE LOUD***

General manager at Kō Hana Distillers Kyle Reutner comes to NYC to visit and have a chat with Lou Diamond on Thrive LouD. Like a delicious tasting sipping rum, this podcast interview has been aging for almost six years since Kō Hana's founder Jason Brand came on Thrive LouD back in September of 2017!! A lot has happened since that initial interview and Kyle brings Lou up to speed as to what is happening at the distillery in Hawaii. From the classic rums to the newly launched “ready to drink” (RTD) mixes, Lou and Kyle have a great conversation and a fun time sipping Kō Hana. You're gonna want to order a bottle or two after this interview!! ***CONNECT WITH LOU DIAMOND & THRIVE LOUD***

✨🎙️Episodio 58 del podcast VEGANISMO Y SOSTENIBILIDAD de Infovegana✨🎙️ 🔥En este episodio hablamos de: ►Analizamos la decisión del dueño de la empresa Patagonia de dejar en herencia la empresa a diferentes ONG's que luchen por revertir la crisis climática. ►Comentamos las virales campañas en redes sociales para intentar revertir la enmienda del PSOE que, cediendo a las presiones del lobby cazador, pretende dejar a los perros utilizados para cazar fuera de la Ley de Bienestar Animal. ►Suiza propone en referéndum prohibir la ganadería intensiva en todo el país. ¿Lo habrán aprobado? ►Comentamos la triste noticia de la muerte de la tercera orca en 18 meses en el parque temático Loro Parque de Tenerife. ►Os explicamos qué es el evento "Popeye Torero y los Enanitos Marineros" que la plaza de Las Ventas en Madrid ha cancelado tras vender únicamente 37 entradas. ►Una noticia positiva: la ciudad de Harlem, en Países Bajos, prohíbe la publicidad de la carne de origen animal en todo el país. Analizamos causas y consecuencias. ►Coca-Cola se convierte en patrocinador de la próxima cumbre climática COP27. ¿Declaración de buenas intenciones o greenwashing? ►Y como siempre, recomendaciones, repaso de la semana, anécdotas y mucho más ;) 💥CADA DOMINGO UN NUEVO EPISODIO DEL PODCAST (disponible en Ivoox, Spotify, Apple Podcast y Youtube) 💙Nuevo formato, más relajado, donde charlamos tranquilamente sobre anécdotas, comentamos noticias, os planteamos dilemas morales y compartimos recomendaciones. Todo relacionado con el antiespecismo, el veganismo y la sostenibilidad. ★Si te apetece, puedes ver nuestro contenido de otras RRSS★ 👉IG: https://www.instagram.com/info_vegana/ 👉TW: @infovegana 👉WEB: https://infovegana.com/ 👉CONTACTO: hola@infovegana.com

Midnight Madness Radio Episode 181 with Anything But Human, Delayed Departure, Master Dy, The Ormidales, The Word66, Michel Le Fleur, Bobby Porter, Signs Of Truth, Kohana, SEPTEM, ALLISON. and CONFIDENTIAL.

Distiller Tyler Johnson from Hawaiian rum distillery, KoHana, joins Alan Bishop and Christi Atkinson to talk about the distillery and their unique sugarcane varietals. 

So much new music we had to split it up! Part 2 coming soon. Temple Of Diemos: https://templeofdeimos.bandcamp.com Tigguo Cobauc: https://tigguocobauc.bandcamp.com Kohana: https://kohana.bandcamp.com/album/jab-2 Stria: https://taxidriverstore.bandcamp.com/album/stria Medussa: https://discosmacarras.bandcamp.com/album/xibalb Warstomper: https://warpstormer.bandcamp.com/album/here-comes-hell Nerdgore Art: https://www.instagram.com/artofnerdgore/ Witchpit: https://heavypsychsoundsrecords.bandcamp.com/album/witchpit-the-weight-of-death Mano De Mono: https://manodemono.bandcamp.com/album/chameleon-tongue ***** http://doomtombpodcast.com *****   ***** Edited by Ian from No Masters Audio: https://www.instagram.com/nomastersaudio/ House band : Stone Witch https://stonewitchband.bandcamp.com https://interstellarsmokerecords.bigcartel.com *****  SPONSORS : Sam Sa'House: https://www.samsahouse.com Click below for 10% off first your order! https://www.samsahouse.com/discount/sahousetomb https://www.instagram.com/samsahouse/ ***** Desert Records: https://www.desertrecords.us/artists/ https://desertrecords.bandcamp.com https://www.facebook.com/desertrecordslabel https://www.instagram.com/desertrecords/ ***** Glory or Death Records: https://gloryordeathrecords.bigcartel.com https://www.facebook.com/Gloryordeathrecords https://www.instagram.com/gloryordeathrecords/ https://www.gloryordeathrecords.com   ***** Cranium Radio(Sundays,6-9 PM EST): https://www.facebook.com/craniumradio The Doom Tomb followed by an episode of the podcast - http://craniumradio.com Listen by way of : https://streema.com https://tunein.com https://live365.com https://liveonlineradio.net/cranium-radio http://radio.garden/listen/cranium-radio/5vlWBp-R ***** Social Media: https://www.instagram.com/doomtombpodcast/ https://www.facebook.com/doomtombpodcast https://www.tiktok.com/@doomtomb?lang=en https://twitter.com/DoomTombPodcast https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYEaR0imIjYsgw-icbQPyhQ   ***** Planet Mammoth: https://www.facebook.com/planetmammoth https://www.instagram.com/planetmammothentertainment/ ***** Doom Tomb Merch: https://doomtomb.bigcartel.com ***** doomtombpodcast@gmail.com Submissions, interviews, or just to say hi. ***** STAY HEAVY !!!!  

Long time friend of the Pod Kyle Reutner, GM of Kohana Rum Distillery, joins Chris and Drew for a lively conversation about Millennials ruining the wine industry, and Heaven Hill acquiring some heavy hitter brands. Dope Follows: @heyKimandTyler @Kohanarum Books: Zachary Carter "Price of Peace" (see also Ezra Cline's interview of Zachary Carter), Charles Oakley "The Last Enforcer" Dope Homies: Buddy Newby, Henry Devere, Garrett Van Vleck --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/goodbottlepodcast/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/goodbottlepodcast/support

Our Dexter run continues with Angela Bishop herself, actress Julia Jones!! You also know her from the Twilight saga, Westworld, Longmire, Jonah Hex, and Taylor Sheridan's Wind River, to name a few. But what you don't know is that Julia is obsessed with Dark Chocolate. Find out where she used to hide her chocolate from her ex-boyfriend and which international chocolate got her hooked in the first place. It's all on this episode of Fanaddcits with hosts Clare Kramer and David Magidoff.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Полная версия по ссылке freshrecords.ru/showthread.php…

Hawaii's favorite local artist, Kim Taylor Reece, joins Maleko and Flash live on location at Kohana Agricole Rum distillery in Kunia, Hawaii. Working with Hula Kahiko for almost 40 years, KTR continues to preserve and share the ancient hula for generations worldwide. We get to sample a new limited edition batch of Hawaiian Agricole Rum made from sugarcane. Every varietal of heirloom sugarcane has a story and flavor profile all its own. At Kō Hana Distillers, home of Kō Hana Hawaiian Agricole Rum, they try to honor and celebrate the Kō they nurture and grow. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/maleko-and-flash/support

Entrevistamos en A Diario Gran Canaria a Pablo Arbelo, socio de Kohana Las Palmas

This episode is full of holiday spirit... in the taste of Kohana Hawaiian Agricole Rum. We're chatting with Kyle Reutner about the world's first Koa Wood Finished Rum.. only available at the distillery https://www.kohanarum.com/koaAnd we chat with Keoni Chang at the opening of Redfish https://www.redfishpoke.com/ the latest project by Foodland, And Anthony Rush and Jo have a conversation about the flavors of Christmas , including some of the new dishes on the Senia menu this holiday season http://restaurantsenia.com/Oh, and want to know where to find the best Irish Coffee in Hawaii ? Kyle Reutner's pick ( and ours) is here: http://murphyshawaii.com

Deep in the agricultural fields of Oahu, something new is growing. Kohana rum is one of just a handful of distilleries in the world that make their spirit using traditional Agricole methods, starting from fresh cane juice grown and bottled on site in Kunia. Kyle Reutner is a highly skilled mixologist and bartender who now oversees the branding of Hawaii's most unique rum distillery. Kyle talks about the process, his passion for chemistry and cocktails, and how his life has improved since he no longer has to work for Flash. Get the original recipe for the Daquiri, and a special invitation to party at the distillery in this episode of the Maleko and Flash Podcast. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/maleko-and-flash/support

l octavo episodio de la segunda temporada de Westworld coge aire y nos ofrece un capítulo centrado en uno de sus personajes secundarios antes de emprender la recta final de la temporada. Vemos la vida de Akecheta y el origen de la Nación Fantasma, una historia de amor, compasión y lucha que nos llega al corazón y que hace que este paréntesis de la trama principal sea una verdadera delicia. En este programa de Expreso a Westworld hacemos el análisis con spoilers del episodio 2x08 de ‘Kiksuya', la serie de HBO. Se trata de un recap que incluye la crítica, comentarios y explicación del episodio ‘Les Écorchés', y además nos hacemos preguntas y teorizamos: ¿qué ha pasado en el episodio 2x08 de 'Westworld'? ¿qué teorías se han planteado y cuáles se han resuelto? “Llévate mi corazón cuando te vayas. Toma el mío en su lugar”. — Akecheta y Kohana

One of the most romantic episodes to date, filled with love, loyalty and truth.  Amanda recaps Akecheta's love affair with Kohana and explores some deeper messages this show may have for all of us! Pointing out some interesting parallels this show has to our own lives.  Questioning our own life of free will or predestination!  What if this show, isn't just for entertainment?  What if the show Westworld was the MAZE, here to unlock something within us all! Mentions:  - by Leonardo's character Cobb

“Westworld” surprised us again with an emotional and intense episode. Craig Carter and Jess Bowers dive deep into “Kiksuya.” After giving their general thoughts on the episode (1:35), they discuss Akecheta’s beginnings (6:50), his quest to find Kohana (17:52), sharing his knowledge with his people (59:10), and a fun theory or two (1:21:20).

Nach einigen schwächeren Folgen ist Westworld mit "Die Lebenden und die Verdammten" zurück! Denn unser Podcast-Trio ist sich einig, dass die von der Deutschen Uta Briesewitz inszenierte "Kiksuya" (Original-Titel) die bisher beste Folge der gesamten Serie geworden ist. Die fast komplett in Lakota gesprochene Episode gibt dem Zuschauer nicht nur wichtige Informationen über die Entstehung der "Ghost Nation" und das mysteriöse Tor. Sie bildet zugleich auch den emotionalsten, berührendsten und schlicht schönsten Teil des Westworld-Universums. Denn die Geschichte von Akecheta und Kohana geht wirklich an die Seele - und führt dazu, dass alle Fans von Bernhard Brink und Wolfgang Petry von nun an ohne Schuldgefühle "Nimm mein Herz mit wenn Du gehst" schmettern dürfen. Musik: "Please listen carefully" von Jahzzar

Westworld delivers one helluva story as we learn the background of Ghost Nation and their leader, Akecheta.  After the humans took away his true love, Kohana, he made finding The Maze and, more importantly, The Door his life's work.  And then there's Maeve... poor, poor Maeve. Questions or comments? You can find us on our website or on the social medias under our parent podcast, The Kid-Free Weekend: http://www.podofthrones.com https://www.facebook.com/thekidfreeweekend https://twitter.com/kidfreeweekend https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDdCSjEkkqOwvoqJmxbjCjQ https://www.instagram.com/kidfreeweekend thekidfreeweekend@gmail.com

The Ballad of Akecheta and Kohana! Join us in our discussion of all things Ghost Nation this week. Explore with us the marketing of the maze and the resulting Fordian take on it. The humanization of the Bard Sizemore continues. Maeve's capabilities are mused upon. Musical accompianment: our favorite 90s bands: Drawing Mazes, Horse Mask, and Robobanger. Just kidding -- this podcast is about Garfield: The Movie. Enjoy!     Disclaimer: We're foul-mouthed and we're gonna spoil you. For the show. Or vise-versa.

Get the featured cocktail recipe: Baby Fireflies, Complete With Lumens Nearly a thousand years ago, the first Polynesians set sail for the Hawaiian Islands using only the stars for navigation. With them they brought select varieties of Kō – or as we know it, sugarcane. And thankfully they did, because today, Manulele Distillers are crafting their Kōhana Hawaiian Agricole Rums using the descendants of those ancient sugarcane plants. As brand manager of Kōhana Rum, Kyle Reutner is not just honoring the Hawaii of yesteryear, he is a part of a team that is developing a new industry that will help shape the future of the islands’ economy, one delicious bottle of rum at a time. Now, that’s what we call honoring the spirit. Got an idea for an episode? Subscribe and review. We'd love to hear your thoughts.

