Laravel is not new to me, despite my resume possibly suggesting that. I wrote a CMS app using the Laravel Blade architecture back in 2016. At the time, I wasn’t exposed to GitHub (though I should have been). Laravel was easy for me to learn. In the winter of 2023-4, I created 4 different tiny Laravel Blade apps which sit in my GitHub Repository, all of which were left private, except for this one (see the project details page for more info):
https://github.com/bbornino/laravel-react-job-search
At NameHero, I wrote my first Laravel Blade app which the team there is now using for monitoring their datacenter. But still, nothing felt challenging or new to me.
Using my Ruby on Rails application as a baseline, I chose to do a basic CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) for just the Emailed Opportunities. The reality is, that I’ve been using the Ruby on Rails app to store all of my tracking with a goal of getting to a completely modern full-stack app (with some smaller incremental baby steps). So that is why I was okay with living with just the one CRUD data table with an edit page and the one SQL table.
Did I have any kind of development challenges bringing this up? Nothing that felt insurmountable. There were no real issues using the basic instructions from Google on how to set up PHP. I used the basic Laravel Bootcamp Inertia with React for my setup.
I think that the most evolutionary mind change for me was that Python with Django and React is the real goal (check out my PHP Drops in TIOBE Index post). And that will then be squeezed into a Docker container. Then I should be able to deploy using an online Web Service (likely Amazon or Google). Knowing that there are some interesting challenges getting these apps deployed to a virtual service in the first place, I decided to postpone that until later.
Here is what I’m really excited to be working on next: AWS training. To help break that up, I’ll be working on a Python-Django version of this smaller CRUD app.
I may return to update this blog entry later with more thoughts on my experience.