The Laravel Podcast

The Laravel Podcast is brought to you by Tighten, your friendly neighborhood Laravel experts. Check us out at tighten.com and also by other sponsors you will hear about later in the episode. 

In this episode, Matt Stauffer talks with Abby Gilson — Laravel's recently promoted field marketing manager, better known in the community as "Gen Z Abby" — about the winding path that took her from studying for the LSAT to running events for one of the web's most passionate developer communities.

They get into what it's like to learn marketing and event management on the fly, why Laravel events deliberately don't feel like typical tech marketing, and how being a non-developer pushed her to actually start shipping apps on Laravel Cloud.

Abby also previews Laracon US in Boston — including dodgeball, LaraProm, and the SoWa Power Station venue — before sharing how she went full-time digital nomad and landed in Milan.
 
Matt Stauffer on X 
Abby’s Email - abby@laravel.com
Abby on X 
Laravel on X
Laravel Website 
Laracon US 2026 
Community Events 
Tighten Website 
Suggestion Box 

----- Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.

Big thanks to the companies that support the show:

Honeybadger 
Laravel - Laracon US and Laravel Cloud
Laracon AU

The Laravel Podcast is brought to you by Tighten, your friendly neighborhood Laravel experts. Check us out at tighten.com and also by other sponsors you will hear about later in the episode. 

In this episode, Matt Stauffer is joined by Cynthia McGillis to talk about her unlikely path from English major and nonprofit fundraiser to leading marketing at Laravel.

They discuss what it’s like to market developer tools as a non-developer, how Cynthia helped launch Laravel Cloud, and why the Laravel community feels different from other dev tool ecosystems. The conversation dives into Laravel Cloud features users still don’t realize exist — including auto-scaling, hibernation, preview environments, and the CLI with tinker — along with the challenges of pricing, onboarding, and scaling a modern hosting platform.

Matt and Cynthia also explore how AI is reshaping workflows inside Laravel, including how the marketing team is using Claude Code to generate weekly kickoff decks from Linear and Hex APIs, vibe-code landing pages without a CMS, and operationalize a fast-moving marketing org.
 
Matt Stauffer on X 
Cynthia on X 
Cynthia’s Website 
Cynthia’s Email - cynthia@laravel.com
Laravel Twitter 
Laravel Website 
Tighten Website
Suggestion Box

----- Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.

Big thanks to the companies that support the show:

Honeybadger
Mailtrap 
Thunk 
Laravel - Laracon US and Laravel Cloud

The Laravel Podcast is brought to you by Tighten, your friendly neighborhood Laravel experts. Check us out at tighten.com and also by other sponsors you will hear about later in the episode. 

In this episode, Matt Stauffer talks with Tom Crary, President and COO at Laravel, about the path that took him from a Big Four CPA firm to running the business side of one of the most loved frameworks in PHP. Tom walks through his years at Accel-backed startups, his time as CEO of Pond5 through the Shutterstock acquisition, and the surprisingly fast turnaround that ended with him signing his Laravel offer letter on Christmas Eve.

They get into the division of labor between Tom and Taylor Otwell, scaling the team from 10 to 105 people in two years, and what Tom calls the hand-to-hand combat phase after Laravel Cloud and Nightwatch launched. Tom also previews fast hibernation, the growth of Private Cloud, and how Laravel is leaning into AI-assisted workflows.
Matt Stauffer on X 
Tom Crary on LinkedIn 
Laravel Twitter
Laravel Website
Tighten Website
Suggestion Box 

----- Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.

Big thanks to the companies that support the show:

Honeybadger - https://www.honeybadger.io/for/laravel/

Mailtrap - https://l.rw.rw/laravel_pod_3

Thunk - https://tidyup.agency/

Laravel - Laracon US and Laravel Cloud

The Laravel Podcast is brought to you by Tighten, your friendly neighborhood Laravel experts. Check us out at tighten.com and also by other sponsors you will hear about later in the episode. 

Matt Stauffer talks with Jason Beggs, staff software engineer at Laravel and the design engineer behind the Laravel Cloud front end. Jason shares how he unexpectedly became “the Tailwind guy”—and how that path led him to helping build one of the most talked-about products in the PHP world.
They get into what design engineering actually looks like at Laravel: working closely with designers, building in React (even when it’s not your favorite), using AI to handle big refactors, and what it’s like to create a product you’re also the perfect user for.
Matt Stauffer on X 
Jason Beggs on X 
Jason Beggs’s Website 
You Might Not Need an Effect 
Epic React
Expose 
Laravel Twitter
Laravel Website 
Tighten Website 
Suggestion Box 
----- Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten - https://tighten.com/

Big thanks to the companies that support the show:
Honeybadger 
Mailtrap 
Thunk 
Laravel - Laracon US and Laravel Cloud

The Laravel Podcast is brought to you by Tighten, your friendly neighborhood Laravel experts. Check us out at tighten.com and also by other sponsors you will hear about later in the episode. 

Matt Stauffer sits down with Dave Hicking, Laravel's Agency Partnership Manager, to trace his winding path into the Laravel world — from a UConn IT library to Tighten (twice), Yale's rare books collection, Userscape, and finally Laravel HQ.
They dig into the evolution of the Laravel partner program, including the newly restructured tiers, and what Dave is actively building to make "partner" mean something beyond a logo on a page. The conversation covers the strategic thinking behind community growth, what real collaboration between Laravel and its agencies looks like, and why their success is genuinely, structurally mutual.
Matt Stauffer on Twitter 
Dave Hicking Website 
Dave Hicking on Twitter 
Dave Hicking on LinkedIn 
Laravel Partners 
https://randsinrepose.com/ 
Pragmatic AI Podcast
Laravel Twitter 
Laravel Website 
Tighten Website 
Suggestion Box 
----- Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.
Big thanks to the companies that support the show:
Honeybadger
Mailtrap
Thunk 
Laravel - Laracon US and Laravel Cloud