An interview with Neo Ighodaro, co-founder of Laravel Nigeria and CTO of hotels.ng Notes: Neo's Earliest drawings Laravel Nigeria Hotels.ng Building the Laravel Nigeria Community With Over 200 People Attending the First Meetup Neo speaking at Laravel Nigeria - Deploying Your Laravel Application Lagos CreativityKills Greymatter Mark Essien, founder of Hotels.ng FlashDP Kohana framework Prosper Otemuyiwa ForLoop Neo in a black hoodie Transcription sponsored by Laravel News Matt Stauffer: Welcome back to Laravel Podcast, season three. This is the second interview, episode three, where we're going to be talking to Neo Ighodaro, big man around town in Laravel Nigeria. Stay tuned. All right. Welcome back to Laravel Podcast! I've got to figure out how to number these things because technically, this is episode three because the first one was a preview, but that confused a lot of people, so welcome back to the second interview of season three of the Laravel Podcast. I have my actually relatively recent friend with me. His name's Neo, and I've been pronouncing it Ighodaro the whole time. Is that actually how to say it? How do you say your name? Say it, not me saying it. Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, you're actually saying it correctly. Matt Stauffer: Could you say it, though? I want to hear you say it. Neo Ighodaro: Okay. Natively, the "g" is silent, so it's more like I-ho-da-ro, but a lot of people call it Ighodaro and I kind of feel more comfortable with Ighodaro because it sounds better, in my opinion. Matt Stauffer: So, if I tried to say it without the "g," you'd actually prefer I say it the way I just said it? Neo Ighodaro: With the "g." Matt Stauffer: Okay. I have some friends.. one of my friends whose name is Al-bear-to ... I don't even know the Spanish pronunciation. Neo Ighodaro: Alberto. Matt Stauffer: I would try to learn how to say it, right? "Al-bear-to." He's like no, no, no. Just call me Alberto (pronounced like an American) and I was like, "But that's not your name," and we had kind of this big back and forth and what he ended up saying was, "When an English-speaking person says it in an English sentence, I prefer it to be the English pronunciation, and then when a Spanish-speaking person says it in a Spanish sentence, I prefer it to be the Spanish pronunciation." I've never heard anybody say that before, because I'm always like, "I don't care. I want to pronounce your name the right way," but for me, more important than the right way is what you want, so I'm here. I'm with you. Neo Ighodaro. It's fantastic to have you on. If anybody hasn't heard about Neo before, the way that he has most primarily been known in the Laravel world is because he is one of the three organizers. I don't know ... who's the founder? Are all three of you the founders, what are you the founder and now three of the organizers? How does that work? Neo Ighodaro: I and Prosper basically are the founders, so we just got together and started it. We decided to get people on board, so Lynda was the third person. Now, we have a couple of other people who are silent organizers, but they help out every single time we have a Meetup. Matt Stauffer: Okay, and by the way, I didn't actually finish my sentence before I asked you one because I interrupt myself. The "it" that Neo and I are talking about is Laravel Nigeria, which is this kind of Meetup, but it's kind of a conference, because it's as big as all the other Laravel conferences, even though they're calling it a "Meetup," but people are traveling from five hours away. It's a really big deal, so we'll talk about that maybe a little bit later. But what I told Neo beforehand was, "This is not actually about that Meetup. This is not actually about you being the CTO of a big tech company. What this really is about is knowing you as a person and what you're about," and if anybody listened to the Taylor interview I did before, we didn't talk so much about Laravel. We talked for a little bit about just kind of Taylor and where he comes from, so maybe we'll down the road there, but the tiniest little bit of context, he's one of the two founders. He's one of the three formal organizers, and there's also some silent organizers of Laravel Nigeria. If you haven't looked it up, I'll put a link to a write-up that he did in the show notes, but you're just seeing hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people once every couple months come together and teach and learn. There's actually a couple of your talks that are online, so I'll make sure to link a couple of those that I think Pusher's hosting. You can hear him speak. You can see what he's organizing. He's the CTO of Hotels.ng, which is a really big tech company out of Nigeria and y'all are in Lagos, right? Ah, pronunciation. Neo Ighodaro: We're in Lagos. Matt Stauffer: More of them. I've been saying "lay-goes" like "go," but then last night, I looked it up and they said "lay-guhs," not "goes", so is that another one? Neo Ighodaro: Exactly. Matt Stauffer: Oh, I'm murdering these things. Neo Ighodaro: Lay-gas, yeah. Matt Stauffer: I also, several times when we were first talking, I would refer to Lagos as if it were only a city, not knowing it was both a city and a state, so it's kind of like a New York, New York thing, right? Like New York is both a city and state, Lagos is also a city and a state. Now I know these things. Neo Ighodaro: Yes. Matt Stauffer: The tiniest bit of context, and I want you to teach me a little more, because basically over the last week, I've been Wikipedia-ing all these things, is that Nigeria's the biggest economy in Africa and then Lagos is the most significant economy in Nigeria. Then Lagos city is such a significant economy that it would have been one of the biggest economies in Africa just as a city alone, and it is the twentieth largest economy of any city in the entire world. This is a significant thing because I think a lot of folks, they understand some general names, some general locations, some general cultural concepts of various African cities and states and countries, but I don't know if they have that much context, understanding that this is a huge place. Are you actually in the city, or are you in a different city in the state? Neo Ighodaro: It's kind of hard to explain, but- Matt Stauffer: I figured. Neo Ighodaro: Lagos, as a whole, like you said, is a city and a state. It's a city and a state because it's quite small geographically. It's really small, so you can't really call it a state and it's so small that you can't not call it a city, I mean, and it's so small in the sense that you want to call it a state because officially, it is a state, but I mean, it's just so small for you to call it any other thing. Matt Stauffer: Now, is it like Singapore, where if you're in the state, you're also in the city? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah. Pretty much. Matt Stauffer: I assumed that there were other cities within the state? Neo Ighodaro: No. Matt Stauffer: So, if you're in Lagos the state, you're basically in the city? Neo Ighodaro: They're just ... we like to call them local governments. Matt Stauffer: Got it. Neo Ighodaro: They are like small, small, very tiny, little regions that you can probably drive like one hour across each region, so it's kind of like a big- Matt Stauffer: But all those regions are within the city? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah. Matt Stauffer: Wow. Neo Ighodaro: Within the city slash state. Matt Stauffer: Okay, so it is a little bit like Singapore in that way. When I think of big cities, I spent a couple years living in Chicago, so I think about Chicago as being a very large city, so Chicago has three million people. It has, I think, I'm trying to remember how many square ... 230 square miles and so Lagos has 16 million people and it has, I think 400 and something square miles, so we're talking many, many, many times the size of Chicago. Also, it's a city, it's a state, and it's all these kind of things, so I think just getting that kind of out of the way and understanding those things helped me a little bit of the context of why when I was like, "Oh, yeah. You're in Lagos," you're like, "Yeah, but" ... We've got to talk a little bit more than that. -So, you are in Nigeria. You are the CTO of Hotels.ng. You are doing all this kind of stuff, so let's actually get to the meat of it. First question: When did you first have access to a computer and where was it, and for what reason? Neo Ighodaro: I would say when I was about 13. Back in the day before internet was quite popular in Nigeria, it was really, really difficult to get your hands on a computer, so I think one of those cybercafes. They're not really cafes in the sense of it. It's just basically a shop where you have a bunch of computers and then you pay some amount of money to get access to those computers to use their internet. I think one of those days, I was about 13, and I got some extra money and I just went to the internet. It was mostly to chat, though. Matt Stauffer: What was the chat protocol that y'all used back then? Neo Ighodaro: I think Yahoo Messenger was very popular then and MSN- Matt Stauffer: I remember that. Neo Ighodaro: Or one of those ones. I was always on them. Matt Stauffer: Did they have computers in your schools at that point, or not until later? Neo Ighodaro: It's kind of tricky because we did have computers in the school, but it was not computers for everyone. It's privileged access at the computer. Matt Stauffer: Really? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah. It was horrible. Matt Stauffer: I told you beforehand that you get to tell me when I'm digging too far, but- Neo Ighodaro: No, it's fine. Matt Stauffer: What privilege gives you access? Is it a particular type of study or something else? What privileges someone to get to use the computer? Neo Ighodaro: Back then, the first thing is ... we had this computer science subject, basically, where we had to learn about computers, but they usually just write it on the board and like, "Okay, this is a CPU. This is a disk." Was it disk? Did we call it disk back then? What's the name of that thing, the square thing where you save stuff? Matt Stauffer: The hard-drive? Neo Ighodaro: No, no. The one back in the day, so you have this thing- Matt Stauffer: Oh, you mean a floppy disk? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah. Floppy disk, so they'll tell you, "This is the floppy disk," and we never saw any of them. We just had pictures and then- Matt Stauffer: Wow. Neo Ighodaro: Once in a while, maybe once in an entire term, they'd be like, "Let's go to the computer room," and then we go and we see them. We don't touch them. Matt Stauffer: Wow. Neo Ighodaro: You're actually forbidden to touch them. Matt Stauffer: Wow. Neo Ighodaro: You see them and they're like, "Oh, that's the CPU they were talking about. Oh, it looks so cool," but looking from five meters away like, "Yo. Don't touch it." Matt Stauffer: Now, why was it that you couldn't touch it? Was it because there were so few that they were precious, or was there something else going on? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, yeah. Pretty much. It was more like a new thing back then, so they were pretty expensive. Matt Stauffer: Got it. Neo Ighodaro: And they didn't really trust kids back then, so- Matt Stauffer: Understandably. Neo Ighodaro: If you became a prefect, for instance, we have this thing where certain students, depending on your academic abilities or your leadership skills, you become a prefect, so to speak, and then you'll be able to have access to certain things that other students didn't have. Matt Stauffer: Got it. Neo Ighodaro: As a prefect, I was able to have some access, limited access. Matt Stauffer: But it was still very limited, so it was really the cybercafe that gave you the space to do what you wanted to do. You started out chatting. When did you transition from chatting to thinking that you were going to be able to create something? Neo Ighodaro: I was 15. I remember very clearly the day. It's actually a kind of funny story. I was subject to some bad people in school and I wasn't really keen on going to school at that point because they were always bullying because I was very little in school. They were always bullying and at some point, I was like, "You know what? Screw this, man. I can't deal," and then I started going to cybercafes. Instead of going to classes, I'd just go to cybercafes. I mean, I'm not happy about it, but it was sort of- Matt Stauffer: It's what it is. It's your story, so ... Neo Ighodaro: One of those days, I decided to check out an internet café and that was it. I just liked going there. I felt safe there. I could literally just bury myself in whatever I was doing and not worry about anything else. Matt Stauffer: That's really cool, so you spent more and more time there, even skipping class to go there. You were chatting originally, but what was the moment or was there a project, or what kind of piqued your interest in creating something on the web? Neo Ighodaro: I don't really remember the thought process, but I remember thinking at some point ... I saw this one guy. He went to the café to, I don't know what he was doing there, but I saw him typing some random stuff and I was just like, "What is this guy doing? It doesn't seem like English." It just looked random. I walked up to him and I was like, "Hey, dude. Sorry, but what are you doing?" and he was like he's learning how to program. That was the moment I just thought, "Okay, program. What exactly is a program?" I'm not sure if Google was a thing then, but I know I was using Yahoo Search a lot, so I tried to Google and I stumbled upon the word HTML. One thing led to another and I started thinking, "Hey, how is yahoo.com actually made?" Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: I started digging and I find out, "Oh, okay. You need something called HTML." I had no idea what it was, and I was like, "I could probably learn that instead of chatting and wasting my time"- Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro:"I could probably learn how to make HTML." That was pretty much the thought process and one thing led to another. I just kept on going and finding out more about HTML. I literally did not know the meaning. I didn't actually care. I just wanted to learn the thing. Matt Stauffer: That's fascinating, so you learned enough that I'm sure you were making your own little local HTML things. Do you remember what the first page you made was about? Neo Ighodaro: Oh, it was a personal page, obviously. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: A site called uni.cc or something like that. It was one of these Geocities type of thing- Matt Stauffer: Sure. Neo Ighodaro: Where you just go and then they give you a sub-domain and a name and then you just kind of mash up the HTML in there. I created one of those and I remember there was this guy. I've forgotten his name, but he was a really big influence back then. There was the time of Greymatter. I don't know if you've heard of it? Matt Stauffer: I haven't. Neo Ighodaro: It was a blogging platform. It was close to what we have in WordPress, but it was called Greymatter. I think his name is Tony. He used to create all these blogs and then there were a lot of young people and they had a lot of blogs that they created. They create these blogs and then they just write random stuff in it, but I was more interested in how the blogs looked. They looked so beautiful and I was like, "Why does mine just look like a bunch of marquee running around the screen?" Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: I was forced to learn design, so I had to start digging in. I heard about Photoshop, so I picked it up. Matt Stauffer: I love that you got there because when we first met, I went over to CreativityKills. Would I be right to describe CreativityKills as essentially your freelance web development kind of company? And I don't even know freelance, but your web development consultancy that was your main thing before you started working at Hotels.ng, and you still kind of keep it running on the side? Is that a good description for it? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, pretty much. Matt Stauffer: What I noticed there ... I went to portfolio, and the moment I see ... I think it was portfolio or work or something, but what I saw instead of code or descriptions, was I saw screenshots. The moment I see that, I say, "This person's probably a designer," and the design was good too, so you're not just a programmer. Tell me how do you think of yourself? Do you think of yourself as a designer and a programmer? Have you trained in one more than the other, or do you think of yourself as a hack in one and really good at the other? How do you kind of approach your skillset? Neo Ighodaro: I think to really answer the question, I have to go a little back to the origins. Like I said, I learned about you have to design your sites for it to look good. I was like, "How do I get there?" and I heard of Photoshop. I started going to the cybercafes. Instead of learning how to write HTML, I was learning how to design, so it was a hassle, to be honest. It was really difficult because you had 30 minutes to learn, literally 30 minutes to learn everything you wanted. I basically started learning and a couple of people just noticed that I come regularly and some people just randomly gave me some extra time. Matt Stauffer: Oh, cool. Neo Ighodaro: I was able to pick up a couple of designs. I actually have a link to one my first ever designs. I still have- Matt Stauffer: That's going in the show notes. That is going in the show notes. Neo Ighodaro: Yeah. It took me about 12 hours chopped into 30 minutes- Matt Stauffer: I was going to say, 30-minute increments of 12 hours, and it's not as if you could take it home. I mean, once the 30 minutes is up- Neo Ighodaro: You're done. Matt Stauffer: Did you have a thumb drive that you were saving everything on, or how did that work? Neo Ighodaro: I had a floppy disk, so every time I go, I was like, "Does this computer support floppy disk?" If they were like, "No," I was like, "No. I'm not doing this." I actively looked for a computer with a floppy disk and I had to download Photoshop- Matt Stauffer: Every time. Neo Ighodaro: Every single time. Matt Stauffer: Oh my gosh. Neo Ighodaro: Exactly. Matt Stauffer: Oh my gosh. Neo Ighodaro: It was hectic. Matt Stauffer: That's incredible. Neo Ighodaro: Pretty much. Matt Stauffer: You taught yourself how to design, so both in terms of design and HTML, I'm assuming that ... because I know that when I started, there weren't a lot of books around teaching this. Were you learning it purely online and, if so, do you remember any of the sites you used to learn? Neo Ighodaro: I remember the site I used to learn how to make my first-ever graphic, but I don't think I really learned any of the other ones, I mean, the tool sets and everything, using any site online. I was basically just "mash, mash, mash." It's "mash, mash," and it worked, I'm like, "Oh." Matt Stauffer: View source, copy, paste, modify. Neo Ighodaro: Exactly. Something like that, so I was just editing. I would just pick a tool and drag it across the screen. I was like, "Try to figure out what does this do." But the first night I learned about actually making vector images was vexiles.net. I don't know if they're still around right now, but it taught me how to take a picture and turn it into a kind of vecto graphic. Matt Stauffer: Trace it with the ... what are those things called? The pen tool and everything like that? Neo Ighodaro: Exactly. Matt Stauffer: Very cool. I think that's pretty similar to how I learned. I remember I got my first book when I was five or 10 years into it and it was such a foreign process because I was like, "Wait. I have to sit down and read 50 pages and then" ... It just didn't translate. I was like, "No. You just kind of figure it out as you go." You started programming when you were 15. I'm guessing the design was a little bit later than that. At which point did you realize this was not just something that was just a fun thing to do with your time, but it was something you were actually going to consider turning into a career? Neo Ighodaro: I think I was about 17 or 18. That was when I actually creating the skills unofficially. I had a couple of friends back then and they had these really nice names for their website. There was Aether Reality.net. They just had really, really random names and I was like, "I could come up with one," and I don't know. I can't remember exactly how, but I was thinking in the lines of, "What if you had a company that portrayed designs to die for?" I sort of just circulated around that concept until I got to the point CreativityKills. I can't remember how it clicked or when I clicked, but I just know at some point, I was like, "Creativity kills." It kind of had a negative connotation, especially culturally, but I felt like people needed to ask questions like, "Well, how does creativity kill?" It kind of was the one thing that I knew could make my brand stand out, because people became curious. Matt Stauffer: I love that. It doesn't give you all the answers just from reading it. It makes you ask questions and that's something you wanted. I mean, that clearly lines up with the story you're telling me is you literally walked over to somebody else in the café and said, "What is that jumble you're typing into your screen right now?" That's really fascinating. Did you have any people around you or any role models where you said, "Oh, I'm going to do this like that other person I know or that other person I've seen," or was it more of a just kind of, "Hey, this is a thing I can try out and see what happens"? Neo Ighodaro: For design, yes. The Tony guy, I really can't remember his name. I wonder why. