Ex-Disney · Ex-Globant · Freelance since 2014
Hire a senior Laravel developer — without the legacy-PHP baggage.
I ship modern Laravel applications: Livewire and Inertia for UI, Filament or Nova for admin, queues for everything async, proper tests. Also take on legacy Laravel rescues — the ones nobody wants to touch.
Start a projectModern Laravel, not 2015 PHP
Laravel 11 conventions, typed properties, strict comparisons, service containers used properly, config caching. The Laravel that ships today isn't the Laravel from a tutorial — the ergonomics are genuinely good.
Admin panels that stakeholders actually use
Filament is usually the right choice for internal tooling — form builders, tables, resources, Livewire-powered interactivity without a React frontend to maintain. Nova for commercial setups that already use it.
Queues, schedulers and long-running jobs
Horizon for queue monitoring, supervisor for workers, proper retry strategies, job batching, unique jobs. Laravel's queue system is one of the best in any ecosystem — I use it heavily for email, exports, integrations and cron-style work.
Legacy Laravel rescues
Laravel 5/6/7 projects with untested code, N+1 queries, unsafe eval, package bit rot — I'll audit, prioritize the dangerous parts, stabilize, and then start the incremental upgrade to current Laravel.
The Laravel stack I work with
- LaravelLatest stable — service container, Eloquent, queues, broadcasting
- PHPPHP 8.2+ — typed properties, readonly, enums, match expressions
- Eloquent ORMModels, relationships, scopes, mutators, eager loading
- MySQLDefault DB — migrations, indexes, JSON columns where it fits
- LivewireServer-driven interactive UI without a SPA frontend
- Inertia.jsAdapter for React or Vue frontends when SPA is needed
- Laravel JetstreamAuth scaffold with teams, 2FA, profile management
- FilamentAdmin panels, form builders, table views — the modern default
- Queues & HorizonBackground jobs with monitoring, retries, batching
- Laravel NovaCommercial admin panel for projects already invested in it
- ForgeServer provisioning, deployments, SSL, zero-downtime releases
- PestExpressive PHP testing — feature tests, unit tests, architecture tests
When Laravel is the right call
Laravel makes sense when the project is a CRUD-heavy web application with admin panels, background jobs, and a team that values convention over configuration. E-commerce backends (before going custom), B2B SaaS with multi-tenancy, internal tools for mid-sized companies, content-heavy platforms — Laravel ships all of these faster than Node-based stacks for teams that know PHP.
Livewire and Inertia have made Laravel legitimately modern. With Livewire, you can ship interactive UI without shipping a React frontend you also have to maintain — Filament is built on it and shows how much you can do server-driven. With Inertia, you get the SPA experience with Laravel as the backend, without the API boilerplate. Neither is better than the other — they solve different problems, and I pick based on how JS-heavy the client-side is.
Where Laravel isn't the right call: projects with heavy real-time requirements (NestJS with Socket.io wins), LLM-heavy backends where TypeScript ecosystem matters more (NestJS again), or teams that don't know PHP and don't want to learn it. Don't pick Laravel because "PHP is cheap" — the hiring market matters more than licensing.
I've shipped Laravel projects including WordPress headless setups with Laravel APIs, admin panels for e-commerce on top of custom catalogs (Tienda Ideal), and legacy rescues of Laravel 5/6 applications with real users depending on them. Laravel rewards teams that commit to its conventions — fight the framework and you'll pay for it; lean into it and you'll ship faster than most Node teams with the same experience.
FAQs
Both. A lot of my Laravel work is rescuing projects stuck on old versions (5, 6, 7) with ugly dependencies and untested code. I audit, stabilize, and upgrade incrementally. Greenfield Laravel is simpler — it ships fast when you lean into conventions.
Filament is free, open-source, and has caught up fast — it's my default unless you're already on Nova and have custom resources. Nova has a license cost but is more mature in some edge cases. For new projects: Filament.
Livewire for admin panels and CRUD-heavy apps where you don't want a React frontend. Inertia for SPA-style applications where the UI is genuinely JS-heavy. Plain Blade for mostly-static marketing sites. I pick based on UI complexity, not trend.
Yes. I've built headless WordPress setups with Laravel APIs, migrated WordPress sites to Laravel, and kept WordPress for the CMS while Laravel handles e-commerce. WordPress is fine for content — Laravel is fine for logic. Often the answer is both.
Usually yes, but I'll be honest per project. Laravel 11 has real improvements over 5/6/7. Packages from that era are often unmaintained. Upgrading gets you back on the supported path — which matters when something breaks in production.
Forge is my default because it's tight with Laravel. Ploi is fine too. For teams that need container-based deploys, I've dockerized Laravel apps with proper queue workers, Horizon, and zero-downtime deploys. Not cult-ish about any of them.
Need a Laravel engineer who ships modern PHP?
Greenfield Laravel builds, admin panels, legacy rescues, version upgrades. 24-hour reply time.
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