Dutch Laravel Foundation Meetup at the JetBrains Office
Earlier this month, we had the pleasure of hosting a community meetup in our Amsterdam office in collaboration with our partner DLF (the Dutch Laravel Foundation). The event brought together Laravel and PHP developers for an evening of technical talks, networking, and knowledge sharing.
The Dutch Laravel Foundation is a non-profit organization that works to strengthen the Laravel ecosystem in the Netherlands by organizing events, sharing expertise, and fostering connections among developers and companies alike.
If you’re interested in becoming a member of DLF, we’re offering a special first-year discount as part of our partnership – see the end of this post for more details.
Sven Mollinga – Kubernetes and Laravel in Production
The first speaker of the evening was Sven Mollinga, CTO of Shock Media, who shared how his team leverages Kubernetes and Laravel to deliver managed hosting solutions for their clients.
Sven provided a practical look at what’s involved in running a Laravel application on Kubernetes. While Laravel turns out to be a great fit, some key configuration adjustments are needed – such as setting the correct log driver, configuring S3 disks, and providing the right credentials for services like MySQL and Redis.
He then gave a live demo showing a pod running several containers, including Horizon. As CPU-intensive tasks were triggered, the system scaled horizontally by spinning up new containers – and scaled down once the load dropped. It was a great real-world look at Laravel’s compatibility with container-based infrastructure.
Brent Roose – The Art of Syntax Highlighting
Next up was our own Developer Advocate at JetBrains, Brent Roose, who dove into the world of syntax highlighting.
Brent shared the story of how and why he built his own highlighting engine, tempest/highlight, and discussed the pros and cons of different approaches, like parsing with abstract syntax trees (ASTs) vs. using regular expressions. Ultimately, since not all languages expose usable ASTs, he chose a regex-based approach.
During his talk, he demonstrated how to add language support to his engine, using Blade templates as an example. If you’re into regex or want to see how highlighting engines work under the hood, his open-source project is a must-see.
For more from Brent, check out his blog and his PHP Annotated YouTube channel.
DLF’s Best Practices Working Group
After a short break, Nick from the DLF board introduced the foundation’s new Best Practices Working Group. The initiative aims to define and document best practices for building, scaling, and maintaining Laravel applications.
The first version will focus on core Laravel components, with plans to later expand into third-party packages. If you’re interested in contributing, you can reach Nick at nick@dutchlaravelfoundation.nl.
Pascal Baljet – Inertia v2 in Action
The final speaker of the evening was Pascal Baljet from Protone Media and InertiaUI, who gave a hands-on walkthrough of the new features in Inertia v2, the popular stack that bridges Laravel and Vue.
Pascal demonstrated several advanced features, including infinite scrolling, data polling, and visibility-triggered data fetching, all implemented cleanly with Inertia v2’s updated API. If you’re still using v1, this talk was a clear case for upgrading: powerful new features with minimal breaking changes.
Wrapping up
After the final talk, attendees stayed for one last drink and continued the conversations. It was a fantastic evening packed with learning and connection, and we’re incredibly grateful to all of the speakers and to the Dutch Laravel Foundation for making it happen.
You can read DLF’s original recap (in Dutch) here.
Get a discount on DLF membership
As part of our partnership with the Dutch Laravel Foundation, we’re happy to offer a special discount on your first year of membership:
- Freelancers: €350 (normally €450)
- Agencies / Development teams: €999 (normally €1250)
To claim the discount, just mention “JetBrains” in the comment section when applying for membership at dutchlaravelfoundation.nl.
Want to partner with PhpStorm?
Are you organizing meetups or looking to bring your local PHP community together? We’d love to support you!
Reach out to us at phpstorm-support@jetbrains.com with details about your event, and we’ll be happy to review your request.
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