## 2026-01-01

In the JS world, I found the back-end constant churn and breaking changes too much to deal with and would have resulted in burn out for me.

PHP has been around for donkeys and since Perl was my first language for the web, I'm happy enough with PHP lingo. 

Laravel was not on my radar until I got so exasperated by nodejs based JS frameworks like React and in particular after Covid 2020 where after the react router project changed so radically as to break so much and so often. 

I had a skin full at this point and needed stability.

YouTubers came up in my stream talking about Laravel (then version 10) and I took a look and got hooked. 

Having 2 or more different languages in a project is not a big deal when you work in devops spaces as this is the way of things so why balk at PHP back end and JS front end ?

Livewire and then Filament convinced me to make the switch to Laravel for anyting seriosus back end and public internet facing.

Using Laravel as a sort of application gateway so to speak also came to mind. So I could still have Go, Python, Clojure, NodeJS, bun, Deno or whatever services _behind Laravel_ but Laravel, Sanctum, Passport even _affront of_ these services. If I wanted to. Else, keep it simple, do everything in Laravel. Hey, with Livewire you can even have SPA like functionality with little or no JS, if you want to.

Laravel 12 is reaching its end as annual releases dictate but I'v happy this year with its stability through interim releases.

Capping it all off and int he new world of AI driven development, even the Bosst plugin adds AI MCP integration into copilot and other IDE plugins. I think this also moves things forward without a lot of fuss for (me) the end user.

I used to feel reluctant to go back to PHP but Laravel changes all that for me and the progression of PHP itself, the test driven apporoach of Laravel and its pragmatic 'just ship' mentality forced me to re-evaluate and abandon previous learnt distrust. 

In technology, boring is good. You want predictability and reliability. Learning is good, productivity is better.

