Laracon AU returned to Brisbane in 2025 with a lineup of amazing speakers discussing a range of important and insightful topics. With the theme of “Level Up”, we experienced two days of talks about how incremental improvements can come together to be bigger than itself. As Brisbane-based Laravel developers ourselves, we attended both days and listened to the packed 2025 schedule. From revitalising an aging codebase to focusing on improving us a developers all the way to condensing your CI pipeline to effectively ‘push to production’, let’s recap Laracon AU’s most interesting talks and what we took away from them.
Aging PHP Codebase? Laravel to the Rescue!
No matter what kind of developer you are, there’s one thing that scares us all: an overwhelming amount of legacy code. But what Jordan spoke of was much worse. Their codebase spread across six repositories, most of them PHP with little to no frameworks. All API calls were handled by a single catch-all route, and there was no synergy between any of the repos. Their codebase was borderline unmaintainable; and we know how crucial proper software maintenance is to long-term success.
His team at Octfolio chose Laravel as the solution. The batteries-included nature of the framework combined with the simple and elegant PHP interfaces made for a perfect step up for their platform. But this migration was not easy; keeping their systems online while the years-long migration was in progress proved a challenge. But by bootstrapping their legacy PHP codebase into Laravel and slowly migrating things piece-by-piece, they were able to achieve a complete conversion.
While this migration was long, tough and hard to sell to management, their work gave them a modern codebase for them to develop more quickly with greater confidence. In an industry where bugs, mistakes or outages can be the difference between life and death, they proved a migration of this scale is possible, and ultimately provided their customers a better experience.
Writing Better HTML
If you’ve ever written a HTML file completely with <div> tags, this talk is for you. HTML can sometimes be seen just “the thing that I can style” rather than an important consideration for your site. Because what’s the issue if it looks fine? Charlie showed the real effects that neglecting your HTML can have, and some of the quick and simple ways you can write better HTML.
The issue is that even though most people consume the web visually, that’s not the case for everybody. In fact, with an estimated 1-in-6 people worldwide living with a significant disability, the truth is that accessibility is crucial to so many peoples’ experience of the internet. It doesn’t end there though; Charlie spoke about how semantic and accessible websites actually help all of us. Whether you want to have a page read aloud to you, summarised by AI or correctly surfaced through a Google search, semantic HTML is makes that work.
Writing semantic HTML isn’t difficult either, you just need to know about it. For the vast, vast majority of cases, all it means is using the correct tags and attributes; for example using heading levels correctly, provide images an alt text description (or leave it blank — but present — if the image is decorative) and correctly using <a> and <button> elements. This fit’s perfectly with this year’s Laracon AU theme of ‘Level Up’ as even the small changes can make a huge difference.
When ‘merge into production’ is your business model
We’ve all seen the memes and GIFs of pushing straight to production. And while Astalty’s development process isn’t quite that, it’s not too far off. Instead of the traditional Git workflow of layered branches (production → staging → development), their process involves a main branch with all development branches merged straight in. Here’s the kicker: after every merge, they redeploy.
Now this seems scary. Especially in their industry – a B2B NDIS management platform — the cost of getting things wrong is high. Without the usual safeguards, issues inevitably become more frequent. Out of the 600 deployments (!!!) in the previous month, James admitted ~10 of those deployments had been bugfixes, but post-Laracon Astalty stressed their platform does not compromise on safety or stability.
The benefits of this approach is clear: speed. Removing the layered development process allows them to move extremely fast, giving their customers a greater end-user experience. Those 600 deployments prove that progress doesn’t have to be slow. They also stressed their strict development process with many tests and pre-deploy checks in-place to catch any issues before production.
The question still remains: is it worth it? They store sensitive data and it’s critical for their platform to be stable, and this approach seems to work against that. At the very least, we’ll be interested to see how they — and projects with similar development processes — fair in the long run, especially as their platform matures. Will this method still provide the same benefits in a 20-year-old codebase as it does for one less than 5?
Two-Way Skill Building
Generally speaking, mentorships are thought of as a one-way street. The mentor passes their knowledge and experience to the mentee to help them learn and grow. In her first time at Laracon AU, Kate made the argument that mentoring should instead be thought of as a back-and-forth with both parties gaining from the experience. Throughout her work, she has found that while the mentee gains the knowledge and experience, as a mentor you can get:
- Insight into your own knowledge or experience gaps. New learners come with a fresh perspective and often without any existing knowledge, so their questions and queries can often expose your own areas which need improvement.
- New knowledge you didn’t have before. The learning road never one-way; nobody’s knowledge is purely a subset of yours. Take mentorships as a opportunity to instead combine your two sets of knowledge where both of your can learn. Sure; the vast majority of knowledge comes from you, but not all of it, so give them room to impart knowledge on you.
As an aside, Kate’s talk was also extremely engaging. Instead of standing behind a slideshow, she co-presented with Marc who barely said a word, but instead spent the presentation sketching out the talk on a digital sketchbook. While not a completely new idea, it was a standout and memorable presentation because of this different style. I hope future speakers take this as inspiration to break out of the PowerPoint mould and experiment with innovative presentation ideas.
A Focus on You
Ryan’s story is one of success and heartbreak. Early on in his career, he climbed the corporate ladder and moved from response to a regional manager in NSW Ambulance fairly quickly. He had achieved his dream job, but over time he made one crucial discovery: he didn’t like it any more. In fact, he had poured his life into his job and his family that he neglected to put time into himself.
Ryan talked candidly about himself, his experience and what barriers he had to overcome to start to bounce back into the next stage of his life. Throughout his talk, his message was clear: focus on you first, because without a solid foundation, everything you build on-top can quickly crumble. Especially when you experience — like he did — multiple significant life changes, it can be hard to re-centre yourself.
There is no real substitute for his talk, but if there’s one thing we should all take away, it’s that we need to focus on us first. To be able to work effectively with a multi-faceted and higher-paced life, you need the essentials down pat. And if you’re not there yet, that’s okay; things take time and you have to start somewhere. After all, the theme of Laracon AU 2025 was “Level Up”, embodied by the act of small incremental steps coming together to make a bigger change.
Summary of Laracon AU 2025
This year’s instalment of Laracon AU was packed full of great talks by passionate people, and for those who got tickets, this year’s event was most certainly worth it. To us, Laracon is more than just the talks; it’s an opportunity to chat and connect with like-minded people. With next years’ convention already being planned, we’re looking forward to seeing what next years’ lineup can bring to the table.
In the meantime, if you’re looking for Brisbane-based Laravel developers, you’ve come to the right place! At FONSEKA, we can help you design and build a custom app to meet your needs. Chat to us today to see what we can build together! https://fonseka.com.au/contact