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: But anyways, the Tony guy, I think I still have him on Facebook or something. He didn't know it, to be honest. I was just more of an admirer from afar type of person and I really liked how he designed and everything, so he was sort of my role model in design. But when it came to HTML and PHP and the other program language, I didn't really have anybody. It was just me. Just me and nobody else. Matt Stauffer: At some point, you went from, "What is this computer and internet thing?" to "What is this coding thing?" to "What is this design thing?" to "I know these things well enough that I could make things" to "I know these things well enough that I could convince someone else to pay me money to do it." Those are a lot of shifts to happen over the span of, I think, two years basically. There's not a lot of other people around you who are doing kind of development consultancies and design consultancies and stuff like that, so how did you figure it out? What were your early challenges? Who were your early clients? What did it look like for you to create CreativityKills and turn it into actually making income? Neo Ighodaro: I had to figure out every single thing myself. I didn't know anything about marketing. They didn't even cross my mind, to be honest. When I started, I created a website for it. I don't have the template anymore, but I was proud of it then. I'm not sure I would be now. Matt Stauffer: Right, right. Neo Ighodaro: I had this lady. She wanted to create a website for her NGO and she met me. She heard of me from my friend, so my friend told her, "Oh, I have this guy. He's probably be cheap and he does websites." Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: She was like, "Okay. Let me meet him," and I talked to her. She told me, "This is what I want. This is what I want," and I was like, "Okay, cool." Back then, I only knew HTML to be honest. I didn't know PHP and so I was like, "How do I swing this?" I then went to a cybercafe again and I started Googling, no, I was Yahooing, basically- Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: Because I don't think I was using Google then. I was trying to figure out, "How do I make a website as dynamic?" and I think that's where I stumbled upon PHP. Somebody was talking about PHP and CGI scripts and all the stuff and I was like, "This seems like something to go into." Then I had about two months, so I gave a deadline of two months to deliver the project, so I had roughly about a month to learn PHP. PHP just jumped at me. I was like, "Let me just go with this one." I heard of ESB. I heard of a lot of ones, but PHP just seemed welcoming. I mean, that's the allure of the language, anyways. I was like, "I'm going to do this," and I jumped on it. The learning process was difficult. I didn't pick it up in one month. I actually just knew a bit, a few things, because of 30 minutes increments, 30 minute, 30 minute. At some point, I stumbled upon Greymatter and WordPress and then I was like, "Okay, so this kind of makes you build a website easily. I could do this. I mean, it doesn't look so complicated." I had to figure out how to host websites, so I hosted her website. I paid for the domains and everything and then in about two months, I came and said, "Hey, look at your website," and she paid me. I was so happy, like, "This is my first income. I did it alone." It was a happy moment for me, but from then on, I started feeling like, "What if I could take that one client and kind of expand my reach, try to reach other people?" I mean, one person old one person, so obviously, there's some sort of system to it. I started digging about SEO and I started digging into marketing and that's pretty much ... one thing led to another, and most of the things I learned, I had to learn because when you work to a certain degree, you hit a bump. Then you're like, "What to do next?" and then you get introduced to certain concepts, and then you learn about that. Then you hit another bump, and, then, "What do I do next?" That was pretty much my learning phase. I just kept on hitting bumps. Initially, it was the HTML. Then I was like, "The HTML has to look nice," so I had to go to CSS. "Now the visual aspects have to look nice," so I went to Photoshop, then I went back to HTML. I realized that you can't really do much with HTML. You need some dynamics. I went to JavaScript and it was really, really difficult, so I left it. I heard of PHP. I went to PHP and I realized I have to go back to JavaScript. I went back to JavaScript and then to Jaggery. It was just- Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: One thing leading to the other. Matt Stauffer: Yeah. You do what you can until you hit a pain point and then you figure out the simplest possible thing to fix that pain point and then move on to the next pain point. Neo Ighodaro: Exactly. Matt Stauffer: Very cool. You were writing procedural PHP back then. This is pretty early. I'm guessing it was right past when WordPress was created. You got WordPress. You got into Greymatter. Did you spend just a couple years there, basically building HTML and CSS websites with some Photoshop design and some WordPress and some Greymatter? Is that kind of your bread and butter for a while before you made shifts over to things like Laravel? I mean, Laravel, obviously came out much later than that, but did you kind of sit in that space, or were there other kind of steps in your journey between then and Laravel? Neo Ighodaro: No. I sat there for a while. I really didn't think of structure or anything. I was there for a long time, probably a year or three years, between that range. I remember the first time I got introduced to CodeIgniter. I learned about CodeIgniter and I didn't really understand what MVC was. In my mind, I just wanted to write spaghetti code and be done with it, but I started seeing the benefits I made of separating concerns and I felt like it could help eventually. I mean, all those things I've created, plus it's a framework. It gives you a jumpstart and that was really what sold me. I didn't have to write my skill connect to this or my skill connect to that, I just put my details and I'm done. I got into CodeIgniter. After a while, I started ... my learning of PHP started evolving from spaghetti code to "How do we structure an application?" Then I started, and this is very interesting, actually. Because I didn't have a laptop or a PC. Laptops were a stretch. I didn't have a PC then. I had to do this thing. I decided to write a framework of my own, but I had just 30 minutes in a cybercafe, roughly. Matt Stauffer: Is this still a floppy disk that you're using, or is this what you're about to tell me? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, yeah. A floppy disk, so what I did was I bought a diary and I literally wrote my code in ink- Matt Stauffer: No. Neo Ighodaro: On the diary. Matt Stauffer: No. Now why couldn't you just save it as HTML files and PHP files down in your floppy disk? Neo Ighodaro: Let me explain. I had a couple of minutes, where if I'm going to ... let's just say, maximum, an hour and thirty minutes at the cybercafe- Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: That's when I have access, but I don't want to go there and start thinking of what to do. Matt Stauffer: Oh. Neo Ighodaro: Exactly, so my solution to- Matt Stauffer: You're writing in the diary when you're not at the cybercafe as your brain is roiling over. Oh my goodness. Neo Ighodaro: Exactly. Matt Stauffer: That's amazing. I mean, I've done architectural diagrams in a journal and I've done the tiniest little bit of code, but writing a framework that way? No way. So, you basically show up, and the first thing you'd do is basically transcribe all your diary notes down into code and then see- Neo Ighodaro: Exactly. Matt Stauffer:"Hey, did it work?" Wow. Neo Ighodaro:"Did it work?" "No." "Oh, bugs, bugs, bugs. Fix, fix, fix, fix, fix. Oh drat. I forgot this." Matt Stauffer: Wow. Fascinating. Neo Ighodaro:"Yeah. I got to go home. Just log out. Go back home." Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: And write, write, write, write, write, write. Matt Stauffer: And write more in your diary. Neo Ighodaro: There was this thing. Nigeria's a very cultural state and then there was this day my mom stumbled upon the diary. She thought I was writing a lot of demonic stuff. She was like, "Oh my God." Matt Stauffer: Oh, no. Neo Ighodaro:"What is all this?" She literally thought I was possessed. Matt Stauffer: It's funny because I was going to ask about your family, so this is perfect. What did your family think about this whole thing? You're skipping class. I mean, I don't know if they knew you were skipping class, but you're doing these computer things. You're in the cybercafes all the time. Was that something that you got a lot of support for, you got a lot of criticism for, or were they kind of ambivalent, they weren't sure how to feel? Neo Ighodaro: A lot of criticism. An African family is a family that places a lot of value on education, so me skipping school then was horrible. I was literally the black sheep of the family just instantly. The day they find out, they were so disappointed. "How could you do this? Blah blah blah," and I was just staring, like, "Sorry." Then they were like, "We're really, really disappointed," and everything. Then the day they saw the writings on the book was my mom, she freaked out. She thought I was on some demonic tick and she was like she's going to call an entire family meeting, so the entire family gathered and they were like, "What is this you're writing?" Matt Stauffer: Oh, no. Neo Ighodaro: And I was not good enough to explain it, so I was just like, "It's code." "It's code for what?" And I was like- Matt Stauffer: Right, right. Yeah. Code as if ... "It makes computers work." Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, so I couldn't really explain it and they were like, "We don't want to ever see you doing this again," and I was like- Matt Stauffer: Oh my gosh. Neo Ighodaro:"Yeah, sure. Right." But I knew, deep down, I wasn't going to stop. Matt Stauffer: How long did it take for you- Neo Ighodaro: I think that was one of the few things that- Matt Stauffer: Oh no. Go ahead, go ahead. Neo Ighodaro: Really made me continue to really fight for it, just because I felt like it made me a rebel. Matt Stauffer: I love it. How long do you think it took before they really kind of understood, or do they now? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, they do. It took a long time, until I was in the university, actually, and they started seeing some dividends like it was paying off. They were like, "Okay. This dude hasn't called us to ask for pocket money or anything, actually." Matt Stauffer: Right, right. Neo Ighodaro: They were like, "He probably is doing something right," and then they were like, "Okay, so what is this thing exactly?" Matt Stauffer: Got it. Neo Ighodaro: They were willing to come to the table and ask me questions like, "What does it do? How does it work?" Matt Stauffer: Very cool. Neo Ighodaro: Then there's this thing in Nigeria, so there are internet fraud stars a lot. They scam people of money and blah blah blah, but the idea is back in the day, when they see you, any young person in front of a computer, that is the instant thing they think, that you're a fraudulent person, that you're being ... they called it a "yahoo yahoo boy." Matt Stauffer: They call it ... can you say it again? It didn't come through on Skype. Neo Ighodaro: Yahoo yahoo. Like "yahoo" twice. Matt Stauffer: Got it. Neo Ighodaro: So they call you a yahoo yahoo boy. They were really concerned that that's what I was doing. Matt Stauffer: Got it. Neo Ighodaro: They really wanted to know because it was illegal and they didn't want any of the stuff and I was like, "No. I promise it's not actually that. It's literally the opposite," and they sort of just went with it. I don't think they really believed. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: They just had faith, so I guess they started to come around from there. Matt Stauffer: That's fascinating and that transitions to the university. At some point, you were doing CodeIgniter, and I assume that was before university. At what point did you decide to go to university, or was this all happening at the same time? Neo Ighodaro: Pretty much at the same time. After they found out that I'd been skipping school, I had to change schools, so I had to go to another one somewhere closer that it could monitor my movements and- Matt Stauffer: Got it. Neo Ighodaro: It didn't really stop me, actually. I did what I wanted to do anyways. The good part was I was sort of book smart to a point- Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: I was able to ace my exams and everything. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: That was the good part, so I didn't really need to go to school, because I knew if they found out that I didn't do a couple of tests, they would probably come and check the attendance sheet and everything. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: I made sure I aced most of my tests, most of my exams, but on the low-low, I was still trying to figure out what this entire programming thing was about. Matt Stauffer: All right, so you went off to ... what did you actually study in university? Was it programming, or was it engineering? What was the actual formal title of it? Neo Ighodaro: Mathematics and economics. Matt Stauffer: Is that something you use in your daily life right now? Neo Ighodaro: Nope. Nope. Matt Stauffer: All right. Well- Neo Ighodaro: Very big no. Matt Stauffer: Well, yeah. I mean, I studied in English education when I was in school. I mean, technically, I don't use it, although the experiences I had there still inform me today. All right, so you went to university. You graduated from university. You got that degree. At what point did you transition from being Neo of CreativityKills who does kind of freelance contracting stuff to Neo who is, I mean, you're doing stuff out in the community. We'll talk about that in a bit. You're working at Hotels.ng. Now, I did see you had a blog post, I think it was in maybe 2016, so was this a pretty recent transition for you? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah. Pretty much. Matt Stauffer: What was that like? Neo Ighodaro: Let me step back a little. I'll tell you another interesting story. Ever before I owned my first laptop, how I got it was there was this guy, Kolade, he had a friend who wanted a programmer on one of their projects and then it was like, "Neo, you need to get on this," and I was like, "You know I don't have a laptop." He was like, "Okay, you know what? I'll tell them. They'll get you a laptop and then we can go from there." I was like, "How do I pay for it?" They were like, "No, don't worry." I was like, "Okay, cool." Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: I was so excited, but I just wanted to play it cool. Be cool, be cool, be cool. Then they brought the laptop and it was ugly. I appreciate it. Matt Stauffer: Right, right, right. Neo Ighodaro: I mean, I still have it. Matt Stauffer: It's a laptop. Nice. Neo Ighodaro: I appreciate it, but it was horrible, meaning if you unplugged the laptop, it would go off. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: The battery was finished. It was literally horrible. Matt Stauffer: It was like a big gray box kind of thing? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, and the problem with that was the situation of power in the country. You could literally go for an entire 24 hours without power at all. The internet was so expensive, but, I mean, somehow, I was able to manage. I had to go to school a couple of times. There's this hub where you could plug your stuff in. Matt Stauffer: Got it. Neo Ighodaro: I'd go there and plug. I remember some of those people always laughing at the laptop, like, "What is that?" Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: I was like, "Just ignore them. Just ignore them and do what you need to do." Fast forwarding, I had a sort of big break, right? It was during the period where BlackBerry was very popular in Nigeria, so I created this website with PHP. I think that's actually the first product I've ever created for myself. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: It was called FlashDp. What it did was it used ImageMagick to create a GIF and then you were able to use that GIF as a display picture on your BBM, BlackBerry Messenger. I did it because ... back in the day, because I wasn't too rich. Let me rephrase that. I was poor, so I had to find a way to make money at least. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: I found out people really like these GIFs and I used to create them on Photoshop a lot and then I thought about it, like, "There has to be a way to do this in PHP or some language." I was like, "Let me try." I sat down that day and I used Kohana. I don't know if you know it? Matt Stauffer: Yeah, yeah. Neo Ighodaro: Kohana framework? So, I used it and I came up with FlashDp and I gave a friend ... I was hosting it on Pagoda Box, so I gave a friend, like, "Hey, help me try this stuff. See if it works," and I went to bed. The next morning, the server had crashed. Matt Stauffer: Oh my gosh. Neo Ighodaro: I was like, "What is happening? What happened?" Then I went to analytics and I check. "Wow. A lot of people used it," and because it was very resource-intensive, I mean, it was ImageMagick trying to- Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: Generate images over and over again, so I was like, "Let me try and reboot the server." I didn't really know about servers then, but it was a click and reboot thing. I decided to create another version two. I decided, "Let me just give everybody, make people use it." Right? Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: I mean, it doesn't hurt. Then I gave people and I just put AdSense on it, and that was literally one of the best decisions I've made ever, because in the space of ... so I created it 2013 and in the space of about a year or two, I made about $37,000. Matt Stauffer: What? What? Just from AdSense? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah. And in Nigeria, that's huge. Yes. In Nigeria, that's huge. That was huge money, so I was able to get my first MacBook. I was able to get a nice Mac and literally that point was the turning point, because I had all the tools I needed. I didn't need to write in a diary anymore. Matt Stauffer: Right, right, right. Neo Ighodaro: I could practice it without need for power for a long time at least. I literally had everything I needed to actually become better and I felt so empowered. That was around the period when I was in school, so I had a lot of time to myself. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: A lot of time to learn, a lot of time to actually go back, and that's when I started redesigning CreativityKills again. I went back to the drawing board and I was like, "How do we appeal to people?" I spent about eight months creating that site and I released it. I think it was on adwords.com for an honorable mention or something like that. Matt Stauffer: Nice. Neo Ighodaro: I was really proud of myself. I came out and I did it. It was crazy for me, but creating FlashDp itself was the turning point. That was the landmark in everything. Matt Stauffer: That's incredible. I feel like I could dig into just this part of your story for another hour. I'm trying to keep this short. I'm going to move on, but that is fascinating. You said that was 2013, so at that point, you had gone from CodeIgnitor, you had moved over to Kohana. Let's move into modern Neo. Let's move in to Laravel. Let's move into the Laravel Nigeria Meetup. Let's move into Hotels.ng. When did you transition from Kohana to Laravel and what made you make that transition? Neo Ighodaro: FlashDp made me make the decision. It was around this period where people were arguing about whether to use static methods or not, and I started feeling bad about Kohana because it had a lot of static methods. I was like, "Is there something out there that's better?" Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: I mean, obviously there might be, so I started digging and I found out about I think was it FuelPHP? I think Slim. I don't know if Slim was really around then, but I know I saw a bunch of them and I heard of Laravel and I was like, "I like the name." It has a ring to it. That was literally the only reason why I jumped on it. Matt Stauffer: Wow. Wow. Neo Ighodaro: I just liked the name. It was like, "I could try this," but I think it was around version four, around that period or something like that. I was like, "How does this work? I mean, it's usually the usual MVC stuff." Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: I was like, "This seems cool," and I realized that every single thing I did was easy. You want to do this? Easy. You want to do that? Matt Stauffer: It just works. Neo Ighodaro: Easy. Yeah. I was hooked. I was like, "I'm sold." It was hard for me leaving Kohana, because I had built a lot of packages back then. