Marcel Pociot

2024 - My year in review

Published on – 4 minute read

2024 in review

Wow - I just noticed that I did not write any review blog posts for the last 3 years! I actually really like these review blog posts, as they allow me to reflect on all the things that happened throughout the year, so here it goes.

Laracon EU

I think it's safe to say that the overall "motto" of 2024 for me work-wise was Laravel Herd.

Laravel Herd was released at Laracon US 2023 in July 2023. The first version was for macOS only and had a very minimal feature set.

Coming into 2024, we had a rough Windows version at our hands and Taylor and I decided to announce the upcoming Windows release at Laracon EU 2024 in Amsterdam. In addition to the Windows release however, we very also busy working on "Herd Pro" – a commercial offering of Laravel Herd, that adds additional debugging and development features such as:

  • Intercepting Dumps
  • Built-in Mailserver
  • Log Viewer
  • Automatic Xdebug detection

The idea was to release Herd Pro at the day of Laracon EU – how exciting, right? Well, it was very exciting indeed, and I am not exaggerating when I tell you that this was the most nerve-wracking conference experience for me.

Launching Herd Pro was a huge task that required us to prepare a whole bunch of things (secretly) and then flip a switch during Taylor's talk at Laracon EU.

We had to:

  • Prepare the new landing page
  • Implement a checkout flow
  • Implement a licensing system
  • Test and release the actual Herd app

Both Diana and I were busy preparing the launch of this during the conference, and we've both been extremely nervous during Taylor's talk. But hey - we all made it!

Herd for Windows was announced and Herd Pro was released 😮‍💨

Herd for Windows and more...

Once Herd Pro was released, we continued working on Herd for Windows, as we planned on releasing it ~2 weeks after the conference.

Another huge milestone for Laravel Herd was the release of Herd Pro's services. This allows you to quickly spin up Redis, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Meilisearch, etc. on your local development environment.

This one was another huge release, as we now had to implement it for two operating systems.

So yeah, overall we have released 32 updates to Laravel Herd in 2024!

php.new

Besides working on Laravel Herd, I also worked on php.new. You can think of this as some sort of "Herd Lite". It's a one-line bash script that gives you PHP, composer , and the Laravel installer.

Together with Herd, this is the absolute dream-team to set up development environments on your machines!

Expose v3

At the end of 2024 we've been very busy working on an entirely new version of Expose, our open-source tunneling software written entirely in PHP. We already launched the new landing page for Black Friday, but the new version of Expose will follow shortly in early 2025.

It will come with a bunch of really cool new features that I loved to use myself when I migrated from Paddle Classic to Paddle Billing for Laravel Herd - so stay tuned for this!

Other conferences

Besides Laracon EU, which I couldn't truly "enjoy" as I was too busy stressing out about Herd's release, I've been to a bunch of other conferences that have all been amazing.

Most importantly LaravelLive Denmark, Laracon US in Dallas and Laracon AU in Brisbane.

Unfortunately, I got pretty sick in Dallas and had the worst headache for pretty much 3 weeks non-stop. So if I acted weird and was a bit less approachable at that conference - I'm sorry 😅

But it's been great to see and meet so many old and new friends from all over the Laravel community! ❤️ I can't wait to go to more conferences in 2025.

Personal life

My personal life was a bit stressful as well, as we moved out of our apartment into a new house in 2024. The new place is only ~200 meters down the road from our previous apartment, but moving is still stressful. But hey, now I no longer need to share my "office" with my wife and finally have an entire room all for myself hah

2025

If you made it this far, I hope that we get a chance to meet in person at a conference around the globe in 2025. I can't wait to ship more exciting things to make your development life easier.

Thank you all for using the apps and services that I'm fortunate enough to work on. It really means a lot to me ❤️