About me
Freek Van der Herten
Partner & developer at SPATIE
@freekmurze
https://murze.be
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Since 2003
Websites, applications and webshops
Team
9 awesome human beings
Specialization
Laravel / Vue development
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Open Source
Software
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We use a lot of it
Nginx, Laravel, Ubuntu, Vue, Yarn, Redis, Beanstalkd, MySQL,
Composer, Glide, Homestead, Flysystem, Fractal, Carbon, PHPUnit,
NPM, React, jQuery, Java, SSH, Sequel Pro, BackupPC …
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We create a lot of it
± 200 packages on Packagist
± 20 000 000 downloads total, ±1 800 000 downloads a month
Most popular ones: laravel-backup, laravel-medialibrary,
laravel-permission
Newest ones: laravel-view-models, laravel-blade-x
Postcardware
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Package
development
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The setting
Zend Framework 1
PHP world was pretty stale around 2012
Laravel 4: developer happiness, clear syntax
Laracasts: miniseries on package development + Travis
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The first package
Browsershot: take screenshots of website programmatorically
PhantomJS
Working in the open
People started blogging about it
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Beyond the first package
Blender: conversion from Zend Framework to Laravel
A lot of functionalities that could be helpful to other developers
New packages: laravel-newsletter, laravel-medialib, laravel-
analytics
Opensourcing Blender itself
Very positive feedback from the community
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Creating a habit
Every package gets born inside a client project
Almost every client project results in a package:
laravel-sitemap, opening-hours, …
Teamwork
Creating Blade X was a fun experience
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Impact
on many levels
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Making time
Time consuming
Coding, writing tests, writing docs, getting the word out
Maintenance, responding to issues, reviewing PRs
6000 issues, 5000 PRs
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Planning
Only plan 4 days a week for client work
Extra day for support, learning and opensource efforts
Free time
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Benefits of creating packages
A lot of learning by coding up the package and writing tests
Feedback from the community
Free code!
Dogfooding
Getting our name out there
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Getting exposure
Speaking at conferences
Company name becomes a seal of quality
More interesting projects
International clients
Hiring very talented people
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Starting side projects
https://ohdear.app
Immediate audience
Making friends
Starting a conference (https://fullstackeurope.com)
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Beware of burn out
Easy to work too much on open source in free time
Felt some of early staging
Starting doing less
https://murze.be/doing-less
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Future plans
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No fixed roadmap
Depends on the client projects
Nova tools
Saas projects
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In closing
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Working on packages has a lot of benefits
It’s fun
Social aspect
Can be recommended to everyone