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: I built a Honey Pot module or Coconut. I forgot on what they called them, but it was a package for Kohana then, so I was kind of tied to the community, but I felt if it's better with Laravel, I could just try it. That was my switch. I created version two of FlashDp using Laravel 4. I just basically kept on digging into Laravel and digging and digging and digging. I also picked up Objective C during that period. Matt Stauffer: All right. Neo Ighodaro: I got an iPhone and I learned to jail break in. I learned you could create awesome stuff using a language called Objective C, so I pretty much dived into it and started learning Objective C, creating jail break tweaks, and all that stuff. Matt Stauffer: Very cool. Neo Ighodaro: Now, my transition into being Neo ... I had this thing where I said I was never going to work- Matt Stauffer: For someone else? Neo Ighodaro: For another company. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: But I realized that if I was to run any successful business, you need experience. It goes without ... you just need it. I was like, "I need to pick the right company." You just don't jump into it, right? Matt Stauffer: Yep. Neo Ighodaro: From, I think, 2015, I started scoping the Nigerian tech scene. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro:"Who would I want to work for?" I was nobody. I wasn't really known. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: But I knew I was good, so I started digging and digging and I found nothing, to be honest. I found nothing that I felt I wanted to work for until I think 2016. I was still in Benin. I schooled outside Lagos, by the way. I was still in Benin and I went to a school called University of Benin. That's UNIBEN. Then I sort of heard of Hotels.ng and I didn't really think much of it. I hadn't heard much about it, so I was like, "Meh." Then I had a friend called Lynda. So, cool story, she was the friend of somebody I knew back in the day, so my friend had been telling me, "Okay, Lynda, she's really good. She's really good." I was like, "Who is this Lynda? Who is she?" I went online and I researched and I heard she was the head of product at Hotels.ng and so I just pretty much said, "Hi. Oh hey, how you doing?" Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: Then we got to talking a little and then we kind of just hit it off pretty much. We were just talking and talking. Then I think I told her that I'm looking for a gig or something. I can't really remember the backstory, but I remember receiving an email. I came to Lagos because my mom had an accident. Matt Stauffer: I'm sorry. Neo Ighodaro: A very, almost mortal one. She was in a sickbed for a long time, so I was really sad. I came down to Lagos and went to see her in the hospital. It was a very bad, very depressing moment in my life, but, I mean, coming back gave me some sort of perspective on life, like, "Things don't last forever. You need to use whatever you have as quickly as you can," so I think I sent an application. I'm not really sure if I applied or not, but I remember receiving an email from Mark Essien, he's the CEO, and he was like, "Hey. I heard about you from Lynda. Can you come to the office for an interview?" My initial reaction was, "No," but I thought about it. Matt Stauffer: Even though you had sent something in to them, right? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah. Then I thought about it. I was like, "You know what? It doesn't hurt. Let me just go." Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: That was literally my first interview ever. Ever. Matt Stauffer: Ever, anywhere? Neo Ighodaro: I was about 20-something then. Matt Stauffer: Wow. Neo Ighodaro: Twenty six-ish? And I was like, "Let me just go." I went and- Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: I remember him sitting in the office with three devs. Lynda wasn't around. I think she was on leave then. It was like, "What are these? What are these?" and it was calling computer science terms. I really didn't know any of them and I was like- Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro:"If this interview's to go like this, I'll literally fail because I don't know any of these terms. Give me a laptop." Matt Stauffer: Do you say that out loud? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, I did. Totally. I didn't know any of these terms. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro:"Just give me a laptop and I will show you what I can do." Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: Then he looked at me for a minute or so and then it was like, "Okay." Then he left and then sort of, I just felt like I'd already gotten the job. Then he left me with the devs and they kept on asking me different questions, like, "This, that, that," and then one of them was like, "I think I've seen your CreativityKills somewhere." I was like, "Ha, sold." Matt Stauffer: Brilliant. Neo Ighodaro: Then he was like, "Yeah. Can you show us stuff you've done?" Then I brought in my laptop and then I showed him ... I had this music site I created using Angular and PHP backed in on Laravel. I showed him, and the first thing he was like was, "Do you design your code?" Because it was so cleanly written. It was during a period where Jeffrey was always talking about, “small controller, thin controllers, this, that. Best practices, SOLID. This, that," and he literally asked me, "Do you design it? Do you sit down and format your code?" I was like, "No, not really. Maybe I have OCD or not. I don't know." But he was really impressed at the structure of the code and I was like, "Wow. He's never seen anybody designing this, like your code. You just write code. It makes no difference to the compiler, you know?" Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: I was like, "I like to see my code as art. If I feel good about it, I feel happy, but I just don't want to jumble everything. He was like, "Cool." I think that was the day I got the job. I hadn't even gotten home and I got another email saying, "You're hired." He was like, "Can you start tomorrow?" and I was like, "Okay." Matt Stauffer: All right. Neo Ighodaro: It was a big leap. That's right. I literally- Matt Stauffer: You were hired as a programmer upfront, right? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, as a programmer. I hadn't even settled with the fact that just got my first interview. I already had my first job. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: I decided to go in and what really caught me was the culture. I've always had this culture, this ideology of what I want CreativityKills to look like and I literally saw everything right there. It was there, and that was what sold me. Everybody seemed so compact. It was a very good mixture of fun and work and that was literally what made me stay. Matt Stauffer: That's very cool. And Mark's very young too, right? It's not as if you're- Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, he is. Matt Stauffer: Joining this kind of giant, pre-existing thing. It was other people with a kind of same young Nigerian "figuring this out as we go" kind of mindset. Neo Ighodaro: Exactly. Matt Stauffer: That's awesome. All right, again, I want to ask you an hour of questions about Hotels.ng, but because we're getting close on time, what I want to do is to talk about a few things real quick. First of all, we're going to talk about the Lagos tech scene, because you mentioned about how you looked around there, and it obviously exists, but I would guess that when you first started, there really wasn't much of a tech scene. I want to hear your thoughts on that. I want to hear your thoughts about the Meetup, and then the last thing, I want to hear about hoodies. Let's start with the Lagos tech scene. When you first started, you said there weren't a lot of people around you that you could look at. There weren't people who you were saying, "That is this person in my town who I want to be like. I identify with that person and I want to be like them," so do you have any thoughts? Did you watch transition happen where all of a sudden, there were other Laravel developers around you and other tech companies? Do you have anything to share with us about what that growth process looked like? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah. When I started, either there was nobody, but they were there, but social media- Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: Wasn't as prevalent as it is now, so I didn't really notice or see anybody. But the first person I did notice was Prosper. I just knew he was making a lot of noise. He's very, very energetic. He can shout, so he's an energetic person, and I kind of noticed him. I was like, "Who is this guy?" He was always saying, "Community, community." What is the community? What is it, exactly? Matt Stauffer: Right. Right. Neo Ighodaro: There is no community. I'm not seeing anything. He just kept on going and I was like, "Maybe there is a community after all," and so getting to Hotels.ng kind of gave me a lot of ... because Hotels.ng is kind of a big scene when it comes to tech. We like to support tech a lot, and it kind of gave me ... it's almost like I swallowed something and now my eyes were opened, and I sort of saw that there was potential. There were a lot of people, but there was just no real leadership. People were not just organized, but the people were there. It's just like Lego blocks. They were there, but nobody could put them together. Matt Stauffer: Got it. Neo Ighodaro: That was literally how I noticed, and I realized that what Prosper was trying to do was to get people to come together. Matt Stauffer: Very cool. Neo Ighodaro: And create that actual community that he was shouting about. That was when I realized that it's possible for us to create something that would kind of unite every single hungry developer, for any developer that's been hungry for knowledge for a while, we can unite them and people could come out and give speeches. Then we did a lot of research on Meetups and conferences. From there on, it has been up, up. I've just been noticing that. People have just been waiting, literally, for someone to start, and once there was that spark, it just happened so quickly. Everybody was, "Meet up here. Meet up here. Meet up here." Right now, as I speak, they're having a G2G Summit and a bunch of others. Next week, I have about ... the entire week is literally booked up. Matt Stauffer: Wow. Neo Ighodaro: I have a talk in Android Nigeria and there are a lot of Meetups coming up everywhere. Matt Stauffer: So, this is all pretty recent? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, yeah. I would say about three years, two years. Matt Stauffer: Because I mean, I follow you on Twitter and I see you posting stuff about a Meetup or a conference, it feels like every week, you're at a different place meeting new people. So this is all just a couple years old, then? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, yeah. Pretty much. Matt Stauffer: Did I hear you right in saying it's not that that tech scene wasn't there, but it was very kind of individualized, like people were really kind of in their own world? A lot of people probably have a pretty similar story to yours, where people are figuring it out on their own and just recently there was ... Prosper helped. You helped, and probably other folks helped realizing there's a lot of potential if we bring all these people together in one, and all of a sudden, they're exploding. So, I'm seeing you nodding, but I asked you a question. Is that a safe way to say it? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, yeah. That's literally how it happened. Matt Stauffer: What do you think the thing that kicked that ... could you point to a single Meetup or a single person or a single event, or were there a lot of them kind of all starting up at the same time? Neo Ighodaro: I might be wrong, but I would point at ForLoop. There's this Meetup called ForLoop. It was started by Ridwan. I think he was one of the first people that started the entire Meetup thing. I might be wrong again, but it was the one I notice- Matt Stauffer: Sure, but from your perspective. Neo Ighodaro: Yeah. It was the one I noticed first and it kind of had the ideologies that most Meetup outside the countries have, like you just get a bunch of coders to come to the table and just talk about new tech. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: That was literally my first Meetup, so I was like, "You know what? I want to speak at ForLoop." That was literally my first ever talk, so I spoke on Docker and I was like- Matt Stauffer: Cool. Neo Ighodaro:"Let's see how this goes," and it was really successful. I mean, we're having not as much numbers as we have now, because it was just starting out, but that was the first Meetup I've heard of from my own perspective, so I think that was the turning point for everything. I will literally say ForLoop. Matt Stauffer: Do you remember, when you first spoke at ForLoop, when that was and how many people there were there at that point? Neo Ighodaro: I'm not too sure about when, but I know the first one I attended, because we hosted it in my office. We used to host Meetups at the Hotels.ng. I think there were about 80, between 50 to 80 people. Matt Stauffer: Wow. Neo Ighodaro: To us, that was big numbers. We really thought we- Matt Stauffer: The Meetups in my local town don't get that many people most of the time and they've been going for years. I mean, and you've noticed people are getting excited about Laravel Nigeria. I mean, part of it is because you never heard of it at all, and then all of a sudden, you've got 400 people and you're running out of space for people to sit. The rapid success that you've seen ... you say you don't remember, but it was at your office, so it had to have been within the last year probably, right? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah, definitely. Matt Stauffer: Yeah, so this is very, very, very recently. I mean, you went from attending ForLoop the first time with 50 to 80 people. You went from speaking at ForLoop for the first time. You went to helping kind of Prosper and Lynda and others create Laravel Nigeria. For it not existing at all, to all of sudden having hundreds and hundreds of people and running out of space and we're all talking about the span of basically the last 12 months or less. This is a pretty incredible growth process and that's why people, they're saying, "Wait a minute. Where did this all come from?" And that's why I asked the question about the tech scene. It didn't come out of nowhere, but the organization that gave the space for it to be seen and to for it to be brought together seems to really happen quickly, but what it did was it touched on something that's been there for a long time. Right? Neo Ighodaro: Yeah. Matt Stauffer: It's individuals. It's an entrepreneurial spirit. It's the desire to do all these things and the motivation to do it even when you only have 30 minutes at a time, even when you've got rolling power black and stuff like that. There's something. There's a reason where a lot of people keep saying, "Whoa. Keep your eye on Nigeria," so that's ... I mean, again, I could talk a whole hour about that, but I'm trying to keep everything short here. All right, so we talked about the Lagos tech scene a little bit. We talked about the Meetup a little bit. I do want to hear you give a pitch, where if somebody has never heard of Laravel Nigeria, give me a pitch about what it is and I asked you a lot of questions when we first talked about well, where people are coming from and what are your timelines and what are your goals, and all this kind of stuff. So, tell me a little bit about the Meetup. Tell me a little about where it is right now. When's the next one going to be? What are the things you're excited about? What are the things you're nervous about? What are the difficult and exciting parts about doing it? Neo Ighodaro: I remember when I thought of Laravel Nigeria initially, it was around December 2016, and I talked to Prosper. That was one of our first few conversations, and I was like, "What would it be like if we had Laravel in Nigeria?" I initially called it, I can't remember the name, but I called it something different. It was like, "You know what? That seems like a good idea. Why don't we do it?" I had zero knowledge on Meetups, like zero. I literally didn't know where to start, and they were like, "Okay." Then we kind of just didn't do it, so January passed. February passed. March, I can't remember when we did the first one, but all of a sudden, I just woke up one morning. I was like, "Let's just do it," and then I called him. I met him at a café, Café Neo, funny enough, so there's a café in Nigeria called Café Neo. Matt Stauffer: Love it. Neo Ighodaro: I met him there and I was like, "Guy, we should do this thing, but I want to speak in pidgin." Pidgin is a weird form of English that we speak in Nigeria here. Matt Stauffer: Really? I had no idea. Neo Ighodaro: Yeah. It's called pidgin English. So, I'm like, "Guy, we could do this thing now." Literally saying, "Guy, let's do this stuff." Then he was like, "Okay. How do we start?" Then I was like, "We should create a Meetup page first." He was like, "Okay," so I tried doing my card and it didn't work, so he did. His card worked, and he created a Meetup page. I created a Twitter page. I started working on the website. Generally, I just noticed people were joining the Meetup page and we hadn't really started talking about it. We just put a couple of things there and say, "We might be hosting a Laravel Nigeria Meetup." Might. That was the word, might. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: Then people were like, "Oh, this is great. This is great. This is great. This is great." The Meetup page was just going higher and I was like, "What is happening?" Then that kind of put pressure on me to actually do the Meetup. Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: Because I was kind of nervous that it would fail. I remember telling some of my colleagues at work that, "I don't know if I can actually do this. I mean, it's huge." Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro:"It's a huge thing. I don't have the money to sponsor it, but how would I do it?" Then someone was like, "Just ask for help," and I was like, "That kind of makes sense." The strategy I did was I went to the Laravel source code itself. I was like, "Okay. What companies are generally interested in Laravel?" I mean, that would be the companies that are more likely to support, right? Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: I looked and I saw Pusher. I saw Nexmo and a couple of others. I was like, "Okay. Pusher, Pusher." Then I spoke to ... I think around that period, I just started guest-writing for them, so I messaged someone in their team and she was like, "That sounds great." I was like, "Cool." I didn't really believe it. Of course, she was like, "Yeah, sure." Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro: Back then, we had about a hundred people who RSVPed and I was feeling like it wasn't enough, but she was really, really, like, "Oh my God. A hundred?" I was like, "Yeah." Then she was like, "That's huge. We will support." I mean, that's the journey. We started getting people to support the entire thing. We couldn't use Hotels.ng space because 100 people, it wouldn't fit, so we talked to Andela, which is a company that outsources developers to bigger companies and I think Facebook invested in them recently. I talked to them and they were like, "Yeah, sure. Why not? I mean, we're all for the community. Yay," and I was like, "cool." So, we had that. If I was to tell someone about Laravel Nigeria, I would literally say from my own perspective, it's the belief that you can bring something out of nothing, the belief that you don't have to know about it to be able to do it. You just need to take the first step. Nobody's perfect at anything, and Laravel Nigeria was a shot in the dark, granted, but it was a lot of hard work and that shot paid off. I mean, it might have not paid off, but it did. I wouldn't have known if I didn't try, yeah? Matt Stauffer: Yeah. Neo Ighodaro: What we try to do now is tell people, "Hey, talk to everybody. Try and get people in remote communities, because right now Lagos seems like the place where a lot of things are happening." Matt Stauffer: Right. Neo Ighodaro:"We want people from other states. Mobilize your people. Try and get people to attend Meetups." In the past one month or two months, I've attended Meetups in places where I didn't expect people to come. I'm like, "Wow. Okay. Crazy." This is viewed as a state where you're like ... I didn't expect so many people to come out. People were out, and I was like, "It's happening." Laravel Nigeria is literally the belief that there are a lot of people out there. There are a lot of people who want it to happen. There are a lot of people who are hungry for this knowledge, a lot of people who already know, but just need a platform to come out and start speaking. This has given them a lot of them hope and a lot of that platform they need to really come out and be leaders, because that's what we want to create, a lot of leaders that can lead the new generation of developers, basically. Matt Stauffer: I love it. I've said a thousand times I could talk for another hour. I can't, but I'm going to wrap it up with just three

