Laracon US 2026: A Complete Wrap Up

Laracon US came back for its 2026 edition on July 28 and 29, at the SoWa Power Station in Boston's arts district. Two days, one stage, and a lineup of eighteen speakers that ranged from Taylor Otwell himself down to independent educators, package authors, and engineers visiting from outside the Laravel world entirely. If you couldn't make it to Boston, or you were there and want the announcements in one place without re-watching eight hours of stream, here's what actually happened on stage.

Calling env() in a controller works in development and returns null in production. Here is why config caching breaks it and the one rule that avoids the trap.

Storing money as a float invites rounding bugs. Build a custom Eloquent cast that keeps cents as integers in the database but exposes a clean value object.

Wrapping related writes in a transaction is easy to get subtly wrong. Laravel's DB::transaction() closure handles commit, rollback, and deadlock retries for you.

Facades look like static calls but are not. Understanding how Cache::get() reaches a real object in the container explains why facades stay testable.

Forge now provisions Valkey caches and object storage buckets directly from the dashboard, bringing two more pieces of app infrastructure under one roof.

Laravel's Stringable class turns nested PHP string functions into a readable left-to-right chain. Here are the methods worth committing to memory.

Take a Laravel app from hardcoded English strings to a properly localized interface with translation files, pluralization, and a middleware that sets the locale.

Stop wrapping query builder calls in if statements. The when() and unless() methods let you apply constraints conditionally while keeping the chain fluent.