Travel Blog: Denver, CO

Three travel blogs in a row - this time leaving in the middle of Monday to attend a work conference known as Laracon. That is a conference built around the PHP framework Laravel which has exploded in popularity over the last decade. I've been using Laravel in both hobby and work since way back in 2012 so it was time to finally attend my first Laracon.

Work (Sourcetoad) became a sponsor for the event and was going to send any employee who had work contributed to the framework itself.

That was only a few of us, myself included, so we had a group of 3 to send to this conference. So as I sat on the plane with an on-time departure to Denver I was feeling great until the child in front of me threw up everywhere.

There is something about the smell of throw up in an enclosed area that just triggers something in you. I started sweating and thought I was going to lose it as well, but with some calm breathing I survived and we landed in Denver with only the downside of a child throwing up. I can't be mad at them - I was that kid 20 years ago as I described in an earlier blog post.

We took the light rail from the airport to a spot that wasn't more than a 5 minute walk to our hotel. A $10 train ticket compared to a $40 Uber was a good deal for just a longer bit of travel time. As I walked into our Catbird Hotel it felt immediately like a cool little place, which seemed even cooler when I walked into my hotel room.

The room had this elevated bed in which the shelves on the bottom could roll out for storage, desk and more. The other cabinets had a hidden fridge, freezer and dishwasher thus seemed intended for a more long-term stay. It is the most unique styled hotel room I've ever been in thus far.

The coworkers and I grabbed some dinner at a nearby place and afterwards we went our separate ways to explore and sleep (-2h time shift) to prepare for day one of Laracon.

As day one arrived we discovered we were in the same hotel as some of the Laravel staff itself, which was fun to grab some face time with a few individuals who I've probably been interacting/following on GitHub for years. After a short breakfast the coworkers and I started our walk to the venue and because we were sponsors we slipped in 30 minutes prior to the rest of the attendees.

The stage and venue was quite powerful with lights, smoke, dangling Laravel symbols and screens for all angles. It was a packed event by the time it started with seats filled everywhere. The schedule for this event was excellent following a pattern of a few talks, break, sponsor segment, talks, lunch, etc. This meant you really didn't sit through a long talk since all talks (with exception of keynote) were down to 15-35 minutes.

Lunch was served in assembled little bowls scattered around the venue to reduce lines. The first day had options of steak, chicken or tofu over a bed of quinoa with a little side of dressing. It wasn't a large amount of food, but yet a perfect little amount to push you through the 2nd half of the day.

As the day ended it was time to walk back to the hotel on our way to the after party. This gave me a little chance to collect all the swag I had collected and organize for a photo during the drop off.

Attending the after party was quite a show of either sponsors or Laravel or both. It was an entire large bar (Number 38) reserved for a private event - with every single drink and food item covered. Though if our ticket was nearly $800 per person maybe we prepaid for all our food and drink.

I'm glad we made it into the limited reservations as that party was fun even if a solid chunk of engineers aren't the best at socializing. As the night fell and the party ended it was time to walk back to the hotel and sleep before the final day (Day 2) arrived.

As I woke up on day 2 I was excited that the hotel had another amazing included breakfast which was a chorizo breakfast burrito. This gave me the needed energy to watch a few talks and push on to lunch. I was excited for day 2 because this had Evan You (creator of Vue) and Caleb Porzio (creator of Livewire) each having their own talk.

The coworkers and I got our same seats as day 1 presumably because our sponsorship level allowed us to enter the conference 30 minutes prior to others. The day started off with a bang with an excellent talk by Evan You discussing Vue & more. I have a lot of respect for the guy as every tool he helps produce has reduced friction or time in our build pipelines.

As lunch arrived on day 2 we had an option between chicken, salmon or a large Portobello mushroom over a bed of salad with dressing. This time after finishing my chicken item I was still really hungry, but I knew I was only allocated a single dish. However as our lunch break was halfway over and I walked around seeing a massive pile of the Portobello option remaining - I cheated and grabbed a 2nd lunch bowl.

Between the breaks of talks one day I slipped into the vendor hall to look at all the sponsors and stumbled upon the Sentry booth. We use Sentry heavily at work so I just wanted to chat with the guys about the product as a fan. I felt it was odd though that a few times someone just pushed their way between me to just swipe some of the swag off the table.

It made me realize that everyone does conferences differently. I could tell the people with every brand of swag in their bag were just going booth to booth to collect as much free stuff as possible. Others were racing around the venue to find all the Laravel booths to win a free t-shirt. Others were probably frequent conference attendees chatting with other frequent attendees. I was there to network a bit, learn about direction of Laravel, chat with some Laravel staff and listen to some good talks.

The talks themselves I was a bit torn on as a part of me wished talks were more technical or even more directly related to Laravel, but I understand why they weren't. If you add up the minimum sponsor amount and all the sponsors at those tiers you arrive at almost $200,000 so there was some money being spent. That means I can excuse the talks that were clearly just a sponsored segment to push us towards a product/thing.

There were a lot of talks from Laravel staff itself which makes natural sense given the conference was about them. When you get down to the remaining talks a few I could classify like "self-help" - a story of someone using possibly Laravel and solving a problem with belief in themself inspiring others. A few others had people that were very new to Laravel and explaining their journey in some project. A few just had talks that could belong at any technical conference because their overlap with Laravel was non-existent or tiny.

So I felt maybe I misunderstood the type of talks for this event. I was coming in expecting deep dives into technical details of the framework, information about Laravel becoming a company and what means for open source, how Laravel evolves alongside Symfony, information about cool 3rd party packages, learning about security & Laravel or upcoming PHP features.

Though regardless of what I expected and experienced I had a blast. What caught me off guard was at every reception or after party I bought a drink, grabbed my credit card and realized it was already covered. I probably had 5 drinks over the 2 days of the conference and didn't pay for a single one which I fully didn't expect.

The brother works at Laravel now so there were quite a few - "Are you related?" when running into some staff. As I headed for the exit after a bit of socializing I ran into an old coworker at the exit which was a small world coincidence. He ended up having the same flight home so we chatted again at the airport.

Thankfully outside of a small delay our flight made it home without much fuss which was way better than my flight out there. Looking back I only spent $20 on transportation ($10 each way) on light-rail tickets which was a lot less than I anticipated. It was a fun conference weekend, but boy taking a week off work has put me behind in things.