An interview with Taylor Otwell, creator of Laravel, about what he did before Laravel and what got him started. Views by Drake The Life of Pablo by Kanye West Free 6LACK by 6LACK 808s and heartbreak by Kanye West Blue Neighbourhood by Troye Sivan Laravel & Lawns Transcript (sponsored by Laravel News): Matt Stauffer : Welcome to the Laravel Podcast, episode 55, in which I talk to Laravel creator Taylor Otwell. We learn about his back story, where he came from, and what helped him—and made him—start Laravel in the first place. Stay tuned. Taylor, it's great to have you on season three of the Laravel podcast. Obviously you've been around since the very beginning, but we're doing a little switch up here, where I'm going to start doing interviews. So, I'm super excited to have you as the first person whose brain I get to pick here. So, I guess we can start with ... Say hi to the people. Taylor Otwell : Hey people. Hey party people. Matt Stauffer : Ha. Party people. What we're going to do here for today, and I told you this beforehand, but I feel like a lot of people have talked to you about Laravel, about development, about the latest version. Every time a new version comes out, 5.5 just came out, people want to talk about that. And maybe we'll cover that a little bit, but what I feel like we haven't talked about quite as much is, the man behind the scenes, kind of thing. I think there's a lot about you that people don't know, so I first started with the questions ... I've known you for years now. I feel like I know you really well and there's still certain things I don't know about your past, but then I also asked a few folks, "What are some things you really want to know about Taylor and how he works?" So, we're just going to off-the-cuff, just throw some of those questions at you and see where it goes. Sound good? Taylor Otwell : Sounds good. Matt Stauffer : Awesome. So, first of all, back to the early days, when did you first have a computer in your home? Taylor Otwell : I think I was about ten or eleven, I had a computer. 66-megahertz computer that our neighbor actually, I think had, had it built of us, because our neighbor was a computer programmer, across the street. And this was back in the early days of Windows. Matt Stauffer : Mm-hmm (affirmative). Taylor Otwell : I guess it was like Windows 3.1 or something like that. Matt Stauffer : Yeah. Taylor Otwell : He was an early Windows programmer. And my parents had, I think asked him to help them get a computer for us. And it had a little megahertz readout on the front of the screen ... or on the front of the tower I guess. And was like Windows 95. Matt Stauffer : I'm always interested to hear from people what role, kind of early access and interest in computers has for them. So you having that neighbor, was it your neighbor that sparked your interest or was it having that computer? What was it that really sparked your interest in computers when you first got into them? Taylor Otwell : You know, it's hard to say, I don't think it was necessarily the neighbor that sparked the interest. I'm not sure I even realized that my neighbor was a programmer until later. I think I was just always interested in sci-fi type stuff and geeky stuff. Of course, I always liked Star Wars. I liked The Jetsons cartoon when I was a kid and all the cool tech stuff they had, so I guess I was just always drawn to futuristic tech stuff, so it was natural to be into computers. My first dabbling in programming was just playing HTML, where I would make little websites about the games I liked, like Pokemon or whatever other games I was playing at the time. Just little tips and strategy site. I remember one of the first ones I ever made actually, which was on CompuServe. And our neighbor, that same neighbor helped me and his son put it on CompuServe, was a website about Civilization 2, and sort of our strategies for that game. Matt Stauffer : Yes. What's the oldest website that you still have access to? Do you know? Taylor Otwell : I don't have anything from my childhood unfortunately. I wish I did. I wish I had thought to take screenshots of them and stuff. But a lot of them ... Several of them were on GeoCities and other free sites like that. Matt Stauffer : I remember my GeoCities sites. The only thing that I remember is the first one that I ever built, I hosted on GeoCities and it had a single image in it because image tags were pretty new at that point. So it was basically like text about me and a giant picture with a page scroll on the corner of the picture because the page scroll was the hottest Photoshop effect or whatever. Taylor Otwell : Yeah. I always thought the counters were really cool too. That you could put on your stuff. Matt Stauffer : Oh, my God, yeah. I was listening to somebody's podcast recently, I don't know who it was and the guy who had originally created link exchange was on there. Did you ever do those? Taylor Otwell : Yeah. I remember those. Those were big especially in the Pokemon website world. Matt Stauffer : Right? Yeah. We were all just waiting for one of those big sites to get a link over to us because of how the link exchange rule played. So it sounds like HTML is where you go started, do you ever do any, I don't know what the right term is like coding, coding, like a basic or anything like that early on, or was it not till later. Taylor Otwell : Yeah, I wrote few basic things. I also got really into TI-83 calculator programs where I would write little strategy games. Back then, at least in like middle school and high school the popular thing was like that drug wars game. Matt Stauffer : I was just going to say drug wars, that was it. Taylor Otwell : I would write games like that, either with drugs or with other lemonade stand type games. And I learned how to do that basically like sitting in ninth grade English, I just kind of taught myself how to program the calculator. Those were really the first real programs I wrote, I feel like. Matt Stauffer : When was your first exposure to the Internet that you remember? Taylor Otwell : We had internet pretty early after I got my first computer. We had dial up Internet. Just like at 14 4 modem. That was my first exposure to the internet. I don't even remember what sites were really a thing back then. I remember mainly looking at video game sites and just like Yahoo, and stuff like that. Matt Stauffer : When you were thinking, then, about coding ... I think a lot of us we were just kind of figuring it out as we went. Did you think, "Man, this is what I want to do forever," or was it just a fun thing and you were still ... did you have a different plan for your life at that point? Taylor Otwell : I actually did not plan to do coding, even when I entered college, I was doing my degree in computer networking and stuff because I thought programming would be too mathematical and sort of boring. Matt Stauffer : Mm-hmm (affirmative). Taylor Otwell : But I didn't really have a good understanding of what real programming was like, on a professional level. I'm not sure if schools back then, even in college ... I'm not sure I really got a good picture of what actual, on-the-job programming is like. I always imagined it to be so theoretical and really hard, like calculus all the time and stuff like that. But it really, at least for the kind of programming we do on the web, it doesn't tend to be that way. I went through all of college not planning to even be a programmer. Matt Stauffer : Did you do well ... I hope you don't mind me asking ... did you do well in math in high school, did you take calculus and everything? Taylor Otwell : Yeah, I was always like a B student in math. Matt Stauffer : Okay. Taylor Otwell : I was just okay. Matt Stauffer : Right. Taylor Otwell : I wasn't exceptional. Matt Stauffer : Not enough that the idea of programming being very "mathy" made you excited about it. Taylor Otwell : Yeah, exactly. Matt Stauffer : Okay. Did you ... like a different tact ... did you always consider yourself someone who's gonna do entrepreneurial stuff? At what point did you start thinking of yourself as, "I'm someone who's going to start a business"? Taylor Otwell : Only a few years after I'd gotten out of college and had a taste of the fact that anyone could take PHP and build an entire web application, which I didn't really realize, I guess, at the time that that was pretty possible for someone to do. Once I realized that, my brain just started churning with different ideas, and even if it wasn't something I could do full-time, but just something small to supplement my income or whatever. I was probably two or three years out of college before I really started thinking that way, though. Matt Stauffer : What was your first exposure to PHP that led you to having that experience? Taylor Otwell : My very first exposure was in college itself. We had a class project, it was a group project with two other people, and we had to build an inventory tracking system for a local charity. This was our final senior thing. We were all assigned real-world projects in the community, and so we happened to get this inventory tracking thing. One of the guys in the group was familiar with PHP, apparently, and said, "We can use PHP for this, because it's pretty easy," and I didn't really know any better, so I was like, "Sure, sounds good." That's when I really got my first exposure to PHP, even though I, on that project, mainly did talking with the customer, and finding out how they needed it to work, and stuff like that. Later, a couple of years down the road, when I started having ideas for side projects and stuff, I had remembered that he had chosen PHP back a couple of years ago in that class project. It was supposed to be easy or whatever, and I knew that we were able to lush the projects, so it wasn't too hard, apparently. Matt Stauffer : Were you ... Taylor Otwell : Yeah, so that's when I revisited PHP, because I hadn't actually used it very much in college. My partner had chosen it as our programming language for that project. Matt Stauffer : In college, when he chose that, were you doing .NET at that point, or did you get into it out of college? Taylor Otwell : No, I only did .NET once I got hired at my first actual programming job. The only programming courses I took in college were two semesters of C++, and that was it, actually I had those two semesters of programming, again, because I was in a networking degree, so I didn't have a lot of programming classes, like a pure computer science major might have. Matt Stauffer : Right. I think I remember you told me that the .NET thing was an intentional, learning-the-job-type situation? Taylor Otwell : Yeah. Matt Stauffer : What was that experience like? Taylor Otwell : Yeah, so, the place that hired me right out of college, they came to my university, which was Arkansas Tech. They were just interviewing students, and since they were there, I just decided to do an interview, even though I hadn't planned on being a programmer. I did the interview, and got the job, and the immediately put you in this six-month training program, where basically, for the first six months of the job, you spend most of your time in class, especially for the first three months, and then for the remaining three months, it's like 50-50 in class, and doing little projects and stuff. They actually taught me basically all of classic ASP, COBOL, JCL, which are two old things, and some beginnings of .NET, but not a ton of it. I did a lot of COBOL and classic ASP, and then eventually got put on a .NET project at work. I just picked that up from the existing code that was already written on the project, because I wasn't writing it from scratch at first. I just taught myself .NET as I got in there, because I already had been programming for a couple of years, so picking up another language was not too difficult, since they actually wrote in VB.NET, and all of their classic ASP was in VB, so ... Matt Stauffer : Right. The syntax was really similar. Taylor Otwell : Wasn't too bad. Matt Stauffer : That actually ... I wanted to ask about .NET and VC, but stepping back for a second, when you guys were writing PHP in school, was this classic PHP, was this ... I'm assuming it was 5-3, based on what I've talked to you about before, right? Was there any framework or anything? Taylor Otwell : No, there was no framework on that project that I remember. It was just classic ... from what I remember, because I actually had to put it all in a thumb drive and install it at this charity, it was just a bunch of random PHP files. There was no real structure to it. Matt Stauffer : Index.php, about.php ... Taylor Otwell : All the ... I remember looking at the HTML and all the PHP being mixed in. Matt Stauffer : Yeah. You got your SQL queries up top, and then the end bracket, and then, all of a sudden, your HTML. Taylor Otwell : Yeah. But then, when I came back to PHP later, it was on PHP 5.3. But again, I started with plain PHP for a few weeks, and then quickly realized that I needed some structure, and that's when I used CodeIgniter for a little bit. Matt Stauffer : Okay. Now, when you were doing .NET, was it .MVC at that point, or was it some predecessor? Taylor Otwell : I've done both. I've done .NET webforms, which were a predecessor to .MVC, and later, I did .MVC, the early versions. Matt Stauffer : I have experience with webforms, and I've never got my brain around the way it works, because if I remember right, it's basically ... rather than a route or a controller, or anything, it's really basically a form that handles its own validation, that handles its own everything. Everything is centered around this form, and then that form, and then that form. It's just a very different mental model, in my ... I know that's not a great description, but am I right in remembering that that's the difference between that versus .MVC? Taylor Otwell : Yeah. I think what they did, is they took WinForms, which is what we used to write desktop apps. On WinForms, how it works, if you want to do some action on a button-click, when they click on a button on your desktop app, you're literally in, the designer can click the button, and it takes you to the spot in the code that's like a click-event handler, and you write all of your code. I think on webforms, they tried to have ... basically, their thought process was, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could make the same model for the web, so that all these WinForms programmers can write these dynamic web applications, so you have the same thing, where you have button-click handlers in your .NET code that correspond to things on your front end." Somehow, they routed that using ... I don't know if it was query strings, or what they were actually passing in the form, but somehow, they were able to route that to the right piece of code when you clicked a button on your web front end. It felt like building a WinForms app, and was really different than any other web technology I've ever used since. Matt Stauffer : Yeah. The reason I was asking is, my brother has done .MVC for ages, and he helped me understand .MVC when I first got into CodeIgniter, but I remember having written webforms before that, and it's such a complete ... it felt a little bit like writing a classic ASP, especially if you're using VB, but then it felt a little bit like some kind of super-powered jQuery, basically. It's not like a mentality that I'm used to seeing anywhere else. Before you got back into CodeIgniter, you had had some experience with .MVC, then. Taylor Otwell : Yeah. I had .MVC, and that's why I even knew the frameworks as a concept to look for, basically. Matt Stauffer : So, you got a job out of school. It almost seems like it was a sponsored boot camp, basically, for the first six months. Is that a good way to think about it? There are getting used to real-world stuff, but you're actually sitting in classes sponsored by the company? Taylor Otwell : Yeah, a little bit. It was all on site, and all the instructors were full-time employees that actually were in other departments, actually. They would just pull them into these training classes when they needed them. But it was a really unique place. They only hired new graduates, and everyone goes through the same training program. It's like they just want people fresh, and wanted to sort of train them in their way of doing things, rather than bring in existing programmers that are already, I guess, ingrained with other ways. Matt Stauffer : Right. That you have to un-train, basically. Taylor Otwell : Yeah, it was one of the of the ... I guess, the only places I've worked that only hired new graduates. Matt Stauffer : Interesting. So, you're doing that, you're working at .MVC, and you have this idea that you want to do some side projects, and you mention that seeing your partner in that class project using PHP gave you a little of the idea that you could do something on your own. Can you tell me a little bit more about what the mentality was, and what the thought process was, that led for you to have a good, paying job doing .MVC, that you could do that for quite a while, and saying, "You know what? I want to do something on the side." What was the itch there? Taylor Otwell : I think part of it was having freedom to move wherever I wanted to if it did take off. Then, I could work from home, and we could move back closer to family, because at the time, I was living three or four hours away from the main bulk of my family, which lives in one town. It was just gonna be more freedom is what I remember to live wherever we wanted to. Matt Stauffer : Yeah. You wanted that freedom, you wanted to be able to be self-employed. If it's anything like it was for me, and then you can tell me if I'm wrong, that there wasn't quite as significant of a culture around being an entrepreneur. It feels like there is, today ... there wasn't all these conferences about being a sole entrepreneur. I guess hearing Ian and Andre talk about it, they're definitely ... what's that form they're always talking about? Business and Software? Taylor Otwell : Mm-hmm (affirmative). Matt Stauffer : But I don't know about you ... have you ever heard of any of those folks who are really big about doing your little business, or is it just something where you said, "Well, I want to do this, and I'll figure it out as I go." Taylor Otwell : No, I didn't know anyone else doing anything like that. I didn't even go to any websites that talked about that or anything. Matt Stauffer : Yeah, same here. I'm interested ... let's see if anything will come up during this chat ... whether the lack of those resources help to hurt us in various ways. You knew PHP was an option. You knew that you could ship with PHP. You at least had the ability to compare it against some other web-based programming things, and it seemed like PHP was more viable for getting something launched, working solo, and so you dug into PHP, you did a little bit of old-school procedural PHP, quickly realized you wanted to do CodeIgniter. What was the first project, do you remember, that you built with CodeIgniter? Taylor Otwell : One of the first projects I built was this really niche thing. I had known someone that owned a book bindery, they rebind old books, and I was going to build a little system for them to take orders and keep track of orders of books they were rebinding. It was a very specific product for this company. I think they were based in Tulsa or something at the time, pretty close to where I was living, really. Matt Stauffer : You built an app custom for them, you built it in CodeIgniter ... what was hosting like? What was the front end like? Do you remember any of the other technical details of what that was like? Taylor Otwell : I think I used DreamHost at the time, so it was just a shared host, because I didn't really know how to configure my own VPS until years later, basically. Yeah, I know I was on DreamHost, and would FTP the files using FileZilla, because I was on Windows at the time, and actually, I didn't even have a Mac until I started working for UserScape after Laravel had been built. All of Laravel, the first version, was built on a cheap Windows laptop. I would just FTP all the files up. When I first started, I was using Notepad++. Matt Stauffer : Yeah, man, I love Notepad++. A lot of good work done with Notepad++ and FileZilla. You were doing that, and at some point, you felt like ... well, actually, I was gonna say, at some point, you felt like CodeIgniter wasn't giving you what you wanted, but actually, the reason you and I first interacted was because I was a CodeIgniter developer who had started learning about IOC and DI, and stuff like that, and I said, "What I wanted was an IOC container for CodeIgniter," and this guy Taylor, this young guy, had written an IOC container for CodeIgniter, and I couldn't find the code anywhere." I ended up DMing you or something, and you ended up saying, "You know what I just pulled ... I got rid of it, I pulled it in Laravel, you should check out Laravel." That was basically how I first my Laravel. I followed Jeffrey at Nettuts for a while, and he'd been talking about Laravel for a bit, so that was what finally switched me over. It sounds like before you went off on your own to do your own thing, you were trying to work in the CodeIgniter ecosystem to improve it. What was that like? Taylor Otwell : Yeah, so at first, I had no intentions of splitting off and writing a framework. But you're right, one of the first projects I wrote was CI injector, CInject or something like that. I was actually pretty proud of that. It was actually the first reflection-based IOC container in PHP at all that I'm aware of. There was one other IOC container that was also written in 2010, a few months later. That was one of the main pieces of .NET/.MVC that I really like was the auto-resolving container. Laravel's container still works, basically, like that first CodeIgniter container did. The other thing I was really interested in was the better ORM for CodeIgniter, and I wanted to get those two things in ... oh, there was a third thing. I wanted better templating, like Blade, where you have an @extends at the top, and then you define these sections that override the parent template section, stuff like that. Template inheritance. I remember the final straw, that I couldn't really continue with CodeIgniter anymore, is I wanted auto-resolving dependency injection in my CodeIgniter controllers. To make that work, you really had to start editing the core files in a way that was not in a nice, packageable, shippable way, where other people could do it. Then I hit this crossroads, where I considered just forking CodeIgniter, and making this "special edition" of just sort of souped-up CodeIgniter on steroids, and giving it another name. Or just starting fresh. I think I just started fresh to just experiment at first, and then got so far along, I just kept going. I know I rewrote the first version of Laravel, probably a solid five or six times until I was happy with it. Matt Stauffer : What was the first thing you wrote in Laravel? Taylor Otwell : I remember writing the routing engine first. Probably the routing and the views. I think ... I don't remember exactly what I was doing for the database at the time. There was an active record of implementation called PHP ActiveRecord, that even at that time had become abandonware. That was back in 2010. Then, there was another couple of libraries. One was called Idiorm ... it was I-D-I-O-R-M, and then it had a corresponding ORM called "Paris". I think the Idiorm thing was the query builder, Paris was the ORM. Actually, Eloquent was very inspired by Paris, because it had the sort of model where a relationship is just a function of the model that returns a query builder. Eloquent, of course, still