Hey, friend!

Well. The past month did not go how I expected. Here are some of the less fun items:

• Got food poisoning on the way to Laravel Live UK
• Got punched in the face (hard) as a reward for joining some folks trying to (peacefully) break up a domestic violence incident in the streets of London
• Got sick on the way home from Laravel Live UK and canceled a vacation with my family

But here's what's good:

• Met a bunch of incredible people in London
• Saw a bunch of delightful old friends in London
• Gave a talk on "How to Build a Productive Laravel Development Team" that got an incredible response... I'll definitely be giving this talk again, and creating more content around this idea

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Remember the course I said was going to launch "in a few days" last newsletter? Well, it still hasn't, just due to marketing/timing issues. But I'm going to give you a tiny insight into the course: I re-built an entire live Laravel app, from scratch, but focused on the ways that building real-world apps are different from building apps in most tutorials. I made mistakes, responded to real-life challenges from confusing users, and overall did a bunch of things that don't usually fit into tutorials. I'm super proud and think y'all are going to love it.

And now I'm building another course. This one is for PluralSight, and it'll be titled "Laravel Testing and Deployment." PluralSight doesn't have almost any Laravel content, and, like when I chose O'Reilly as my publisher for Laravel: Up and Running, I'm trying to get some content in these more enterprise-targeted educational spaces to spread the love and validation for Laravel as far as I can.

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Whew. We've got one month of summer left before the kids go back to school, and while summer parenting is harder, I also feel like I haven't gotten enough time with my kids this summer! Here's to using the next month well, and getting the most I can out of this time while I have it!

What Else?