February 3 and 4 it was time: Laracon EU 2025 in Amsterdam. The laravel developers of Van Ons visited this international Laravel conference in the Muziekgebouw. We got a lot of inspiration from the many talks and in this blog we share the highlights!
Auto-scalable hosting with Laravel Cloud
This is what we were immediately excited about: Laravel Cloud. This is a hosting platform specifically designed for Laravel applications. It offers an automated and scalable infrastructure, so developers can focus on building applications without having to worry about server management. And for customers, this means that at peak times the server automatically scales to handle this traffic. The official release will follow on February 24, but we already got a demo account to experiment with!
Monitoring Laravel applications with Nightwatch
Monitoring your website is crucial to see where and why errors occur in the codebase. Our programmers also use these tools intensively. A well-known monitoring tool that we also use at Van Ons is Sentry. But now there is an alternative.
And that alternative is called Laravel Nightwatch. This monitoring tool is specifically developed for Laravel projects. Because Nightwatch knows exactly how a Laravel application is put together, the monitoring can be tailored to that. Nightwatch can therefore help us even better with tracking errors, measuring performance and logging information.
Better search function on your website thanks to word embedding
A good search function is crucial on a website but also complicated to implement really well. Nothing is more difficult than language and how to interpret it. Diana Scharf from Beyond Code gave a very educational talk about how “word embedding” works. With word embedding you store content in the database so that it can be matched semantically instead of based on letter combinations. Word embedding is therefore also an important part in the development of language models that are used in AI.
Thinking like a Product Manager
Almost a classic at any tech conference is the love/hate relationship between programmers and product managers. John Drexler from Thunk! gave a very positive talk on how you as a developer can think more like a product manager. The benefit? Learning how to ask the right questions as a developer to ensure you are working on a sorted list of meaningful problems, instead of a random list of feature requests.
Laracon EU 2025 was a great success. We saw many great developments, including all kinds of new (also weird) PHP functions, tips for implementing PHPUnit for testing and how to build a PHP extension. Want to know more about laravel trends? Call us for a cup of coffee!
Van Ons is a digital agency from Amsterdam. Simply put, we are website builders and we help you with web design en web developmentWe do this with open source software and we are specialists in Laravel and often use Filament.