works like that to this day, so Paris deserves quite a bit of credit for coming up with that model. I don't think the person who wrote Paris even programs PHP anymore, last time I looked, but I'm not sure they're aware that Eloquent was so inspired by that. Matt Stauffer : That's really cool. I remember the moment where I realized I had to leave CodeIgniter was when I recognized that some of its inherent restrictions were forcing me into writing worse code. For example, some of the ugliest stuff in my old CodeIgniter apps were because I had ... database models, they called it, which was really like it was a model and repository and three other things, but you cram it all into one, and so you have methods that are everything you could just possibly imagine that would touch the database in any way, would all get crammed into a single class. If you're lucky, you've figured out enough to at least differentiate those classes by table. But that wasn't even always the case. Like you said, without view inheritance, you end up loading views and data in every controller and passing them around to each other, and you've got a single variable that you're passing through your controller method that tracks the data that's eventually going to get past the view. There's just a lot of things, because of the constraints of CodeIgniter, you just wrote worse code. When you started doing Laravel, you wanted to be able to do dependency injection and all these things. How much of your mindset was, "I'm gonna write things that are gonna make people write better code," and how much of it was, "I want to do these things, and I can't do these things." Was it a purity concept? Was it an ease-of-use concept, or were those things all tied together? Taylor Otwell : At first, I feel like it was a lot of ease-of-use, but also, there was some purity mixed in as well, because of the whole dependency injection thing, which I considered a more pure approach to doing some things back then, and of course still is a more pure approach a lot of times now. I feel like ... but also, ease of use was huge, too, because I wanted it to be very Apple-esque, where it was just really nice to use out of the box, and you didn't have to do all these hacks and customizations to get it really nice that I had to do with CodeIgniter. I wanted it to be like when you unwrap Laravel, it was this nice package that you could use, it was all cohesive and coherent. Matt Stauffer : Yeah. I want to talk a little bit further on that for a little bit. One of the things that you've talked about since the early days is that you recognize that the documentation in the community just make a really big impact on people's experience, working with the framework of a library. You've reference the fact that CodeIgniter was so successful, in large part because it had great documentation. For starters, what do you think it is that prepared you to be in a place where you could recognize that? Is it because you hadn't trained to be a programmer, or are there other experiences in your life that made you more sensitive to those types of, or do you even have a sense for what that is? Taylor Otwell : I don't know. I feel like it was just a low tolerance for pain in terms of programming, because programming wasn't a hobby for me, even really back then. I didn't come home and program, I did other stuff. To have a painful experience programming wasn't that great for me, because it wasn't something I was particularly obsessed about, and so if I was gonna do it at all, I wanted it to be really enjoyable, and easy to do, and fun. I just had a really low threshold for any pain points in the tools I was using, I think. Matt Stauffer : Yeah. It's like we always joke about the fact that a lazy programmer is a good programmer because they're gonna do the one that doesn't waste time or whatever else it ends up being, so I hear that. Taylor Otwell : Yeah, and even when I was at my .NET job, I had already discovered that I really enjoyed writing tools that helped programmers be more productive, because I remember one of the things I did there in my free time, when I had a few extra minutes, was I wrote this little program called WeDev in .NET that was like ... the closest thing I can think of, it would be a lot worse version of Slack, but it had a file dropbox where we could drop files to each other, and it had a little status indicator of what you were doing then, so it was like our own little instant messenger with a file share thing. But I really loved that project, so that was my first taste of, "Hey, I really enjoyed making developers' lives easier." I think that was part of what drew me into Laravel, was it became this fun project to see how productive I could make a programming environment. Matt Stauffer : Yeah, I like that. One of the things that really struck me when I first started going to Laravel conferences was how many people told stories about the ways that Laravel had changed their lives. That was something I wasn't used to. I think people ... there's some jokes around that the terms of "artisan" and some of the other terms we use in the Laravel world, but it's reflective of a really different approach for what the priorities and values are coming from Laravel. What's the goal? That's the question I was asking about purity versus ease of use, it seems like developer happiness is really a very significant ... like productivity and happiness are really significant goals that you have there. When you were building Laravel, you started out, you wanted to scratch your own itch. You wanted to make something that was good for you and it made you be able to do things a certain way, but you were relatively public about it. You started showing people. At what point did you start to realize this is something people are responding to? This is something that might really be a big player in the post-CodeIgniter framework world. Taylor Otwell : I think when I was pretty far along and had, basically, a finished product, only then did I really decide that I would go all the way and document it. I knew that the documentation would be huge, because I felt like that was why CodeIgniter was even popular to begin with, because there was Kohana, which was another, CodeIgniteresque-type framework that had some advantages, and had some better features, but the documentation was so much worse that it just never really had the same steam that CodeIgniter had. I had picked up on that pretty early that if I wanted Laravel to be popular, I would have to write really good documentation. I tried to write, basically, CodeIgniter-level documentation from the very first 1.0 release, because I've seen a lot of people put stuff out there, and then looks like, "Documentation coming soon," or "Documentation in progress," and it's never gonna get the same reception as if it's a finished product. I thought I had a pretty productive little thing, and decided, "Hey, I'll go ahead and document it and put it out there, and see what the response is." My mentality at the time was, "Even if nobody else ever uses this, then that's fine with me, because I at least have something enjoyable to use when I write PHP." Matt Stauffer : Are there any people or moments or inflection points or whatever where you point to a thing and said, "If that thing hadn't happened, or that moment hadn't happened, it would have been a completely different story"? Taylor Otwell : Yeah, so there's a couple of moments. A big moment was, there was a point where a few PHP programmers were teaming up to make this PHP framework called "Fuel", and it was a few CodeIgniter people like Phil Sturgeon, and Dan Horrigan, and one other guy, I think, one or two other guys. I think they were trying to build the successor to CodeIgniter that was moving faster and had features that people wanted, and stuff like that. They had some pretty decent marketing pages for it, and stuff like that. I remember I had some ideas ... I was actually excited about Fuel, and had some ideas that I wanted to put into Fuel. I can't remember what they exactly were at the time. I think one of them might have been some type of route filter-type thing that ended up being in Laravel, or something like that. I had messaged one of them and said, "Hey, I'd really like to help out on Fuel. This is the feature I want to add, or whatever." They weren't super-interested in the feature, which is fine. It's not a knock on them, they just weren't interested in it. I was like, "Okay, I guess I'll keep working on Laravel," but if they would have bit on that, and been interested in me helping with Fuel a little bit and some of these things, then of course, I think things could have been really different, because I would have jumped into Fuel and started adding stuff there, and probably would have just started using it, and become invested in it. That's one moment. Probably the biggest moment I can think of where things could have taken a really different direction because that feature wasn't really a fit for them, that I just kept working on Laravel. Matt Stauffer : Yeah. Well, I, for one, am grateful to whoever it was that rejected that feature. I think ... it's not to say that something else wouldn't have come along, but I think your life would have looked a little bit different after that point, so I think it's a good time to ask a couple questions about what's your life like today. When you were working full-time ... I assume it's at least a 40-hour work week .NET job, and you were writing Laravel on the side ... do you have a sense for what your hours a week were looking like between day job and Laravel work? Taylor Otwell : Yeah. I seemed to have a lot of energy back then. I worked eight to five, and then I came home. James, our first child, was pretty young at the time, just basically a baby, when I'd first started working on it. I would hang out with the family from five to nine. We were just in a little two-bedroom apartment, it was 900 square feet. We were all in there together, pretty close. Abigail would go to bed around nine or 9:30, and I would actually stay up until one or 1:30, a lot of the time. Going to bed at midnight, for me, was like, "I'm going to feel great tomorrow, I went to bed at midnight." I would stay up until midnight, one, sometimes two, the majority of nights, really, and work on Laravel. I was putting in, let's see, probably three to four hours of Laravel work every night, and somehow felt pretty good, actually. I can't really seem to do that anymore. I don't know what changed, but ... Matt Stauffer : Yeah. When my wife was pregnant, she would go to bed at 9:00 every night. I was not happy with my day job situation, and that's when I wrote my first softwares and service. I was working 90, 100-hour work weeks between my normal job and that. It's the same thing. There's no way I could do that right now. But I'm glad I did it then, back when I had that energy. Taylor Otwell : Even when I wrote Forge, I was still working at UserScape, and would stay up until midnight or one routinely, because that took six months for me to build just in my free time. Matt Stauffer : Yeah. At some point, you had Laravel to a point ... I don't want to go too deep in this story, because it's been told before, so I want to cover things I haven't, but you got to a point where Laravel was good enough that it attracted Ian's attention. He was looking to do a reboot of UserScape, which was handled PHP from scratch, and he pick Laravel, and he hired you, and said, "Hey, you build this thing out, and you can make Laravel better, so it can support our needs." You would add a lot of features that UserScape needed, and that helped Laravel grow up in a lot of ways. You told that story. I think the interesting aspect that hasn't been covered before, is what the shift from being UserScape plus Laravel to solo Laravel look like. What were some of the things that you were thinking about when you were starting to make that decision ... when you were starting to consider going out on your own, what was scary, what was exciting, what considerations did you have before you decided to go solo? Taylor Otwell : Some of the scary parts were just not knowing how much longevity Laravel, as the ecosystem, would have, because ... Forge was out, and was doing well, and I was actually making more on Forge than I was making at UserScape pretty quickly. But Laravel was still relatively new. It was only three years old when Forge came out, so there was questions. What if everyone stops using Laravel? What if a better framework comes out in six months and everyone's like, "Screw Laravel, screw Forge, I'm using whatever." That was one of the main fears. The exciting part was that I would just have so much time to work on Laravel. At the time, it was just unfathomable if you know how much time that would be, because 40 hours a week on Laravel. If I'm working just two or three hours of my free time at night, it's two weeks worth of free time. I could try stuff faster, I could experiment faster. That was the most exciting part for me. Matt Stauffer : Yeah, that's cool. I remember talking to you during that time where, to me, it seemed obvious because I have a similar story where I did DreamHost, but I was running a softwares and service from 2010, 2011. I needed a VPS, and I tried managing my own Linode VPSes, and it was just awful. I wasn't trained in that stuff. I ended up paying for these super-constrained hosts that didn't let you do what CodeIgniter and Laravel needed, because nothing like Forge was out there, and I just couldn't afford from my SaaS to pay a DevOps person to handle it. When Forge came along ... I don't want to be bombastic, but it really revolutionized individual developers' and small teams' ability to run fully-robust VPSes without having full-time DevOps people. For me, as someone from the outside, first of all, I said, "Please let us pay you more money," but second of all, I knew that was really gonna sustain. But I know that there were times where it was a little bit scary. Within your realm of comfort ... I don't want you to have to say your deepest, darkest secrets, but what does make you nervous today? Are you worried about some other framework? Are you worried about PHP no longer being viable? Are you just feeling pretty good? What does ... in the life that you have, where Laravel is very popular, very stable, what's on your horizon? Taylor Otwell : Nothing makes me too nervous anymore, because even if Laravel started dying today, and died a slow death over the next few years, I would have secured my future at this point, in terms of "I'm gonna be able to retire with my family, the kids' college is paid for, and I don't have to worry about those things anymore." I would just be like, "Okay, great, thanks for the memories," and I would apply to work at Tighten, I guess. Matt Stauffer : I know, I love it, yes, I'm sold. Taylor Otwell : I would have to just go back to being a regular guy programmer, working on projects and stuff, but I don't know. It doesn't make me too nervous, because I always try to have this mentality that Laravel, obviously, will not be a thing anymore, that either because PHP's not a thing anymore or there's some other framework that's better or whatever. I don't know how long that will be, but I don't really get too nervous about it, because I feel happy with what I created, the memories I made, what I did for my family for decades to come, basically. If it all ended tomorrow, I would be fine. It would be a fun ride. Matt Stauffer : I love it, and that's really good. I think that makes me so happy I want to touch two other things, and then we might just cut it short. The two other things are in that same direction, about what makes you happy and what gives you peace outside of programming. I think the first question is, do you have any daily practices or any mantras, or any things that you do to center yourself, and just help you handle life when it's stressful or not? Just things to keep you steady, I guess. Taylor Otwell : Yeah, I try to meditate some. I can't say I do it every day, but every other day at least, let's say, I try to meditate. For me, that's a spiritual thing, but for other people, it might not be. It might be more just a "focus your thoughts" kind of thing. Also, just try to keep life and perspective during that meditation, I guess. Try to think some of those things ... same thoughts where I don't want to hold too tightly on the success of Laravel, or being a popular programmer is core to my identity, because I think that's setting yourself up for a lot of pain in the future, because all things pass away eventually. It's just a time to focus my thoughts. Also, I just think about my family, stuff like that. More important stuff than programming. But I find it just de-stresses me a bit, helps me focus on what's important, and it's refreshing. But now I try to make time to do it. I feel like as soon as we get up in the morning, now with two kids, it's sort of rushing around everywhere getting ready for school and stuff like that. But yeah, that's what I do. Matt Stauffer : Yeah. You got to be intentional about those things. You've talked about productivity systems and how much you love Wunderlist and stuff. How structured do you keep your life? Do you have, "This is the hour when I do that"? I remember you've talked about starting with pull requests and issues. Do you still have some of those same structures, or is it different with Mohamed around? Taylor Otwell : Yeah, I still have some structures. It's not structured to the point that every hour of the day is structured. I'm more focused in day increments moreso than hour increments in Todoist, which is what I moved to after Wunderlist, which I'm really enjoying, actually. I have this bullet journal approach, where I only really sit in the "Today" column of Todoist, and I have, usually, five or six things that I want to do that day, and I have them in Todoist, and then I have projects that I treat just as grab-bags, the things I want to do at some point. Some of my projects in Todoist are actual projects that I'm working on, like Laravel Horizon was, where I have all the things I want to do. But some of them are just movies I want to watch, or music I want to listen to, or something like that. I do keep my day fairly structured, where I start my day with port request and emails, but then after that, it's not so structured. I just work through my to-do list for that day as I ... just whatever I feel like doing next. But it's still structured at a daily level. Matt Stauffer : Right. In regards to the music that you're gonna listen to ... I'm not gonna ask you to tell me the best rap album of all time, because we could do a whole podcast on that, but do you have one that, even if it's not your favorite today, has been the longest-running favorite, or the most significant impact, just the one that you played out like no other album or something. Taylor Otwell : I feel like I go in phases, and it's funny because each Laravel release, I feel like, has had an album that I feel like I really played a lot for that release. I know on one of the releases, I played the Views album that Drake put out quite a bit. One of the releases was "The Life of Pablo" from Kanye West. But I think one of the albums recently that I really played a lot was ... I think you pronounce his name "Black" even though it's spelled with a six on the front, so "6lack" is what it looks like. He's a rapper/singer hybrid, I guess you could say, almost more singer than rapper, but I played that album a lot when it first came out, and still play it quite a bit. Matt Stauffer : All right. Did you like 808s and Heartbreak? Taylor Otwell : Yeah, I really like that album. Matt Stauffer : I played that out like no album for quite a while. Taylor Otwell : Yeah, looking through my music ... okay, another album I played a lot was "Blue Neighbourhood", by Troye Sivan, who's not a rapper at all, he's a singer. But that's another album I just really wore out over the past couple of years Matt Stauffer : I've literally never heard of it. Taylor Otwell : Okay, you should check that out. Matt Stauffer : I definitely will. That's awesome. I'll put all of this in the show notes. Okay, let's see, so I'm sure rap is one of these, but what outside program inspires you? Whether it's inspiring you to do good things with programming, because you hear something that gives you a thing, or just inspires you in terms of your life and your family and your entrepreneurial-ness or whatever else. What inspires you? Taylor Otwell : Any time I travel, I feel like I get inspired. Any time I see some cool part of the world, or some really beautiful piece of scenery while I'm traveling or something, somehow that just inspires me to create cool stuff in general. For me, that usually translates into trying to think of cool Laravel ideas, so travel is a big inspiration for me. Let's see, what else ... you know music is a big inspiration. I don't know. Those are the two things that jump out at me. Matt Stauffer : That's good. I didn't prepare you for this one, so sorry, but my friend DeRay and his podcast always asks every guest for one piece of advice that they've received that's really influenced them across their life ... is there any one piece of advice that really stands out, that has big impact on you, that you've gotten from somebody else? Taylor Otwell : One thing that comes to mind that wasn't really a piece of advice, but just more like learning, is probably from my grandfather, who just did jobs really well. Anything he worked on, he just made sure it was done really right, in a way he could be proud of. I don't know, I guess it goes back to an old-fashioned work ethic that he must have been raised with, but I think that was really inspiring, and I actually blogged about this once, but when I worked with him, actually when I was in college, we took care of all the lawns at our local church. It was just a lot, because they had soccer fields, and just big lawns and stuff, and even with that, he put a lot of attention to detail into that. It inspired a lot of my own attention to detail and going forward. It wasn't a spoken piece of advice, it was more of just a thing you had to observe, but was pretty impactful. Matt Stauffer : I remember that post. I'll link it. Well, I could ask you questions for another hour, but I'm gonna try and keep this one to the hour range, so I think that is pretty good for my questions for today. Is there anything else, especially along this line of questions, but just in general, that you feel like you want to talk about today? Taylor Otwell : I can't think of anything. Matt Stauffer : Okay. Taylor, this was ridiculously fun. Part of the reason that I'm having you is that the first episode of the Laravel Podcast, Season Three, is because everybody wants to know about you and you have a lot to say, but also I just want to say, officially, from me, and from Dan, and from the rest of the crew at Tighten, and the rest of the Laravel crew, thank you for what you've done for our community, because when I talk about Tighten, I say, "You know what? We're creating a company that we want to take care of people. We want to create good jobs for people and stuff like that." You're doing the same thing with Laravel. Yeah, you make money off of it, and you have the ability for yourself to create certain kinds of codes and stuff like that. But your attention to providing good things for people is evident throughout this interview, and just throughout everything about what you've done for Laravel. From all of us, thank you very much. Taylor Otwell : All right. You're welcome. Matt Stauffer : Awesome, man. Thank you so much for speaking with me today, and that's it for today. Taylor Otwell : All right, see you. See you.

