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Workshops

Workshops

New for 2026, our Day 0 workshops are a key part of this year's DEV.OLUTION - creating space for deeper, more focused learning.

Across two half-day sessions - morning and afternoon - you'll have the opportunity to engage more deeply with real-world problems and practical techniques, guided by experienced practitioners.

Workshops are optional and available as add-on tickets to your conference pass.

Sessions include tea/coffee, refreshments, and lunch.

View Schedule.
No Compromises

Testing a Laravel App From Scratch

8am - 12pm

You've got a Laravel app with no tests, or maybe just the default ExampleTest still sitting there.

Where do you even start? In this half-day workshop, we'll open up a realistic untested Laravel application and start writing tests together.

No theory-first lecturing.
We pick a route, write a test, and build from there.

Along the way, you'll learn how to set up a reliable test environment, write factories that keep your tests readable and maintainable, test authentication and authorization, and work through an entire resourceful controller end to end: index, store, validation, file uploads, the works.

Whether you've never written a test or you've written plenty but don't trust them, you'll leave with patterns you can apply to your own codebase immediately.

Comfortable building Laravel applications: routes, controllers, Eloquent, Blade. No testing experience required. If you've tried testing and bounced off, or if you write tests but feel like they're not catching real bugs, this workshop is designed for you too. Every testing concept is introduced as we need it.

We'll work through the real decisions you face when adding tests to an existing app. When should you use a factory vs creating a model directly? When does a random value from Faker help, and when does it make your test flaky? How do you test query logic in a way that actually proves the right records come back? We'll also explore the PHPUnit vs Pest question head-on and face the practical tension of what to test first when you have limited time.

The demo application is modelled after patterns seen repeatedly in consulting at No Compromises: a Laravel app with controllers, Eloquent models, relationships, policies, events, and Livewire components, but zero tests. It's deliberately imperfect because that's what real codebases look like. The teaching progression has been refined through a live multi-week cohort and distils the highest-leverage material into a single focused session.

$249 Or $399 for the full day
Speaker background pattern Joel Clermont
with Joel Clermont

Owner

@No Compromises

Register for workshop.
Laravel

Ship Fast, Load Faster

1pm - 5pm

Your Laravel app works, but is it fast?

In this half-day workshop, we'll take a deliberately unoptimised e-commerce dashboard and systematically diagnose and fix its performance problems.

No guessing at bottlenecks - we'll read EXPLAIN output, spot N+1s, and determine whether a slow page is a query, cache, or architecture problem.

From there, we'll work through the full Laravel performance stack: query optimisation, smart caching with proper invalidation, queues, and Octane.

We'll also build a working AI agent using the Laravel AI SDK and learn the patterns to keep it fast and affordable.

Whether you're shipping a side project or running production at scale, you'll leave with a checklist of patterns and the judgment to know when to apply them.

Working knowledge of Laravel - you've built apps with Eloquent, you know what a migration is, and you've deployed something to production at least once. Aimed at mid-to-senior developers, but motivated learners with solid Laravel fundamentals will get a lot out of it too. You'll need PHP 8.4 or 8.5 installed locally. No prior experience with Octane or AI SDKs is required.

Performance work is full of "it depends" moments, and we'll work through them honestly. When does caching cost you more than it saves? How do you invalidate without writing a brittle web of observers? When is Octane the right tool versus a footgun waiting to leak memory? We'll also wrestle with the tension between premature optimisation and shipping - knowing when to reach for these patterns and when to leave well enough alone.

The patterns in this workshop come from real Laravel applications running at scale - including systems built at Laravel and in regulated financial services, where slow queries and missed cache invalidations have real consequences. The starter app is a deliberately unoptimised e-commerce dashboard, but every bottleneck we fix and every pattern we apply has been seen (or debugged at 2am) in production.

$249 Or $399 for the full day
Speaker background pattern Devon Garbalosa
with Devon Garbalosa

Solutions Engineer

@Laravel

Register for workshop.

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For 2026, Laracon Australia is offering even more ways for companies and open source projects to sponsor this year's event. Enter your details and we'll be in touch with our 2026 sponsorship prospectus, or contact us at [email protected] if you have any questions.