I just watched Laravel Origins: The Documentary and it warms my heart seeing such an amazing group of people. The Laravel community isn't just the people on that video and you can feel their welcoming among each other and among their viewers. It is like Jeffrey said: it is a niche, specialized and focused to be the best at one thing. The community is everyone talking about the framework, using it on a daily basis, producing content, sharing with co-workers, attending conferences, writing books, linking videos or even sharing twitter snippets of code. Matt said it best that we're competing with each other on who can create more free content for others to consume and be inspired to create more free content.
Laravel probably changed more lives than Taylor could ever have dreamed. It empowers businesses and developers to create value. Laravel is a teacher and a role model. And it's not just a single individual. I'm not able to name one single person that made me switch from a mathematical view to an artistic view of software. We spend more time reading software than writing it. Software Engineers all around the world have their own language be it PHP, Python, Ruby, JavaScript or Rust. We are all composing an artwork that is simultaneously capable of teaching computers how to do things, aggregating value to the world and having deep conversations with other engineers that read our code. Taylor made Laravel expressive, Jeffrey made Laravel approachable and after that thousands of people contributed to my professional growth by making pull requests, sharing twitter hints and each focusing on their own niche of speciality. Spatie makes packages, Beyond Code makes crazy things from the future reach the present, Staudenmeir makes Eloquent amazing, Nuno brought type strictness, Barry made debugging easier and so many more people had an opportunity to contribute something to the betterment of everyone's lives.
With every passing year, Laravel grows beyond what I can follow and that's exciting and empowering. It's not getting less relevant and it's not getting more complex. It is always trying to solve a niche problem that if one day you need to address, it will help you do just that. It's fresh and innovative and there's always room for improvement and the community take advantage of that. So many people have found what they're good at and added more value to the community itself. Taylor's philosophy of giving everyone an opportunity to make something has "infected" the community to do just that but for the community and with every passing year a new age begins with a snowball of innovation that is rooted with the foundation of improving on the artistic profession that is being a Software Engineer.
I hope this community can thrive for another 10 years to come while making my work fun, enjoyable and satisfying. Thank you everyone in the Laravel community for being so passionate. You all have made me better.