Armed with Wrestlemania X t-shirts and bad puns, the boys take the the crap around the world down in the most epic ladder match of all time. Really. The week they take on shaky cam horror films and discover the fate of the furious, peter and the porno, alaskian mass murder and Oregon Trail, Cheers, enjoying the refreshing taste of Kohana on a United flight, wrestling beefs and Doink, Robs extensive Star Trek knowledge, and burning out on Star Wars.

An all star cast this episode, as Ben and Phil are joined by regular guest Anthony Ferrara - thinker of good ideas and long-time part-time side-line contributor to the PHP-FIG, Woody Gilk - one-speed rider & BDFL of Kohana, and Beau Simensen - author of a bunch of stuff including StackPHP. Here we’re talking about some awesome stuff the PHP-FIG is working on: PSR-15 (HTTP Middleware). This PSR is in Draft mode, and is potentially not as well known about as some others. There was a bit of a cuffufle getting it started as before it had even passed an entrance vote there were alternatives and rewrites suggested, but now the major players are on the same page and things are moving forward. We discuss all this, and the reason PSR-7 (HTTP Message) is not enough for the ecosystem to benefit from shareable middleware. Jumping away from PSR-15 for a second there is an interesting bit of insight into why the PHP-FIG didn’t just slap a “PSR” sticker on Symfony’s HTTP Kernel or HTTP Foundation. Woody provides a bit of the decision-making process in a very tricky aspect of the FIGs job, which is: should standards be built entirely to match existing implementations, or should standards try to improve on the learnings of the existing implementations to better them all as implementations change to support the standard. It’s all a bit chicken and egg, but a very worthy discussion to have. All About Middleware - Anthony posts about PHP HTTP Middleware Why Care About PHP Middleware? - Summary of the initial Anthony vs Woody approaches and background on the HTTP middleware concept StackPHP - Composing HttpKernelInterface middlewares since 2013! Equip - Equip is a tiny and powerful PHP micro-framework created and maintained by the engineering team at When I Work

