Laravel goes full Vercel

Issue #371.February 27, 2025.2 Minute read.
Bytes

Today’s issue: The largest TypeScript codebase on Earth, the Zen philosophy for becoming a GitLord, and a controversial-but-effective use case for the Apple Vision Pro.

Welcome to #371.

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The Main Thing

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Average Laravel enjoyer

Laravel goes full Vercel

When the Laravel team tweeted that last Monday was “the biggest day in Laravel history,” I naturally assumed that Aaron Francis must have finally posted a video reveal of his skincare routine.

Sadly, I was mistaken – but Laravel did release some major updates that help chart a new course for both the framework and the company behind it.

Quick context: This is Laravel’s first big launch since raising $57 million from VCs back in December, and the playbook feels a little bit familiar to those of us in the JavaScript community.

Let’s dive in:

  • Laravel 12 – Despite the major version bump, this is mostly a maintenance release that upgrades dependencies and lays the foundation for new features that will come in minor releases throughout 2025. But there is one cool thing…

  • Application Starter Kits – They launched new starter kits for React, Vue, and Livewire that feel very JavaScript-y. The React kit uses Inertia.js to enable modern, single-page React apps with SSR, and it comes with React 19, TypeScript, shadcn/ui components, Tailwind, and built-in auth.

  • Laravel Cloud – They launched their own hosting platform to allow you to “deploy your Laravel app in 60 seconds.” It comes with autoscaling and hibernation, one-click database provisioning, and preview URLs for every environment.

To recap, Laravel raised fat stacks of cash from VCs, launched their own hosting platform, and built a full-stack React framework starter kit to help expand their market size. That’s what we in the JavaScript world refer to as “going full Vercel.”

And it’s probably a smart move, considering Vercel is now a $3 billion company. As Max Stoiber and swyx recently pointed out, the best (and maybe only?) way for a devtool company to hit the massive revenue numbers required to successfully IPO is to eventually become an infrastructure business.

Bottom Line: You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become an AWS abstraction.

        
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Our Friends
(With Benefits)

A girl standing on swivel chair legs

Me gliding around my entire codebase with Trace Explorer

Sentry’s new Trace Explorer is genuinely cool

Debugging issues usually means digging through logs, manually tracing requests one by one, and asking yourself how life brought you to this point.

Thankfully, Sentry wants to save you from that existential dread – so they just launched a new Trace Explorer tool that lets you debug issues across your entire system and get the answers you need much faster.

Here’s how:

  • Find patterns, not just problems – Search, filter, and visualize traces using any attribute (span operation, API body, user segment, etc.) to pinpoint recurring bottlenecks and issues.

  • Drill down instantly – Jump directly from high-level trends to the exact spans causing trouble, so you can fix issues without context switching.

  • Custom metrics and visualizations – Calculate key metrics for your project (like P95 latency) and turn them into alerts and dashboards for ongoing monitoring.

Try it out, and I promise you’ll never go back.

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Cool Bits

  1. James Long wrote about subverting control with weak references, which is also the name of my favorite Rage Against the Machine song.

  2. story.to.design is a Figma plugin that lets you automatically turn your Storybook components into Figma components. [sponsored]

  3. The mad lads at Michigan TypeScript got the Doom engine running purely in TypeScript types. It’s by far the largest TypeScript codebase ever created, and it proves that you can accomplish anything when you’re locked inside during winter in Michigan.

  4. Cloudflare just announced some cool new tools that make it easier to build AI agents on Cloudflare.

  5. Buildkite and Oso are hosting a live panel discussion in San Francisco on March 6th on Strategies for Efficient Scaling. Join engineering leaders from Vanta, Faire, and more as they cover scaling challenges they’ve faced and how they’ve solved them – plus enjoy food, drinks, and merch giveaways. Reserve your spot before it fills up. [sponsored]

  6. Scott Chacon wrote about how core Git developers configure Git. Because to become a GitLord, one must first inhabit the mind of a GitLord.

  7. Krish wrote about Parsing JSON in 500 lines of Rust

  8. The State of React Native survey results, and I’m very disappointed to see how few of you are building Apple Vision Pro apps.

  9. Aurora Scharff wrote about avoiding server component waterfall fetching with React 19’s cache() API.

  10. QA Wolf can now test your mobile app on both iOS and Android devices – and they run all tests in 100% parallel with no extra charges, so there are no run limits of any kind. [sponsored]

  11. vlt launched reproduce, a tool that empirically tests whether an npm package can be faithfully rebuilt from its declared source code.

  12. Aiden Bai created React Explorer, which turns any React website into an interactive visualization. If you open this bad boy up and put it side by side with my Windows Music visualizer from 2007, I’m pretty sure you’ll enter the astral plane. This is what the Apple Vision Pro was made for.