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Editor’s note: Every year, Lawline sends our development team to Laracon US, the annual conference for Laravel, the framework that powers the Lawline platform. It’s one of the ways we invest in the people who build the technology behind your learning experience. Below, our Director of Engineering shares our engineering team's takeaways from this year’s conference.
Laracon has always been an insightful event that’s worth attending with my team. It’s not just a way for us to slow down from our daily work and focus on learning and being inspired, but a way for the team to build deeper connection with each other that leads to better team dynamics and trust. This year was no different, and a few things stood out to me both professionally and personally.
Is AI Coming for the Software Engineer?
A session at Laracon, “The Last Software Engineer” by Kent C. Dodds, talked about how our job as software engineers has shifted. We shouldn’t set our goal as just completing a task start to finish anymore, because that’s exactly what AI agents are getting really good at. Instead, we should turn ourselves into Product Engineers, because we’re more than task completion.
We care about the user experience, we care about the taste of our code, and the impact our UX decisions have on how people use our products. Those are things AI can’t take away from us.
This framing is a good way to position ourselves, and a reminder that every engineer is capable of making product decisions, and that’s where we should be spending more of our time.
If that question sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same one we hear from the attorneys taking our AI courses: what does this technology actually take over, and what stays irreplaceably human? The answer looks remarkably similar in both professions. The routine production work is changing fast. The judgment, the ethical reasoning, and the decisions about what actually matters to the person on the other end are not going anywhere.
Why We All Need "Useless" Time
Another session, “Whimsy-Driven Development” by Christina Martinez, talked about the importance of spending time on whimsy projects to “feed your inner tom” (as she put it, the fun part inside you). We often get too focused on our current projects and goals and try to be as efficient as possible with everything, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But we sometimes forget the importance of spending time doing silly projects, things that make us happy without measuring whether our time is well spent before we even do it.
This resonated with me a lot. As I’ve gotten older and taken on more responsibilities, even playing video games or watching a long movie in one sitting makes me feel guilty, like I should be doing something more productive. That creates a kind of emptiness in my mind that I couldn’t really explain to others. This session reminded me that we all need useless time: time to go do things other people might think are silly, just to do the thing and see what happens, regardless of whether it succeeds or fails. This is the same conversation happening in the attorney well-being space right now, where the pressure to bill every hour leaves little room for the kind of rest that actually restores you. Different profession, identical problem.
What's Next for the Lawline Platform
Not everything we brought home was philosophical. We found opportunity from talks and conversations with Curotec around the possibility of migrating our AWS stack to Laravel Cloud, their fully managed infrastructure (still on AWS), with the potential to drastically reduce our cost while making our infrastructure much easier to maintain, which means a faster, more reliable learning experience for you.
Pest 5 was also introduced at this year's conference, a new version of the testing framework we’ve been thinking about switching to from basic PHPUnit, to improve our overall dev experience and performance with more cutting-edge features, helping us ship new features with fewer bugs.
Where This Leaves Us
We came away energized and inspired that we can build and do great things in the age of AI. A lot of things that we thought would take tons of time to research and implement are now much easier to build and experiment with, and we’re more optimistic than ever that even though most of our code may be written by AI now, our role as Software Engineers continues to be critical in making impactful decisions, whether that’s design, execution, or user experience.
AI is a catalyst to help us move faster and experiment more, and I’m excited to see where this takes us in a year or two as the AI industry keeps evolving, and to keep building a better learning experience for the attorneys who rely on Lawline.
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