Fred Wu 是 Locomote 公司的技术经理，在工作之外，他衷于开源，是 Rails 社区知名的开源软件开发者，Rails框架的贡献者，Slim 模板引擎的开发者，他在上海出生，在澳洲读书，工作，Fred Wu 是 RubyConfChina 2012 的演讲嘉宾。 在本期访谈中，FredWu 从他在大学时代以自由职业者的身份开始接触项目，到技术话题包括 Ruby，Rails，PHP框架等，以及 Fred 如何参与开源实践，包括 Angle Nest 的故事，如何去给 Rails 贡献代码的，Slim 项目给我们带来的启发等等精彩内容。 About Fred Wu: Fred Wu Github Twitter Envato tutsplus psd.tutsplus themeforest Sitepoint Ruby Rails Wordpress Spree Magento 写给程序员的Web设计书 Locomote Kohana yiiframework CakePHP Codeigniter Angle Nest Open-sourcing A 200+ Hour Project Angle nest at Hac knews Angle List Contribute to Rails Upgrade from 3.2.12 to 3.2.13 makes loading of views become really slow Slim Haml Mac apps bundle datamappify Redline Become a Better Developer You Can Special Guest: Fred Wu .

First off, we now have a sponsor for the podcast: Engine Yard. This is something they will surely regret after listening to this episode. We started off with the idea of talking about technologies we wish we had time to play with. Ed was talking about his attempts at exploring Clojure, and how it’s likely he’ll be using Python for work in the near future. This leads into a discussion of what attracts us to certain languages and technologies, and when to try to work a personal interest in to your day job. Then Chris talks about how he will likely mess around with evented stuff like Node.js or Twisted for his next book about HTTP APIs or whatever. We also go off on a discussion about HTPC stuff. I can’t really remember how we got there. In reality we mostly bullshitted through the whole thing, and made fun of Engine Yard a bunch. Hopefully they know that they have awesome products and don’t hate us now. Feel free to hit us up on Twitter at @dev_hell or harass Ed and Chris directly. Download now (MP3, 38.7MB, 1:20) Links Engine Yard Video Engine Yard’s Orchestra product Clojure Kohana Node.js Twisted Gunicorn WSGI MIT Fry Guy (actually “The Fry Kids”) HTPC XBMC Raspberry Pi Paleo Diet